Contemporaneity, multipolarity, hospitality

Guest lecture by Héctor Hoyos, Assistant Professor of Latin American literature at Stanford University.

The three concepts in the title of Hoyos’s talk summarize his thinking about the fruitful, tense relationship between Latin Americanism and World Literature. A proposal for mutual development, this short exposé shows how heterochronic, non-teleological cultural flows upend center-periphery dynamics. The talk explores the partly coincidental institutional and intellectual dimensions of this problem. Drawing literary examples from Roberto Bolaño and others, Hoyos presents a model of critical hospitality where the hosts and guests of world literature change places. Beyond regarding the latter critical movement as an epiphenomenon of globalization, this approach seeks to intervene in the very fabric of literary experience at a global level.

Héctor Hoyos is Assistant Professor of Latin American literature at Stanford University, where he teaches contemporary fiction and literary theory. He holds a Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Cornell University, degrees in Philosophy and Literature from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, and an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at Freie Universität in Berlin. His book, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel(Columbia UP, 2015), is the first monographic, theoretical study of Latin American novelistic representations of globalization of its kind. He is the co-editor of the special issue "Theories of the Contemporary in South America" for Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. His manuscript Radical Things: Transcultural Materialism in Literature integrates new and historical strands of materialism in the study of narrative.

Further information may be obtained from Associate Professor Christian Dahl.