Postmodernism of Resistance in Roberto Bolano’s Fiction and Poetry

Postmodernism of Resistance in Roberto Bolano’s Fiction and Poetry examines the ways in which Bolano employs a type of literary aesthetics that subverts traits traditionally associated with postmodernism. Pasten B. coins these aesthetics postmodernism of resistance and argues that this resistance stands in direct opposition to critical discourses that construe the presence of hopeless characters and marginal settings in Bolano’s works as signs of the writer’s disillusionment with the political as a consequence of the defeat of the Left in Latin America. Rather, he contends, Bolano creates a fictional world comprised of characters and situations that paradoxically refuse to accept defeat - even while displaying the scars of terrible historical events. In this work Pasten B. challenges some critical assumptions about Bolano’s fiction and poetry that led to decontextualized interpretations of his work and offers a singularly comprehensive investigation that synthesizes multiple perspectives of a complicated author into one text.