Bolaño, By Night in Chile: Reading Group with David Kurnick

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKER: David Kurnick, Rutgers University

Nocturno de Chile was the last novel published in Bolaño’s lifetime but one of the first to be encountered by Anglophone readers. It forms a kind of loose conceptual trilogy with 1996’s Estrella distante (Distant Star, 2004) and 1999’s Amuleto (tr. Amulet, 2007): all novella-length, first-person fictions about Art and Politics. One of his few wholly “Chilean” books and based on recognizable figures, it raises questions about the politics of literary criticism; the conventions of the death-bed confession novel; the Lukácsian problematic of the appearance of world-historical figures in the historical novel; humor, sympathy, allegory, and readerly identification. Please join us for a discussion of this fascinating work.

About the Speaker

David Kurnick is Professor of English at Rutgers. He is the author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton, 2012) and, for Columbia’s Rereadings series, The Savage Detectives Reread (2022). His translations include Julio Cortázar’s Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires and works by Álvaro Enrigue. He’s working on a book on nineteenth-century ideas of the social and has been writing recently about the relations between queer theory and literary criticism.

Please see the pre-circulated paper attached to this page below. The passcode you receive when you register for the Zoom event is also the password for this pre-circulated paper.

If you have any questions, please contact Deidre Lynch at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu or Yoon Sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu.