Paper short abstract

My article will attempt to sketch, departing from a reading of three novelistic inheritors of the Borgesian legacy – Sebald, Foster Wallace and Bolaño – a series of thesis regarding what happens to the novel as genre once it is forced to encounter the disruptive force of Borges’ formal innovations.

Paper long abstract

In 2002 Roberto Bolaño finished his intervention in the Fiesta de Literatura Amplificada with the following words: "Hay que releer a Borges." Two years later, prompted by his early death, the manuscript of his posthumous novel 2666 was published. Bolaño's last novel, which had remained a secret until then, showed itself first and foremost to be a fascinating reading and writing of the novelistic potential implicit within Borges' work: its more than a thousand pages attempt to think, departing from strategies already present in Borges, the relationship between reading, information and experience. Bolaño was not, however, alone in this re-reading. My article will attempt to sketch, departing from a reading of three novelistic inheritors of the Borgesian legacy - Sebald, Foster Wallace and Bolaño - a series of thesis regarding what happens to the novel as genre once it is forced to encounter the disruptive force of Borges' formal innovations. In doing so I will attempt to think through what it would mean to say that with Borges the novel begins to think itself within the space of criticism.