Death: Reporting and Reflecting - A Discourse Analysis of Roberto Bolaño's 2666

Abstract

My current project focuses on a discourse and spatiotemporal analysis of representations of violence in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666. The novel centers on the city of Santa Teresa, which is largely accepted as a fictional representation of Ciudad Juárez. Ciudad Juárez is located along the U.S.-Mexico border and is known for the femicides (homicides committed against women) that have been occurring with impunity since 1993. The novel is divided into five temporally and geographically distinct plotlines, all of which end in Santa Teresa. Mapping the violence along the movement of these distinct plotlines will allow me to visualize the way in which representations of violence evolve in the novel across both time and space. Moreover, this project will allow me to probe new inquiries into contemporary forms of violence by understanding them to be a global, instead of a static phenomenon anchored to specific sociopolitical contexts.