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.