Specters of History and History of Specters: an analysis of historical specificity in Amulet, by Roberto Bolaño.

• Grant number: 23/16207-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: March 01, 2024
• End date: February 28, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Marcos Piason Natali
• Grantee: Rafael Amin Cardoso Salloum
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The project seeks to understand the ghosts that haunt the text of Amuleto, a novel written by Roberto Bolaño, thinking about them based on a dialogue between Jacques Derrida's concept of spectrology and the reading key of the historical novel, taking into account both the classic theory by György Lukács on the genre and contemporary contributions. Questions about the way in which violence is narrated in the book, the future and importance of literature and the notion of community in a historical time marked by individualism will unfold based on an understanding of the historical situation that allowed the discourse of the "end of History", especially in the case of the last three decades of the 20th century in Latin America, with the spectral haunting of those killed and disappeared by dictatorships and neoliberal policies. Furthermore, based on a dichotomy between essence and appearance established at the beginning of the novel, paranoid and reparative reading will be considered as ways of conjuring ghosts and working through grief.