BOOK NEWS: Defamiliarizing reading via "deformative" Latin American fiction

Deformative Fictions: Cruelty and Narrative Ethics in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
By Ashley Hope Pérez

Ohio State UP, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5906-1

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215654.html

Tapping a rich vein of Latin American literature, Deformative Fictions by Ashley Hope Pérez excavates works that unsettle, defamiliarize, and disrupt access to the conventional pleasures of reading and interpretation. Close readings highlight the nuances of texts that have been misread, underread, or fetishized because they depart from literary norms, including fiction by Roberto Bolaño and Silvina Ocampo. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Interweaving rhetorical and narratological analysis with reflections on the ethical stakes of writing, reading, and interpreting deformative fictions and fictional cruelty, Pérez issues a resounding entreaty for us to expand our understandings of the value of narrative beyond the logics of utility and comfort. Doing so, she contends, allows readers to embrace the full possibilities of the relationships among authors, readers, and the worlds we inhabit on and off the page. In defamiliarizing the act of reading, deformative fictions reacquaint us with its ethical weight.

“Pérez brings a rich genealogy of Latin American literature into the narrative studies tradition, convincingly arguing why we should read works that refuse to offer us comfort. She offers critical food for thought for researchers and teachers alike, employing a beautiful writing style that illustrates complex ideas with ease.” —Doug P. Bush, author of Capturing Mariposas: Reading Cultural Schema in Gay Chicano Literature

Ashley Hope Pérez is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of the novels What Can’t Wait The Knife and the Butterfly, and Out of Darkness and the editor of the forthcoming anthology Banned Together: Authors and Allies on the Fight for Readers’ Rights.

BOOK NEWS: Bolaño's and Pynchon's hyperbolic style

Hyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon's and Bolaño's Late Maximalist Fiction

BY SAMIR SELLAMI

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN: 9781501360497

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/hyperbolic-realism-9781501360497/

What comes after postmodernism in literature?

Hyperbolic Realism engages the contradiction that while it remains impossible to present a full picture of the world, assessing reality from a planetary perspective is now more than ever an ethical obligation for contemporary literature. The book thus examines the hyperbolic forms and features of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 – their discursive and material abundance, excessive fictionality, close intertwining of fantastic and historical genres, narrative doubt and spiraling uncertainty – which are deployed not as an escape from, but a plunge into reality. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Faced with a reality in a permanent state of exception, Pynchon and Bolaño react to the excesses and distortions of the modern age with a new poetic and aesthetic paradigm that rejects both the naive illusion of a return to the real and the self-enclosed artificiality of classical postmodern writing: hyperbolic realism.

"Samir Sellami writes with brilliant clarity and makes difficult arguments easy to follow. Philosophers and critical theorists should study his techniques." —Kathryn Hume, Pennsylvania State University

Samir Sellami is a literary critic and, together with Tobias Haberkorn, founding editor of the Berlin Review. He holds a PhD in comparative literature and media studies from the University of Perpignan and the Federal Fluminense University in Nitéroi, Brazil. His research interests include post-avantgarde writing in the Americas, critiques of strong narrativity, aesthetic autodidacticism, and the intersectionality of genre, affect, and form.