The Festivals are the Real Novels: The Latin American Writer on the World-Literary Circuit

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKER: Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Pennsylvania State University

During a fevered and increasingly unsettled evening at a literary festival, the eponymous narrator of Pola Oloixarac’s Mona (2019) has a realization that she relays to her fellow writer, the Macedonian Chrystos: “It’s not that there are no more literary personalities in our era: it’s just that now they come to places like these thinking they’re writers and end up leaving as characters. The festivals are the real novels!” (trans. Adam Morris 2021, 134). In Mona (and the novel’s) analysis, the contemporary circuit of fairs, festivals, and other such events requires a performance of writerly persona that makes of writers not (rounded) personalities but (flat) characters, as reliant on as they are limited by stereotype. Articulated in the putatively borderless space that is the rarified milieu of the elite literary festival, Mona’s complaint is ultimately about the practices of differentiation on which such spaces rely. Taking Oloixarac’s Mona as its focus, this talk will analyze the ways in which that novel emplots the dynamics of the contemporary world-literary field, at once participating in and proffering a critique of the conditions of its existence. 

About the Speaker

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University and, in 2023-2024, a Humboldt Fellow in the Romance Language Seminar at the University of Köln. Specializing in comparative approaches to the literature of Latin America, Africa, and, more broadly, the Global South, she is the author of The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South (2019) as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and essays. Her current research analyzes the ways in which the international success of Latin American writings in the 1960s and 1970s became a model (acknowledged or not) for the “internationalization” of writing from elsewhere in the Global South in subsequent decades.