April 8: Bolano

A Brief and Incomplete Summary of 20th Century Latin American Literary Movements:

1. Modernismo: "founded" by Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario in late 1800s, movement's main literary conventions include poetry of exotic, faraway landscapes (often imagined) and symbolic images -- surreal and childlike worlds. A kind of escape from the material world of the day. Influenced by French Surrealism and even EA Poe and Walt Whitman...
2. from the early 1960s through '70s-->the "Boom": writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa start to get European attention...publishing of Latin American authors enters the international mainstream in large numbers. This was when magical realism really took off.
3. Magical Realism: literature that involves two perspectives of the world: first, it is often set in the modern world where landscapes are real; second, there is the inclusion of the fantastical or the supernatural. In a sense, there's a balance between a rationally-created world and the more primitive, "irrational" world. Juan Rulfo and Garcia Marquez (especially Marquez) are seen as masters of this movement.

Chile In Context

1. Geographically isolated by Andes from Argentina and Bolivia, and by Atacama Desert from Peru.
2. Native folklore had a heavy influence on literature, due in part to the isolation of nation.
3. Literature of 1800s and first half of 2oth century often worked to shape a regionist, national identity. There was a championing of the "rural" and the native.
4. "Generation of 1950" -- term coined by Enrique Lafourcade, who published an anthology of Chilean writers. Including "the boom" and a general reference point to understand how literary topics shift to a more cosmopolitan (city) perspective, away from the rural/nativism of Chile.
5. 1970: Salvador Allende is elected president (Socialist), but is overthrown by military three years later. General Auguste Pinochet takes control of military and government, and has a tyrannical hold over country (and literature) until 1989. Pinochet is thought to have killed over 3,000 Chileans who defied his authority, over that time period.

Roberto Bolano...

• In the article "Vagabonds," Daniel Zalewski calls Bolano's fiction "...the testimonies of people the wanderers leave behind" (New Yorker). Of the short stories read for today, where is this concept most well-represented? What kind of thematic effect(s) does this convention have on the reader?