Please join us for a CuSPP Seminar in person (BPB W3.03) and online on Thursday 8 May from 1-2. Please refer to the CuSPP email or email Wesley.Lim@anu.edu.au for the link.

Abstract:

In responding to external and internal national(istic) pressures felt by writers, Jorge Luis Borges defended authors’ artistic autonomy, highlighting that, after all, “Anything we Argentine writers can do successfully will become part of our Argentine tradition” (177, emphasis mine). In this chapter I will explore this claim within the dynamics of canonisation in the literature-world and across its scales: national, regional (Latin American), and global.

Chilean-born yet American-raised writer Alberto Fuguet (1963-) incarnated what Mariano Siskind has called a “deseo de mundo” (desire for the world) (Cosmopolitan Desires 27); that is, a desire to transcend a solely national literary existence and enter international circulation and canonisation. He, like many before him and many since, deployed a series of artistic strategies to this end by, for instance, differentiating himself from reigning national/regional forms, and courting controversy through extra-literary polemics.

Despite these tactics, and also mediated by contextual forces, he failed in his ambitions to become a canonical world author, even if he achieved a relative level of fame or infamy in the Latin American Literature-World. Despite originally being considered antithetical to Chilean letters, in the end he has eventually been welcomed back to the Chilean field as an important literary figure, confirming Borges’ claim, to a certain extent.

Through this case study I theorise a particular feature of the fabric of world literary space and trajectories of certain authors who seem to productively fail. It is as though fearful of remaining a stateless global failure, Fuguet (as well as other authors) successfully exchange and reinvest their international symbolic capital for national symbolic currency, entering a newly woven Chilean literary tradition they played a role in reforming.

Bio:

Thomas Nulley-Valdés is Lecturer in Spanish Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra. He is an emerging scholar of World Literature with a focus on Spanish and Latin American literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries. He is the author of McOndo Revisited: The Making of a Generation Defining Anthology in the Latin American Literature-World (Lexington, 2023) and is currently preparing a co-edited volume with Juan Poblete (UC Santa Cruz) titled Chilean Literature as World Literature.  His research has featured in Hispanófila, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Theory Now, Chasqui, 1616: Anuario de literatura comparada, and JILAR.