Cultural Synchronization and Disjuncture
What is the Contemporary?
An international colloquium, in collaboration with Université Paris 8
May 21-22, 2012
Levinthal Hall
Stanford University
An international colloquium, in collaboration with Université Paris 8
May 21-22, 2012
Levinthal Hall
Stanford University
Schedule:
Monday, May 21
9:00 Breakfast
9:30 Welcome by Gabriella Safran, Chair of the DLCL
9:45 Opening remarks by Héctor Hoyos and Marília Librandi-Rocha, organizers (ILAC).
10:00-12:00 Panel 1: Time and Concept
Lionel Ruffel, Paris 8: “What is the Contemporary? Brief Archeology of a Question”
Idelber Avelar, Tulane U: “Contemporary Intersections of Ecology and Culture”
Discussant: Ramón Saldívar, English/Comparative Literature
Lunch
2:00-4:00 Panel 2: Emerging Canonicities I
Paola Cortés Rocca, San Francisco State U: “Debates contemporáneos sobre estética y política en la Argentina del nuevo milenio”
Diego Vecchio, Paris 8: “Luis Gusmán y el inconsciente bruto”
Valeria de los Ríos, U. Santiago de Chile: “Mapa cognitivo, memoria y medialidad: contemporaneidad en Alejandro Zambra y Pola Oloixarac”
Discussant: Juan Poblete, U. California at Santa Cruz
Coffee
4:30- 6:00 Public reading by Alejandro Zambra, Diego Vecchio, and Guadalupe Nettel (in Spanish), in conversation with Jorge Ruffinelli, ILAC
6:00-7:00 Reception
Tuesday, May 22
9:30 Breakfast
9:45 Recap by Tom Winterbottom and Victoria Saramago
10:00-12:00 Panel 3: Emerging Canonicities II
Julio Premat, Paris 8: “A contratiempo: notas sobre cultura y época”
Alejandro Zambra, U. Diego Portales: “Computadores”
Discussant: Ximena Briceño, ILAC
Lunch
1:30-3:00 Panel 4: Methodologies of the Transient
David William Foster, Arizona State U: “The Contemporary as Immersion: on Being an Argentinist”
Odile Cisneros, U. Alberta: “Contemporary Experimental Poetry in Canada and Brazil: A Contrastive View”
Earl Fitz, Vanderbilt U: “Interdisciplinarity and the Emergence of a New Scholarly Field: Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, French, English, and Comparative Literature, and the Rise of Inter-American Literature":
Discussant: Estelle Tarica, U. California at Berkeley.
Coffee
3:30-5:00 Roundtable with all participants, closing remarks by Hoyos and Librandi-Rocha
9:00 Breakfast
9:30 Welcome by Gabriella Safran, Chair of the DLCL
9:45 Opening remarks by Héctor Hoyos and Marília Librandi-Rocha, organizers (ILAC).
10:00-12:00 Panel 1: Time and Concept
Lionel Ruffel, Paris 8: “What is the Contemporary? Brief Archeology of a Question”
Idelber Avelar, Tulane U: “Contemporary Intersections of Ecology and Culture”
Discussant: Ramón Saldívar, English/Comparative Literature
Lunch
2:00-4:00 Panel 2: Emerging Canonicities I
Paola Cortés Rocca, San Francisco State U: “Debates contemporáneos sobre estética y política en la Argentina del nuevo milenio”
Diego Vecchio, Paris 8: “Luis Gusmán y el inconsciente bruto”
Valeria de los Ríos, U. Santiago de Chile: “Mapa cognitivo, memoria y medialidad: contemporaneidad en Alejandro Zambra y Pola Oloixarac”
Discussant: Juan Poblete, U. California at Santa Cruz
Coffee
4:30- 6:00 Public reading by Alejandro Zambra, Diego Vecchio, and Guadalupe Nettel (in Spanish), in conversation with Jorge Ruffinelli, ILAC
6:00-7:00 Reception
Tuesday, May 22
9:30 Breakfast
9:45 Recap by Tom Winterbottom and Victoria Saramago
10:00-12:00 Panel 3: Emerging Canonicities II
Julio Premat, Paris 8: “A contratiempo: notas sobre cultura y época”
Alejandro Zambra, U. Diego Portales: “Computadores”
Discussant: Ximena Briceño, ILAC
Lunch
1:30-3:00 Panel 4: Methodologies of the Transient
David William Foster, Arizona State U: “The Contemporary as Immersion: on Being an Argentinist”
Odile Cisneros, U. Alberta: “Contemporary Experimental Poetry in Canada and Brazil: A Contrastive View”
Earl Fitz, Vanderbilt U: “Interdisciplinarity and the Emergence of a New Scholarly Field: Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, French, English, and Comparative Literature, and the Rise of Inter-American Literature":
Discussant: Estelle Tarica, U. California at Berkeley.
Coffee
3:30-5:00 Roundtable with all participants, closing remarks by Hoyos and Librandi-Rocha
Talk descriptions
Note: talks are in the language of their titles, above.
Avelar, Idelber. “Contemporary Intersections of Ecology and Culture”: Cultural studies, anthropology, Legal Studies, and other disciplines have all been impacted by the planet's urgent environmental crisis. Avelar follows this problematic through Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben's notion of thanatopolitics, the Argentinean philosopher Fabián Ludueña questioning of the opposition between bios and zoe, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s examination of the concept of the Anthropocene, and the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of the “internalization of nature.” Meanwhile, the Amazon, as the world's greatest reservoir of biological diversity, concentrates some of the most decisive political and ecological conflicts of our time, as is visible in the indigenous struggle in Bolivia regarding the highway to be built across the Tipnis park, in violation of indigenous land, or in the Brazilian center-left administration's inheritance of the military dictatorship's hydroelectric-based model of development for the region. In his talk, Avelar proposes that Latin America has become a major terrain for rethinking the intersection between cultural history and natural history.
Cisneros, Odile. "Contemporary Experimental Poetry in Canada and Brazil: A Contrastive View": Cisneros is currently involved in creating the first anthology of contemporary English-language experimental poetry from Canada for a Brazilian audience. The process of selecting both the authors and texts for this anthology, with a view to assemble a collection that would “resonate” with the poetry-reading public in Brazil revealed surprising parallels as well as contrasts. Through an exploration of selected examples, her presentation explores how contemporary poetries in these two countries approach the issue of the diversity of identities (Native, immigrant, women), the material aspects of poetry, and environmental concerns.
Cortés-Rocca, Paola. “Contemporary Debates about Aesthetics and Politics in Argentina in the New Millennium”: The new, the current, and the contemporary are different ways of inhabiting the present. The contemporary, following Agamben’s proposal, signals a particular misalignment – a coincidence and a disjuncture with the present – which permits one to see the luminosity of our time and, at the same time, perceive its dark side. Perhaps nothing better defines fiction or the aesthetic realm than the temporal disorder about which Agamben speaks; perhaps it is precisely for this reason that such disordered temporality may be the best space for examining the contemporary. If in the 1990s concepts such as transculturation, deconstruction of national identity, hybridity, etc. were the defining words of the Latin American field, what are those words today? What is the vocabulary of contemporary debate? What are the concepts that today articulate aesthetic and politics? With these questions, this paper explores Argentine fiction in the new millennium.
Fitz, Earl. "Interdisciplinarity and the Emergence of a New Scholarly Field: Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, French, English, and Comparative Literature, and the Rise of Inter-American Literature": In his talk, Fitz addresses the emergence of inter-American literary study as a new force to be reckoned with in the Humanities of the twenty-first century and explore both its profoundly comparative nature and its need for interdisciplinary cooperation. Drawing from personal experience, Fitz attempts to define the parameters and methods of this new field. Lastly, he comments on how inter-American studies can be developed as a single course, at either the graduate or undergraduate level, as a research project, and how it could be developed as a new program, or track, in an existing department or group of departments.
Foster, David William. “The Contemporary as Immersion: On Being an Argentinist”: Argentina is a society no more complex than any other, but it is a society characterized by the master imperative of El Gran Deschave: the need to engage in the aggressive display of sociopolitical corruption in a vast process of self-witnessing that has significant implications for Argentine cultural production. Being an Argentinist—especially a foreign Argentinist and one from a culture that is many ways suspect for the agents of symbolic power—requires a total immersion in the process of self-witnessing. It requires the attempt to manage the many intertwining narrative threads of the contemporary historical process. On the one hand, one may speak of the flattening effect of the contemporary in Argentina, to the extent that no one of the narrative threads ever seems to effect a coherent semiotic trajectory, but rather to become endlessly convoluted. On the other hand, one may identify those historical process that, while intertwined with the flattening effect of dominant narratives, have achieved some sort of developmental arc. These comments are tied to the author’s experience of fifty years of research involvement with Argentina/Buenos Aires.
Premat, Julio. “A Contratiempo. Notes about Literature and Epoch”: In the contemporary one can see the present converted into concept, thought, gestures, formalizations. It is the illusiveness of the flow of time turned subject, idea. It is not just sharing or dividing a time, but seeing in the now that which was already there before it was examined, that which, as a feature, would define it. Therefore, the contemporary is at the same time a horizon that advances along with us when we try to approach it and a constant whirlwind that passes from the visible to the invisible. Premat associates the present/absence of the contemporary with the psychoanalytical notion of the “real.” Drawing form an abundant bibliography on the subject (Hartog, Ruffel, Agamben, De Certeau, Didi-Huberman), his talk attempts a demarcation through exclusion of the relationship of literature with its time –i.e., a demarcation through that which puts the contemporary into doubt, that which appears to go against the current, in the rearguard, moving à contretemps. Along with the idea of “anachronism,” Premat dialogues with Adorno and the late Saïd.
Nettel, Guadalupe. Description to come.
de los Ríos, Valeria. “Cognitive Map, Memory, and Mediality: Contemporaneity in Alejandro Zambra and Pola Oloixarac”: One of the central characteristics of Roberto Bolaño’s work is its capacity to draw a cognitive map in which local space figures just as much as global/world space. Bolaño represents what Agamben would call the “dark space” of his present, constantly summoning a past of wars and extermination, with the intention not only of trying to explain the unexplainable, but also of giving an account of the recurrence of horror and inexplicability. Following Agamben, de los Ríos proposes the hypothesis that our literary contemporaneity may be defined by three aspects: first, by the inscription of global and local experiences on a cognitive map; second, by summoning one or more historical moments that harken to the present; and third, by the presence of an audio/visual media archive that allows us to construct memory of a subject that often aspires to be confused with the author – as in the case of Belano/Bolaño – or that uses the first person singular to project a certain degree of intimacy or subjectivity in conflict or in construction. To do so, she examines the work of Alejandro Zambra and Pola Oloixarac.
Ruffel, Lionel. “What is the Contemporary? Brief Archeology of a Question”: While it was never addressed in these terms before, the question “what is the contemporary” resounds at Stanford for the sixth time in eight years since 2004. The question was first raised in a series of articles published in Zum, the journal of the Centro de Expresiones Contemporáneas (Rosario, Argentina). The second time was in Venise (Italy) by Giorgio Agamben; and then in France by an action group of architects in Montpellier and by philosophers and literary critics in Pantin. Later on, the question was raised by a dance company in Brussels (Belgium) and finally in Palo Alto (USA) in a colloquium revolving around Latin American Literature. What are the territorial, disciplinary, and professional situations of those who have been asking the same question for the past eight to ten years? What is their epistemological and discursive nature? Why wasn’t this question raised in the manifesto that accompanied the creation of the Institute of Contemporary Art of Boston in 1948? Or asked by Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart or Raymond Williams at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham between 1964 and 2002? Why was the question absent from the series Discussions in Contemporary Culture of the Dia Art Foundation (NYC) that seems to want to “end with the postmodern era” and open up to the contemporary? In his archeological investigation, Ruffel interrogates these successive births of the contemporary, leading its Latin Americanist formation.
Vecchio, Diego. “Luis Gusmán and the inconsciente bruto”: Between 2009 and 2011, Luis Gusmán published two books: Los muertos no mienten and La pregunta freudiana. The first is the second volume of an autobiography started in 1989 with Rueda de Virgilio, which presents itself as a commentary about a spiritualist library on whose shelves authors such as Artl, Nabokov, Joyce, Flaubert, Leopoldo Lugones, Leónidas Lamborghini, Wilcock, Faulkner, Allan Kardek, Raymond Roussel, and Conan Doyle rub shoulders. The second is a book of clinical psychoanalysis, in the best Freudian tradition. Spirits in one hand, psychoanalysis in the other - in two different planes, in two different books, without any clear continuity, as if there were in Gusmán not one split subject but two parallel subjects: a writer and a psychoanalyst. Vecchio examines this disassociation between literature and the clinic. What books are missing in this spiritualist library? For Vecchio, the “gaps” in the library of Luis Gusmán signal an epistemological and cultural conflict produced in the passage of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century –with implications for the contemporary– between the Freudian unconscious and that which we could call the inconsciente bruto, postulated by certain lesser realms of knowledge, such as parapsychology or spiritualism.
Zambra, Alejandro. “Computers”: In his talk, novelist and scholar Alejandro Zambra addresses the problem of the contemporary in Latin America based on personal and group experiences related to technological advances, especially the mass use of computers and word processors. Going beyond a natural mistrust of the idea of a generation, in this talk the author attempts to systematize the traits that to some extent unite writers born in the mid-1970s.
Speaker bios
Idelber Avelar is a Full Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University, specializing in contemporary Latin American fiction, literary theory, and Cultural Studies. He is the author of The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (2004), and The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (1999), which won the MLA Kovacs Prize. He is the co-editor (with Christopher Dunn) of Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship (2011). He has received Rockefeller, Ford, and Hewlett grants, and was recently awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), in relation to a project entitled “Rethinking Masculinity in Contemporary Brazilian and Argentinian Literatures.”
Odile Cisneros is a Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies in the University of Alberta. Her specializations and interests include the Latin American historical avant-gardes, modern and contemporary Brazilian poetry, Mexican literature, and literary translation. She has translated the poetry of Haroldo de Campos, Régis Bonvicino, Jaroslav Seifert, and Rodrigo Rey Rosa. She is also associate editor of the São Paulo-based poetry and culture journal Sibila along with Régis Bonvicino, Alcir Pécora, and Charles Bernstein.
Paola Cortés-Rocca is an Associate Professor in the Spanish Program at San Francisco State University and Department Chair. She has published essays on citizenship and monstrosity, sickness and femininity, ghosts and political imagination, zombies and racial conflicts as well as on the photographic work of Andrés Serrano, Gabriela Liffschitz, Cássio Vasconcellos, Marcelo Brodsky and Eduardo Gil. Her work appeared on academic journals (October, Mosaic, Iberoamericana, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, among others) as well as on electronic and mass media publications. She is the coauthor of Imágenes de vida, relatos de muerta: Eva Perón, cuerpo y política, the co-editor of Políticas del sentimiento. El peronismo y la construcción de la Argentina moderna, and the author of El tiempo de la máquina. Retratos, paisajes y otras imágenes de la nación.
Earl Fitz is Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. He has published a number of books and articles, including Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature (2007) with Elizabeth Lowe, and he was co-editor of Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America (2004). He is a recognized expert on Brazilian literature, having published works on Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector and Jorge Amado. He looks at on how narrative has evolved in Brazil and Spanish America, as well as working on Latin American literature in the comparative perspective.
Julio Premat is a professor of Hispanic American Literature in the Université Paris VIII. He is the author of Héroes sin atributos. Figuras de autor en la literatura argentina (2009), La dicha de saturno. Escritura y melancolía en la obra de J.J. Saer (2002), and he serves on the editorial board of the journals Pandora and Río de la Plata. He has organized international colloquia related to authors such as Juan Carlos Onetti and César Aira, and he directs the research group LI.RI.CO. (Literatura rioplatense contemporánea). He recently coordinated the publication of a critical edition of Juan José Saer’s Glosa and El entenado (2010).
Guadalupe Nettel Born in Mexico in 1973, she graduated from UNAM in Hispanic Languages and Literatures before going on to complete a Ph.D. in language sciences at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. She is the author of three short-story books (Juegos de artificio, Les jours fossiles, Pétalos y otras historias incómodas) and two novels (El huésped y El cuerpo en que nací), published by Anagrama. She has been translated in various languages, including English, French, Dutch, Czech and Slovenian, and has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Premio Antonin Artaud, the Anna Seghers prize and The France Radio International prize. She was a finalist for the Premio Herralde in 2005, and in 2007 was voted as one of the 39 best writers in Latin American under age 39 at the HAY Festival. She is also a frequent contributor to literary journals and magazines.
David William Foster is Regents’ Professor of Spanish & Portuguese in the School of International Letters and Cultures at the Arizona State University. His research interests focus on urban culture in Latin America, with emphasis on issues of gender construction and sexual identity. He has written extensively on Argentine narrative and theater, and he has held teaching appointments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. His recent publications include Sao Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production (2011), Urban Photography in Argentina: Nine Artists of the Post-Dictatorship Era (2007).
Valeria de los Ríos is an Associate Investigator and the Director of the Master’s Program in Latin American and Chilean Literature in the Department of Linguistics and Literature at Universidad de Santiago de Chile. She has participated in and directed projects related to the work of Enrique Linh, Raúl Ruiz, and literature and technology. She is the author of Espectros de luz. Tecnologías visuales en la literatura latinoamericana (2011), and co-editor (with Iván Pinto) of El cine de Raúl Ruiz. Fantasmas, simulacros y artificios (2010).
Lionel Ruffel is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Université Paris VIII and the director of studies of the Boston University Programs in Paris. He is also a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. A specialist in contemporary literature and theory, he is the author of two books—Le dénouement (2005) and Volodine post-exotique (2007)—and editor of two collections—A quoi jouons? (2008) and Qu’est-ce que le contemporain? (2010). With Olivia Rosenthal, he coedited an issue of the French journal Littérature. He is the director of the chaoïd series at French publisher Verdier.
A native of Buenos Aires, Diego Vecchio completed his doctoral dissertation, a study of the work of Macedonio Fernández, at the Université Paris VIII in 2001. He was an invited speaker, with Sergio Chejfec, at a lecture series organized by the Instituto Cervantes in Bordeaux in 2011. He is the author of Osos (2010), Microbios (2006), Egocidio: Macedonio Fernández y la liquidación del yo (2003), and Historia calamitatum (2000).
Alejandro Zambra is Professor in the School of Literature at Universidad Diego Portales. He has published narratives, poetry, and criticism, and his works have been translated into more than ten languages. He was invited to participate in Bogotá39 in 2008, and named one of the best young writers in Spanish by Granta. His works include poetry collections Bahía inútil and Mudanza, as well as novels Bonsái (2006)—which won the Premio de la Crítica de Chile and the Premio del Consejo Nacional del Libro de Chile—, La vida privada de los árboles (2007), and Formas de volver a casa (2011).
About Cultural Synchronization and Disjuncture
A DLCL working group devoted to cultural theory and Latin Americanism, CultSync celebrates its third and final year of successful activities with this colloquium. A unique discursive space on campus for sustained intellectual exchange on central issues of contemporary criticism, the group fosters dialogue that is not produced exclusively by or for Latin Americanists, but one that, while emphasizing the specific contributions of a Latin American point of view, examines broader themes. Activities have included roundtable discussions, public lectures, and talks by faculty, graduate students, and guests from the Bay Area and beyond. Chaired by Héctor Hoyos, participants have included Diana Sorensen, Pheng Cheah, Daniel Alarcón, Neil Larsen, Ramón Saldívar, Jens Andermann, David Palumbo-Liu, Élmer Mendoza, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Horacio Legrás, Julio Villanueva-Chang, Paula Moya, Neil Safier, and Ignacio Sánchez Prado, among other distinguished speakers. For information on past events, see cultsync.stanford.edu.
Note: talks are in the language of their titles, above.
Avelar, Idelber. “Contemporary Intersections of Ecology and Culture”: Cultural studies, anthropology, Legal Studies, and other disciplines have all been impacted by the planet's urgent environmental crisis. Avelar follows this problematic through Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben's notion of thanatopolitics, the Argentinean philosopher Fabián Ludueña questioning of the opposition between bios and zoe, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s examination of the concept of the Anthropocene, and the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of the “internalization of nature.” Meanwhile, the Amazon, as the world's greatest reservoir of biological diversity, concentrates some of the most decisive political and ecological conflicts of our time, as is visible in the indigenous struggle in Bolivia regarding the highway to be built across the Tipnis park, in violation of indigenous land, or in the Brazilian center-left administration's inheritance of the military dictatorship's hydroelectric-based model of development for the region. In his talk, Avelar proposes that Latin America has become a major terrain for rethinking the intersection between cultural history and natural history.
Cisneros, Odile. "Contemporary Experimental Poetry in Canada and Brazil: A Contrastive View": Cisneros is currently involved in creating the first anthology of contemporary English-language experimental poetry from Canada for a Brazilian audience. The process of selecting both the authors and texts for this anthology, with a view to assemble a collection that would “resonate” with the poetry-reading public in Brazil revealed surprising parallels as well as contrasts. Through an exploration of selected examples, her presentation explores how contemporary poetries in these two countries approach the issue of the diversity of identities (Native, immigrant, women), the material aspects of poetry, and environmental concerns.
Cortés-Rocca, Paola. “Contemporary Debates about Aesthetics and Politics in Argentina in the New Millennium”: The new, the current, and the contemporary are different ways of inhabiting the present. The contemporary, following Agamben’s proposal, signals a particular misalignment – a coincidence and a disjuncture with the present – which permits one to see the luminosity of our time and, at the same time, perceive its dark side. Perhaps nothing better defines fiction or the aesthetic realm than the temporal disorder about which Agamben speaks; perhaps it is precisely for this reason that such disordered temporality may be the best space for examining the contemporary. If in the 1990s concepts such as transculturation, deconstruction of national identity, hybridity, etc. were the defining words of the Latin American field, what are those words today? What is the vocabulary of contemporary debate? What are the concepts that today articulate aesthetic and politics? With these questions, this paper explores Argentine fiction in the new millennium.
Fitz, Earl. "Interdisciplinarity and the Emergence of a New Scholarly Field: Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, French, English, and Comparative Literature, and the Rise of Inter-American Literature": In his talk, Fitz addresses the emergence of inter-American literary study as a new force to be reckoned with in the Humanities of the twenty-first century and explore both its profoundly comparative nature and its need for interdisciplinary cooperation. Drawing from personal experience, Fitz attempts to define the parameters and methods of this new field. Lastly, he comments on how inter-American studies can be developed as a single course, at either the graduate or undergraduate level, as a research project, and how it could be developed as a new program, or track, in an existing department or group of departments.
Foster, David William. “The Contemporary as Immersion: On Being an Argentinist”: Argentina is a society no more complex than any other, but it is a society characterized by the master imperative of El Gran Deschave: the need to engage in the aggressive display of sociopolitical corruption in a vast process of self-witnessing that has significant implications for Argentine cultural production. Being an Argentinist—especially a foreign Argentinist and one from a culture that is many ways suspect for the agents of symbolic power—requires a total immersion in the process of self-witnessing. It requires the attempt to manage the many intertwining narrative threads of the contemporary historical process. On the one hand, one may speak of the flattening effect of the contemporary in Argentina, to the extent that no one of the narrative threads ever seems to effect a coherent semiotic trajectory, but rather to become endlessly convoluted. On the other hand, one may identify those historical process that, while intertwined with the flattening effect of dominant narratives, have achieved some sort of developmental arc. These comments are tied to the author’s experience of fifty years of research involvement with Argentina/Buenos Aires.
Premat, Julio. “A Contratiempo. Notes about Literature and Epoch”: In the contemporary one can see the present converted into concept, thought, gestures, formalizations. It is the illusiveness of the flow of time turned subject, idea. It is not just sharing or dividing a time, but seeing in the now that which was already there before it was examined, that which, as a feature, would define it. Therefore, the contemporary is at the same time a horizon that advances along with us when we try to approach it and a constant whirlwind that passes from the visible to the invisible. Premat associates the present/absence of the contemporary with the psychoanalytical notion of the “real.” Drawing form an abundant bibliography on the subject (Hartog, Ruffel, Agamben, De Certeau, Didi-Huberman), his talk attempts a demarcation through exclusion of the relationship of literature with its time –i.e., a demarcation through that which puts the contemporary into doubt, that which appears to go against the current, in the rearguard, moving à contretemps. Along with the idea of “anachronism,” Premat dialogues with Adorno and the late Saïd.
Nettel, Guadalupe. Description to come.
de los Ríos, Valeria. “Cognitive Map, Memory, and Mediality: Contemporaneity in Alejandro Zambra and Pola Oloixarac”: One of the central characteristics of Roberto Bolaño’s work is its capacity to draw a cognitive map in which local space figures just as much as global/world space. Bolaño represents what Agamben would call the “dark space” of his present, constantly summoning a past of wars and extermination, with the intention not only of trying to explain the unexplainable, but also of giving an account of the recurrence of horror and inexplicability. Following Agamben, de los Ríos proposes the hypothesis that our literary contemporaneity may be defined by three aspects: first, by the inscription of global and local experiences on a cognitive map; second, by summoning one or more historical moments that harken to the present; and third, by the presence of an audio/visual media archive that allows us to construct memory of a subject that often aspires to be confused with the author – as in the case of Belano/Bolaño – or that uses the first person singular to project a certain degree of intimacy or subjectivity in conflict or in construction. To do so, she examines the work of Alejandro Zambra and Pola Oloixarac.
Ruffel, Lionel. “What is the Contemporary? Brief Archeology of a Question”: While it was never addressed in these terms before, the question “what is the contemporary” resounds at Stanford for the sixth time in eight years since 2004. The question was first raised in a series of articles published in Zum, the journal of the Centro de Expresiones Contemporáneas (Rosario, Argentina). The second time was in Venise (Italy) by Giorgio Agamben; and then in France by an action group of architects in Montpellier and by philosophers and literary critics in Pantin. Later on, the question was raised by a dance company in Brussels (Belgium) and finally in Palo Alto (USA) in a colloquium revolving around Latin American Literature. What are the territorial, disciplinary, and professional situations of those who have been asking the same question for the past eight to ten years? What is their epistemological and discursive nature? Why wasn’t this question raised in the manifesto that accompanied the creation of the Institute of Contemporary Art of Boston in 1948? Or asked by Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart or Raymond Williams at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham between 1964 and 2002? Why was the question absent from the series Discussions in Contemporary Culture of the Dia Art Foundation (NYC) that seems to want to “end with the postmodern era” and open up to the contemporary? In his archeological investigation, Ruffel interrogates these successive births of the contemporary, leading its Latin Americanist formation.
Vecchio, Diego. “Luis Gusmán and the inconsciente bruto”: Between 2009 and 2011, Luis Gusmán published two books: Los muertos no mienten and La pregunta freudiana. The first is the second volume of an autobiography started in 1989 with Rueda de Virgilio, which presents itself as a commentary about a spiritualist library on whose shelves authors such as Artl, Nabokov, Joyce, Flaubert, Leopoldo Lugones, Leónidas Lamborghini, Wilcock, Faulkner, Allan Kardek, Raymond Roussel, and Conan Doyle rub shoulders. The second is a book of clinical psychoanalysis, in the best Freudian tradition. Spirits in one hand, psychoanalysis in the other - in two different planes, in two different books, without any clear continuity, as if there were in Gusmán not one split subject but two parallel subjects: a writer and a psychoanalyst. Vecchio examines this disassociation between literature and the clinic. What books are missing in this spiritualist library? For Vecchio, the “gaps” in the library of Luis Gusmán signal an epistemological and cultural conflict produced in the passage of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century –with implications for the contemporary– between the Freudian unconscious and that which we could call the inconsciente bruto, postulated by certain lesser realms of knowledge, such as parapsychology or spiritualism.
Zambra, Alejandro. “Computers”: In his talk, novelist and scholar Alejandro Zambra addresses the problem of the contemporary in Latin America based on personal and group experiences related to technological advances, especially the mass use of computers and word processors. Going beyond a natural mistrust of the idea of a generation, in this talk the author attempts to systematize the traits that to some extent unite writers born in the mid-1970s.
Speaker bios
Idelber Avelar is a Full Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University, specializing in contemporary Latin American fiction, literary theory, and Cultural Studies. He is the author of The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (2004), and The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (1999), which won the MLA Kovacs Prize. He is the co-editor (with Christopher Dunn) of Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship (2011). He has received Rockefeller, Ford, and Hewlett grants, and was recently awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), in relation to a project entitled “Rethinking Masculinity in Contemporary Brazilian and Argentinian Literatures.”
Odile Cisneros is a Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies in the University of Alberta. Her specializations and interests include the Latin American historical avant-gardes, modern and contemporary Brazilian poetry, Mexican literature, and literary translation. She has translated the poetry of Haroldo de Campos, Régis Bonvicino, Jaroslav Seifert, and Rodrigo Rey Rosa. She is also associate editor of the São Paulo-based poetry and culture journal Sibila along with Régis Bonvicino, Alcir Pécora, and Charles Bernstein.
Paola Cortés-Rocca is an Associate Professor in the Spanish Program at San Francisco State University and Department Chair. She has published essays on citizenship and monstrosity, sickness and femininity, ghosts and political imagination, zombies and racial conflicts as well as on the photographic work of Andrés Serrano, Gabriela Liffschitz, Cássio Vasconcellos, Marcelo Brodsky and Eduardo Gil. Her work appeared on academic journals (October, Mosaic, Iberoamericana, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, among others) as well as on electronic and mass media publications. She is the coauthor of Imágenes de vida, relatos de muerta: Eva Perón, cuerpo y política, the co-editor of Políticas del sentimiento. El peronismo y la construcción de la Argentina moderna, and the author of El tiempo de la máquina. Retratos, paisajes y otras imágenes de la nación.
Earl Fitz is Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. He has published a number of books and articles, including Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature (2007) with Elizabeth Lowe, and he was co-editor of Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America (2004). He is a recognized expert on Brazilian literature, having published works on Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector and Jorge Amado. He looks at on how narrative has evolved in Brazil and Spanish America, as well as working on Latin American literature in the comparative perspective.
Julio Premat is a professor of Hispanic American Literature in the Université Paris VIII. He is the author of Héroes sin atributos. Figuras de autor en la literatura argentina (2009), La dicha de saturno. Escritura y melancolía en la obra de J.J. Saer (2002), and he serves on the editorial board of the journals Pandora and Río de la Plata. He has organized international colloquia related to authors such as Juan Carlos Onetti and César Aira, and he directs the research group LI.RI.CO. (Literatura rioplatense contemporánea). He recently coordinated the publication of a critical edition of Juan José Saer’s Glosa and El entenado (2010).
Guadalupe Nettel Born in Mexico in 1973, she graduated from UNAM in Hispanic Languages and Literatures before going on to complete a Ph.D. in language sciences at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. She is the author of three short-story books (Juegos de artificio, Les jours fossiles, Pétalos y otras historias incómodas) and two novels (El huésped y El cuerpo en que nací), published by Anagrama. She has been translated in various languages, including English, French, Dutch, Czech and Slovenian, and has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Premio Antonin Artaud, the Anna Seghers prize and The France Radio International prize. She was a finalist for the Premio Herralde in 2005, and in 2007 was voted as one of the 39 best writers in Latin American under age 39 at the HAY Festival. She is also a frequent contributor to literary journals and magazines.
David William Foster is Regents’ Professor of Spanish & Portuguese in the School of International Letters and Cultures at the Arizona State University. His research interests focus on urban culture in Latin America, with emphasis on issues of gender construction and sexual identity. He has written extensively on Argentine narrative and theater, and he has held teaching appointments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. His recent publications include Sao Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production (2011), Urban Photography in Argentina: Nine Artists of the Post-Dictatorship Era (2007).
Valeria de los Ríos is an Associate Investigator and the Director of the Master’s Program in Latin American and Chilean Literature in the Department of Linguistics and Literature at Universidad de Santiago de Chile. She has participated in and directed projects related to the work of Enrique Linh, Raúl Ruiz, and literature and technology. She is the author of Espectros de luz. Tecnologías visuales en la literatura latinoamericana (2011), and co-editor (with Iván Pinto) of El cine de Raúl Ruiz. Fantasmas, simulacros y artificios (2010).
Lionel Ruffel is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Université Paris VIII and the director of studies of the Boston University Programs in Paris. He is also a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. A specialist in contemporary literature and theory, he is the author of two books—Le dénouement (2005) and Volodine post-exotique (2007)—and editor of two collections—A quoi jouons? (2008) and Qu’est-ce que le contemporain? (2010). With Olivia Rosenthal, he coedited an issue of the French journal Littérature. He is the director of the chaoïd series at French publisher Verdier.
A native of Buenos Aires, Diego Vecchio completed his doctoral dissertation, a study of the work of Macedonio Fernández, at the Université Paris VIII in 2001. He was an invited speaker, with Sergio Chejfec, at a lecture series organized by the Instituto Cervantes in Bordeaux in 2011. He is the author of Osos (2010), Microbios (2006), Egocidio: Macedonio Fernández y la liquidación del yo (2003), and Historia calamitatum (2000).
Alejandro Zambra is Professor in the School of Literature at Universidad Diego Portales. He has published narratives, poetry, and criticism, and his works have been translated into more than ten languages. He was invited to participate in Bogotá39 in 2008, and named one of the best young writers in Spanish by Granta. His works include poetry collections Bahía inútil and Mudanza, as well as novels Bonsái (2006)—which won the Premio de la Crítica de Chile and the Premio del Consejo Nacional del Libro de Chile—, La vida privada de los árboles (2007), and Formas de volver a casa (2011).
About Cultural Synchronization and Disjuncture
A DLCL working group devoted to cultural theory and Latin Americanism, CultSync celebrates its third and final year of successful activities with this colloquium. A unique discursive space on campus for sustained intellectual exchange on central issues of contemporary criticism, the group fosters dialogue that is not produced exclusively by or for Latin Americanists, but one that, while emphasizing the specific contributions of a Latin American point of view, examines broader themes. Activities have included roundtable discussions, public lectures, and talks by faculty, graduate students, and guests from the Bay Area and beyond. Chaired by Héctor Hoyos, participants have included Diana Sorensen, Pheng Cheah, Daniel Alarcón, Neil Larsen, Ramón Saldívar, Jens Andermann, David Palumbo-Liu, Élmer Mendoza, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Horacio Legrás, Julio Villanueva-Chang, Paula Moya, Neil Safier, and Ignacio Sánchez Prado, among other distinguished speakers. For information on past events, see cultsync.stanford.edu.
Faculty chairs
Héctor Hoyos (Ph.D. Romance Studies, Cornell 2008) is an assistant professor of Latin American literature and culture at Stanford University. He was born in Bogotá, where he studied philosophy and literature at the Universidad de los Andes. His book manuscripts Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel and El deber de la travesura: César Aira y la crítica cultural are forthcoming. Hoyos’s research areas include visual culture and critical theory, as well as comparative and philosophical approaches to literature. His work has appeared in several venues, among them Comparative Literature Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Chasqui and Revista Iberoamericana. His most recent publications are "Aftershock: Naomi Klein and the Southern Cone." Third Text 26.2 (2012) and "Visión desafectada y resingularización del evento violento en Los ejércitos de Evelio Rosero" Mabel Moraña and Ignacio Sánchez Prado (Eds.) El lenguaje de las emociones: afecto y cultura en América Latina. Vervuert, 2012.
Marília Librandi-Rocha is Assistant Professor in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. Professor Librandi specializes in Brazilian literature and culture within a comparative framework. She is particularly focused on the modern period, from the nineteenth century to the present. Professor Librandi has edited an anthology of the poetry of J.P. Goldberg entitled, Poemas-Vida (2008). Her book Maranhão-Manhattan. Ensaios de Literatura brasileira (2009), features essays on Sousândrade, Murilo Mendes,Paulo Leminski and João Guimarães Rosa.
Héctor Hoyos (Ph.D. Romance Studies, Cornell 2008) is an assistant professor of Latin American literature and culture at Stanford University. He was born in Bogotá, where he studied philosophy and literature at the Universidad de los Andes. His book manuscripts Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel and El deber de la travesura: César Aira y la crítica cultural are forthcoming. Hoyos’s research areas include visual culture and critical theory, as well as comparative and philosophical approaches to literature. His work has appeared in several venues, among them Comparative Literature Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Chasqui and Revista Iberoamericana. His most recent publications are "Aftershock: Naomi Klein and the Southern Cone." Third Text 26.2 (2012) and "Visión desafectada y resingularización del evento violento en Los ejércitos de Evelio Rosero" Mabel Moraña and Ignacio Sánchez Prado (Eds.) El lenguaje de las emociones: afecto y cultura en América Latina. Vervuert, 2012.
Marília Librandi-Rocha is Assistant Professor in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. Professor Librandi specializes in Brazilian literature and culture within a comparative framework. She is particularly focused on the modern period, from the nineteenth century to the present. Professor Librandi has edited an anthology of the poetry of J.P. Goldberg entitled, Poemas-Vida (2008). Her book Maranhão-Manhattan. Ensaios de Literatura brasileira (2009), features essays on Sousândrade, Murilo Mendes,Paulo Leminski and João Guimarães Rosa.
Chair(s):
Graduate Coordinator(s):
