This site serves as a complement to my dissertation on the international reception of Latin American literature.
The project focuses on the emergence of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño as a novelist in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Bolaño's work was met with a level of seemingly spontaneous critical and academic enthusiasm that Latin American writers had arguably not seen outside of the Spanish-speaking world since the “Boom” of the 1960s and 1970s. I attempt to define what, concretely, sets Bolaño's reception apart from other post-Boom authors and to identify what in his career trajectory and in the formal texture of his novels might explain this case of exceptional reception.
This site contains two sets of data that I use in the project. The first represents what I call “cultural presence”, which is my attempt to quantitatively measure and compare the reception of writers in different national fields. The second is metadata from publications in Latin America, Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Quebec, which I use to visualize the careers of a corpus of Bolaño's contemporaries.
