Can I read Global Forms in Bolaño’s 2666: Genre, Race, Capital on EtoBox?

Global Forms in Bolaño’s 2666: Genre, Race, Capital by Jack Weizhe Cao is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Global Forms in Bolaño’s 2666: Genre, Race, Capital about?

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumously published 2666 is a novel split into five parts without a clear logic of organization. I argue that its unity lies in the way each section takes up and then dissolves the conventions of an Euro-American genre, negating its usual organization of meaning and therefore relation to history. I argue that these genres are structures of experience which decompose in confrontation with the colonial destruction of life. Since there is no single received literary form that adequately represents the transformations of racial violence, Bolaño negates a procession of genres as a way of testifying to the complex matrix of power, death and revolt in the contemporary world. Subsequently, I demonstrate my interpretation with a reading of Book I, “The Part about the Critics”, as an academic novel. This genre has historically represented the world of an academic elite institutionally sheltered from the movements of history. Bolaño rewrites Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” as an allegory of colonial mining to stage the reemergence of slavery in the form of the university discourse.

Who reads Global Forms in Bolaño’s 2666: Genre, Race, Capital?

Author

Jack Weizhe Cao

Published

2024

Language

EN

Category

nonfiction