糖心TV

2013 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003). The past decade has seen Bolaño’s reputation not only consolidated within the Spanish-speaking world, where he has come to be seen as the leading writer of his generation, but established on a global scale. Translations of his fiction, nonfiction and poetry continue to proliferate, along with articles, critical collections, monographs and documentaries; the international attention to his work, especially his novels The Savage Detectives and the posthumously published 2666, have placed him in the category of ‘the world’s authors’ (Francisco Goldman). At the same time, the category of world literature itself has become subject to renewed scrutiny and academic debate in the years since Bolaño’s death. The question of situating the world in Bolaño’s work, along with his work in the world, offers the opportunity for assessing new methodologies in C21 world-literary studies and new mappings of the continuum between aesthetics and politics.

This conference brings together writers and scholars with the aim of locating Bolaño’s work within the broad context of interest in the problems and possibilities of reading world literature today. Invited speakers include Francisco Goldman and Roberto Tejada.

This two-day international conference in Venice will focus on the development, beginning in the late eighteenth-century, of what may be considered a modern Italian audience: readers and spectators who, as an albeit diverse group, collectively reflected the modernizing effects of the social, historical, economic, and technological transformations taking place in Italy during this period.