Description
- Abstract:
- The exchanges between literature and the visual arts are a growing topic of interest in the panorama of contemporary Latin American literature. This thesis examines the influence of the visual arts in the narrative of three key contemporary Latin American authors: César Aira, Roberto Bolaño, and Mario Bellatin. I read their open-ended texts through their interactions with avant-garde art and contextualize their work historically, within the production of an alternate line of artists who escape categories and genres, such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The first chapter analyzes the exchanges between art and literature in the work of Aira, and how they take form conceptually in his narratives, which suggest the mechanisms of curious objects and specific works of art, such as Duchamp’s The Large Glass or M.C. Escher’s Belvedere. The second chapter focuses on the dialogues between Bolaño’s narratives and conceptual art and on the way his novels question literature and its institutions, through a generation of poets whose work is closer to performance than to traditional writing. The last chapter is dedicated to the work of Mario Bellatin. Whereas Aira explores the capacity of the book to contain, Bellatin plays with its materiality and challenges it. Taking into account his texts’ negotiations between the inside and the outside, the fragment and the totality, I study his work from the perspective of collage and the recycling of fragments inaugurated by Picasso and Braque. While Aira’s texts insinuate their relationship to art through their stories and mechanisms, and Bolaño’s play with ekphrasis while exploring the figure of the artist, Bellatin’s texts exhibit the exchanges between art and literature explicitly by including photographs, as well as references to his real life artistic projects, dissolving the boundaries between art and life. I argue that through the influence of the visual arts in their writing, Aira, Bolaño and Bellatin move beyond the conventions of the novel, creating new ways of narrating and thinking about literature and the identities of those who create and experience it.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2016)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Tobar Thommel, Ingrid Carolina,
"Arte y Literatura: Estéticas de Ruptura en las Narrativas de César Aira, Roberto Bolaño y Mario Bellatin"
(2016).
Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0SB4452
Relations
Collection:
-
Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Hispanic Studies department....