Cambridge Hispanic and Lusophone Research Seminars: Wednesday, 19th January 2022

 Poetry, Parody, and the Question of History: Savage Detectives and the fall of the poets

 Speaker: Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, University of Michigan 

 Registration:  https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcoduChqDksGtxmUvrZqcz9xcepsNqcEB83

This talk will focus on the disarticulation between the Latin American mythopoetic tradition and its history; a disarticulation triggered by the series of coup d’état and civil wars of late 20th century that produced an exhaustion of the utopic and poetic fundaments that fed the region’s contemporary literary and political imagination. In this case, beyond some preliminary comments on contemporary Chilean poetry, I want to present a reading of Roberto Bolaño’s 1998 novel, Savage Detectives, as a thematization of this disarticulation between poetry and history in which we find a parodical representation of Latin American political and literary avant-gardes. At the end, by questioning the granted relationship between poetry, emancipatory politics, and the logic of historical development, Bolaño opens the question about the function or historical role of literature in the context of the ongoing neoliberal globalization.

BIO: Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott's research focuses mainly on literary, visual and cultural forms and practices of imagination in Latin American modern and contemporary history. He develops an interdisciplinary approach to cultural and aesthetical phenomena with a theoretical emphasis informed by continental philosophy and psychoanalysis.