José Revueltas y Roberto Bolaño: Formas genéricas de la experiencia

My dissertation investigates the ways in which José Revueltas (México, 1914-1976) and Roberto Bolaño (Chile, 1953-2003) strive to communicate anti-humanistic social experiences in Chile and Mexico through three episodes: the Mexican Revolution; the 1968 revolts in Mexico; and the 1973 Chilean coup. I argue that Revueltas and Bolaño share a common project of recovering experiences, forgotten or ostracized, stigmatized as marginal to the history of nation-state consolidation often because of their cruelty. Both writers challenge us to confront these abject histories as a way of reimagining Latin American societies without self-indulgence or pity, signaling the exit from perennial debates about originality and deficit. In short, Revueltas and Bolaño offer an anti-exceptionalist literature for re-thinking Latin America in a global context. Each chapter of the dissertation is guided and modeled by a problem, and the criteria used for the texts chosen is hinged on their relationship to each problem. My inquiry was based on six problems: generic and non-territorial sovereignty; images of thought; right to cruelty and the arts of memory in Revueltas´ texts; non-psicological memory and thought; fascism and sadism; the transition from the letrado to the calculista, in Bolaño´s case