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 presents three datasets used in my project:
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Cultural Presence – A quantitative measure of how writers are received across different national literary fields. This metric is designed to compare their visibility, influence, and positioning within various cultural contexts.
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Career Metadata – Publication data from Latin America, Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Quebec, used to visualize and compare the career trajectories of Bolaño and his contemporaries.
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Epiliterarity – Using natural language processing, I analyze works by Jorge Luis Borges, key figures of the Latin American Boom, Bolaño, and select contemporaries to assess the density of explicit literary reference—a narratological feature I call epiliterarity, which I argue is central to the Bolaño phenomenon.
