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    Keep writing: the critique of the university in Roberto Bolaño's 2666

    Eve, Martin Paul (2015) Keep writing: the critique of the university in Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Textual Practice 30 (5), pp. 949-964. ISSN 0950-236X.

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    Abstract

    Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is a novel that can be situated, aesthetically, within the traditions of utopian fiction and the North American encyclopaedic, postmodern novel. It is also, however, a text that is exemplary of a type of didacticism that cloaks its mechanism behind an overloaded structure. One of the explicit targets of this didacticism is the neoliberal university that, in 2666, is structurally twinned with the police department and is thus complicit in the novel's femicides. This article suggests the ways in which Bolaño's novel attempts to discipline the academy while also outlining its mode of crypto-didacticism. Taking theoretical cues from Theodor W. Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu, this article reads 2666 as a metafictional work that signals its own desire to teach, thereby representing a fresh approach for ethics in the postmodern novel and beyond.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Roberto Bolaño, 2666, didacticism, university, neoliberalism
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Research Centres and Institutes: Contemporary Literature, Centre for
    Depositing User: Martin Eve
    Date Deposited: 06 Jul 2015 08:14
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:36
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/12132

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