Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-fv566 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-23T22:24:18.420Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 9 - Literary Taxonomies after the Wall

Woes of the True Policeman (Los sinsabores del verdadero policía)

from Part Four

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2019

Jonathan Beck Monroe
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Get access

Summary

Begun in the late 1980s, but appearing only in 2011, a year after The Third Reich and seven years after the monumental 2666, Bolaño’s third posthumously published novel, Woes of the True Policeman, pivots decisively from the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century to a pronounced post-Cold War emphasis on questions of identity. Reframing Bolaño’s investigation of what counts, and what doesn’t, as poetry, as an inquiry into the elaboration of literary taxonomies and the aesthetics and politics of their particular ways of making visible, it orients its concerns with genre, gender, sexuality, and identity after “The Fall of the Berlin Wall” (the title of its opening chapter) toward a profound questioning of what progress we may claim to have made in negotiating conceptual, epistemological, ideological binaries. Through its central characters, the Chilean, Spanish, Mexican literature professor Óscar Amalfitano (who appears in 2666 as professor of philosophy), Amalfitano’s former lover, the poet turned novelist Juan Padilla, and the writer J.M.G. Arcimboldi (2666’s Benno von Archimboldi), Bolaño explores the degree to which, post -1989, post-9/11, in reimagining poetry, the novel, history, literary history, ideology, and politics, we may find it possible to develop a poetics of apposition rather than opposition.

Type
Chapter
Information
Framing Roberto Bolaño
Poetry, Fiction, Literary History, Politics
, pp. 155 - 172
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×