Resumen de The Fantasy of Subaltern Literature in Bolaño and Elizondo

Gabriel Horowitz

• Roberto Bolaño explores of a fantasy of subaltern literature in his short story “Dentista” by rewriting Salvador Elizondo’s story “Narda o el verano.” This rewriting exemplifies an ideological repetition symptomatic not only a historical exhaustion of literature, but also of subaltern and cultural studies. The well-intentioned aim of the detective or academic to learn the truth about the subaltern Other is perverse when it maintains a hope that marginalization and suffering might be somehow redemptive. Bolaño shows this “exhaustion” not as the end of literary and cultural studies, but rather as a starting point for its revaluation.