Franco Pesce
College:
Hughes Hall
Research:
I recently submitted my thesis, titled ‘The Abyss of Writing: The Literary and the Sublime in Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes and Vila-Matas’s “Trilogy of the Writer”’. This thesis responds to a broader interest in writers’ attempts to justify and legitimise their writing, and to pin down the crucial qualities that a satisfactory piece of writing must have. Bolaño and Vila-Matas group those qualities under the label ‘literary’, yet in their works the literary remains elusive: it is impossible to define or achieve; it is largely shaped by fantasy and by the desire for a grounding for writing; and it depends on formal innovation as its necessary condition. I explored these attributes of the literary using the concept of the sublime, drawing, more specifically, on the revisions to the Kantian sublime proposed by Borges, Žižek, and Lyotard.
Publications:
Please see my updated academia.edu profile: http://cambridge.academia.edu/FrancoPesce
Teaching:
- SP5: Topics in Latin American Culture and History (Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge)
- SP12: Latin American Culture (Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge)
- SPA3: Introduction to Hispanic Literature (Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge)
