Literature
Chile has a rich literature tradition that started back in the sixteenth century.
As the native cultures of he territories known today as Chile had no written tradition, Chilean literature was born during the Spanish conquest in 1500s. The conquistator Pedro de Valdivia wrote letters to the King, Charles V, and in one of those letters, he admiringly describes the natural beauty and landscape of the country. Along with the conquerors came missionaries to teach and convert the native peoples to Christianity, spreading not only their religion but also their language, writing and other arts and artisan skills. Chilean literature in the time of the Spanish conquest consisted mainly of the chronicles of the war of Arauco (long running conflict between Spaniards and the Mapuche people, a group of indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile). The main role of literature was to keep historical records of the campaign, also during the colonial period literary works written by Chilean nuns spotlighted spiritual letters, diaries, autobiographies and epistolary.
The excitement of the independence movement inspired the first newspaper or printing operation of any kind, mostly covering politics and political philosophy.
The generation of 1837 made up of writers born between 1800 and 1814, also known by the name "Generacion Costumbrista" developed a literary interpretation of local everyday life and manners. Its main feature was a special emphasis on observing the picturesque and local, approaching it from a satirical and critical point of view.
The generation of 1842 was also know as the "Romantic-social" generation. They portrayed everyday life but added an extra layer of social critique to their work.
Criollismo was a literary movement that was considered as an extension of Realism: it portrayed the scenes, customs and manners of the writer's country, with some hints of patriotism. The first centenary of the Chilean independence in 1910 fed the patriotic spirit of the nation and its writers, and saw a renewed emphasis of rural life in contrast to the traditional focus on urban life as the only source and background of stories.
Chilean Poetry was like an avant-garde movement, it broke with metric restrains and the rules of poetry. Since 1900 poetry has been constantly changing in Chile, every author has adopted his or her own boundaries, style and metric. One of the most representatives is Pablo Neruda, known by his love poems and his political participation in the communist party.
Reference
Wikipedia. (2016, March 20). Chilean Literature retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_literature
About Chile
Like Argentina, Chile was at one time left out of the great sphere of Spanish influence in the region, precisely because Spaniards were much more interested in the gold and silver of Peru and Bolivia. Also, what kept the region from being being overrun within immigrants from the Continent, in addition to the Andes mountains, was the ferocity of the local Araucanian Indians.
September 11, 1973
The 1973 Chilean coup d'etat was a watershed event in both the Cold War and the history of Chile. For Chile September 11, marks a very different occasion, the country was experiencing a severe left-right political polarization and turmoil: Following an extended period of social and political unrest between the center-right dominated Congress of Chile and the elected socialist President Salvador Allende, as well as the economic warfare ordered by US President Richard Nixon, the armed forces and the national police overthrew then-president Salvador Allende, leading to his suicide, and followed by Augusto Pinochet's rise to power.
Augusto Pinochet was Allende's appointed army chief, who rose to supreme power within a year of the coup, formally assuming power in late 1974, instituting a 16-year-long wight-wing military dictatorship that left more than 3000 people dead or missing. The regime headed by Pinochet ended in 1990 after it lost a referendum in 1988.
Chile is a long and narrow coastal Southern Cone country located on the west side of the Andes mountains, that encompasses a remarkable variety of climates and landscapes. Southern Chile is rich in forests, grazing lands and features a string of volcanoes and lakes.
Reference
Foster, D. (2002). The Global Etiquette Guide to Mexico and Latin America. (pp. 183-188). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Isabel Allende. (2016). Isabel Allende Biography retrieved from http://ia-site.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/cont/other/Bio_Isabel_Summary-en.pdf?r=e97b9e1e
Wikipedia. (2016, May 25). 1973 Chilean coup d'état retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
Wikipedia. (2016, May 11). Chile retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chile
Websites
- The Culture Trip (Chile)The Culture Trip: the best art, food, culture and travel.
- Isabel Allende [Official Website]Take a closer look to Isabel Allende's life. All about her books, her biography and interviews throughout her life.
- Poetry Foundation: Pablo Neruda"The work of art and the statement of thought—when these are responsible human actions, rooted in human need—are inseparable from historical and political context".
Pablo Neruda
Isabel Allende
Born in Peru, Isabel Allende was raised in Chile. A prominent journalist fro Chilean television and magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Allende's life was forever altered when General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup in 1973 that toppled Chile's socialist reform government. Allende's cousin Salvador Allende, who had been elected Chile's President in 1970, died in the coup. The Pinochet regime was marked early on by repression and brutality, and Allende became involved with groups offering aid to victims of the regime. Ultimately finding it unsafe to remain in Chile, she fled the country in 1975 with her family. In 1981 Allende learned that her beloved grandfather, who still lived in Chile, was dying. She began a letter to him, recounting her childhood memories of life in her grandparents' home. Although her grandfather died before having the chance to read the letter, its contents became the basis for The House of the Spirits, the novel that launched her literary career at age 40.
Allende, who has received dozens of international tributes adn awards over the las 30 years, describes her fiction as "realistic literature," rooted in her remarkable upbringing and the mystical people and events that fueled her imagination. Her writings are equally informed by her feminist convictions, her commitment to social justice, and the harsh political realities that shaped her destiny.
City of the Beasts by ISBN: 9780062254474Publication Date: 2002Allende's first novel for children—an eco-thriller in which fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold has the chance to take the trip of a lifetime. Partin from his family and ill mother, Alexander joins his fearless grandmother, a magazine reporter for International Geographic, on an expedition to the dangerous, remote world of the Amazon. Their mission, along with others on their team—including a celebrated anthropologist, a local guide and his young daughter Nadia, and a doctor—is to document the legendary Yeti of the Amazon known as the Beast. Under the dense canopy of the jungle, Alexander is amazed to discover much more than he could have imagined about the hidden worlds of the rain forest. Drawing on the strength of the jaguar, the totemic animal Alexander finds within himself, and the eagle, Nadia's spirit guide, both young people are led by the invisible People of the Mist on a thrilling and unforgettable journey to the ultimate discovery.
Paula by Call Number: PQ8098.1.L54 Z4713 1995ISBN: 0060172533Publication Date: 1995In 1991, Isabel Allende's daughter, Paula, became gravely ill and shortly thereafter fell into a coma. During months in the hospital, the author began to write of her family to her unconscious daughter. In her telling, bizarre ancestors appear before our eyes: we hear both delightful and bitter childhood intimate secrets passed along in whispers.
As an exorcism of death, in these pages Isabel Allende explores the past and questions the gods. The result is a magical book that carries the reader from tears to laughter, from terror to sensuality and wisdom. The glorious characters of Allende's fiction—clairvoyants, revolutionaries, and most of all the questioning woman who makes her way through storytelling—populate this autobiography, perhaps Allende's finest work, and certainty her most revealing.
The House of the Spirits by Call Number: PQ8098.1.L54 C313 1986ISBN: 0553273914Publication Date: 1986The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love fro his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.
Reference
Isabel Allende. (2016). Isabel Allende Biography retrieved from http://isabelallende.com/en/bio
Allende, I. (1995). Paula. New York, NY: Harper-Collins Publishers, Inc.
Image retrieved from Google Images http://blog.isabelallende.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/blogIsabel-1.jpg
Outstanding Authors
Roberto Bolaño belongs to the most select group of Latin-American novelists. Born in Chile in 1953, he spent his teenage years in Mexico and moved to Spain at the end of the 1970s. A prolific writer, a literary animal who makes no concessions, Bolaño's successfully combines the two basic instincts of a novelist: he is attracted to historical events, and he desires to correct them, to point out the errors. From Mexico he acquired a mythical paradise, from Chile the inferno of the real, and from Spain he purges the sins of both.
Boullosa, C. (2002). Roberto Bolaño. Bomb Magazine. Retrieved from http://bombmagazine.org/article/2460/
Image retrieved from Google Images http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/2012/04/15/1337256000000.cached_2.jpg
Another big hitter on the Chilean literacy scene is feminist Marcela Serrano, who has published nine novels and several short stories. A theme which dominates much more of her writing is the way in which it explores women's lives, something which has drawn criticism from misogynistic critics. The 2011 novel Ten Women gives biographical flashes into the lives of the women, nine of whom are the patients of the final one, Natasha the therapist. Serrano's clear, lucid prose shines here, as she rather impressively tackles the creation of ten distinct biographies in one novel, while keeping them fully fleshed out and absorbing.
Cocking, Lauren. (2015, December 9). Top 10 Contemporary Chilean Authors. The Culture Trip. Retrieved from http://theculturetrip.com/south-america/chile/articles/top-10-contemporary-chilean-authors/
Image retrieved from Google Images http://trabalibros.com/rs/2227/e9c4455d-a317-4f4c-9f70-108d736bae98/6c8/filename/marcela-serrano-trabalibros.jpg
Openly gay author Pedro Lemebel sadly passed ou in January of 2015 but solidified his status s on of Chile's greatest contemporary writers before his death with his unabashed tackling of controversial topis (in Chile, at least) of gender and sexuality. This so-called shock value of his interaction with these often unexplored subjects in Chilean literature, including transgender issues, makes him a highly recommended writer. Arguably his most famous work, and his only novel, is Tengo Miedo Torero (My Tender Matador), which was published in 2011 and remains the only of his works to be translated for an English-speaking readership. It deals with a gay love story in '80s Pinochet-era Chile and was nominated for the 2002 Premio Altazor de las Artes Nacionales.
Cocking, Lauren. (2015, December 9). Top 10 Contemporary Chilean Authors. The Culture Trip. Retrieved from http://theculturetrip.com/south-america/chile/articles/top-10-contemporary-chilean-authors/
Image retrieved from The Culture Trip https://cdn.theculturetrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/5777197623_9ae9e80d65_b.jpg
Books
By Night in Chile by Call Number: PQ8098.12 .O38 N6313 2003ISBN: 9780811215473Publication Date: 2000A hypnotic deathbed confession revolving around the Opus Dei, poetry, and Pinochet, "By Night in Chile" pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia.
My Tender Matador by Call Number: PQ8098.22 .E57 T46 2004ISBN: 9780802141873Publication Date: 2005Centered around the 1986 attempt on the life of Augusto Pinochet, an event that changed Chile forever, "My Tender Matador" is one of the most explosive, controversial, and popular novels to have been published in that country in decades.
Antwerp by ISBN: 9780811217170Publication Date: 2010-04-30Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolano's enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes.
The Return by Call Number: PQ8098.12.O38 R48 2010ISBN: 9780811219051Publication Date: 2012-09-20Bent on returning to haunt you, Bolano's tales might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend, or soccer, witchcraft, or a dream of meeting the poet Enrique Lihn:they always surprise.
Amulet by Call Number: PQ8098.12.O38 A6813 2008ISBN: 9780811217460Publication Date: 2008-05-17Auxilio Lacouture is a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University.
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Call Number: PQ8098.12.O38 H5713 2008ISBN: 9780811217941Publication Date: 2009-05-29The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.
2666 by Call Number: PQ8098.12.O38 A12213 2008ISBN: 9780312429218Publication Date: 2009-09-01Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman--these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared.
Understanding Roberto Bolaño by ISBN: 9781611176483Publication Date: 2016-09-15In Understanding Roberto Bolaño, Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat offers a comprehensive analysis of this critically acclaimed Chilean poet and novelist whose work brought global attention to Latin American literature in the 1960s unseen since the rise of García Márquez and magic realism. Best known for The Savage Detectives, winner of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize; the novella By Night in Chile; and the posthumously published novel 2666, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bolaño died in 2003 just as his reputation was becoming established. After a brief biographical sketch, Gutiérrez-Mouat chronologically contextualizes literary interpretations of Bolaño's work in terms of his life, cultural background, and political ideals. Gutiérrez-Mouat explains Bolaño's work to an English-speaking audience--including his relatively neglected poetry--and conveys a sense of where Bolaño fits in the Latin American tradition. Since his death, eleven of novels, four short story collections, and three poetry collections have been translated into English. The afterword addresses Bolaño's status as a Latin American writer, as the former literary editor of El País claimed, "neither magical realist, nor baroque nor localist, but [creator of] an imaginary, extraterritorial mirror of Latin America, more as a kind of state of mind than a specific place."
Civil Obedience by ISBN: 9780299317201Publication Date: 2018-05-15Since the fall of General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in 1990, Chilean society has shied away from the subject of civilian complicity, preferring to pursue convictions of military perpetrators. But the torture, murders, deportations, and disappearances of tens of thousands of people in Chile were not carried out by the military alone; they required a vast civilian network. Some citizens actively participated in the regime's massive violations of human rights for personal gain or out of a sense of patriotic duty. Others supported Pinochet's neoliberal economic program while turning a blind eye to the crimes of that era. Michael J. Lazzara boldly argues that today's Chile is a product of both complicity and complacency. Combining historical analysis with deft literary, political, and cultural critique, he scrutinizes the post-Pinochet rationalizations made by politicians, artists, intellectuals, bystanders, former revolutionaries-turned-neoliberals, and common citizens. He looks beyond victims and perpetrators to unveil the ambiguous, ethically vexed realms of memory and experience that authoritarian regimes inevitably generate.
Witnessing Beyond the Human by ISBN: 9781438465715Publication Date: 2017-05-01Provides an innovative and theoretically rigorous approach to the subject of testimony in Latin America.This book rethinks the nature of testimony beyond the ground of the human in works produced in Chile and Argentina from the 1970s to the present. Focusing on literature by Juan Gelman, Sergio Chejfec, and Roberto Bolaño, as well as art by Eugenio Dittborn, Kate Jenckes argues that these works represent life, death, and the relation between self and other “beyond the human,” that is beyond the sense that we can know and represent ourselves and others, with powerful implications for our understanding of history, community, and politics. Jenckes engages with the work of Jacques Derrida together with the intellectually rigorous field of Chilean aesthetic theory to explore issues related to the nature of testimony.
Homenaje a Jaime Concha by ISBN: 9781945234422Publication Date: 2018-05-01Este libro es el primero en rendirle un homenaje al gran critico chileno, Jaime Concha. Reune reflexiones personales de unos amigos academicos; ensayos sobre su docencia en Concepcion y su obra en general; estudios inspirados en los libros de Concha sobre Huidobro, Mistral y Neruda; capitulos dedicados al deber de la critica y la narrativa sobre la dictadura chilena; estudios incisivos de ex estudiantes de la Universidad de California en San Diego quienes son ahora son academicos; y la conferencia magistral que Concha diera en un simposio-homenaje en Santiago de Chile en 2015. La obra critica de Concha, entonces, sirve de pretexto para meditaciones, puente con estudios relacionados a su obra, y punto de arranque para estudios innovadores e independientes.
Speculative Fictions by ISBN: 9780822962335Publication Date: 2013-05-07Speculative Fictions views the Chilean neoliberal transition as reflected in cultural production from the postdictatorship era of the 1970s to the present. To Alessandro Fornazzari, the move to market capitalism effectively blurred the lines between economics and aesthetics, perhaps nowhere more evidently than in Chile. Through exemplary works of film, literature, the visual arts, testimonials, and cultural theory, Fornazzari reveals the influence of economics over nearly every aspect of culture and society. Citing Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Willy Thayer, Milton Friedman, and others, Fornazzari forms the theoretical basis for his neoliberal transitional discourse as a logical progression of capitalism. Fornazzari identifies Casa de campo, José Donoso's allegory of the military coup of 1973 and the ensuing monetary crisis, as a harbinger of transitional texts, challenging them to explore new forms of abstraction. Those forms are explored in the novels Oir su voz by Arturo Fontaine and Mano de obra by Diamela Eltit, where Fornazzari examines divergent views of workers in the form of neoliberal human capital or post-Fordist immaterial labor. In documentaries by Patricio Guzmán and Silvio Caiozzi, he juxtaposes depictions of mass mobilization and protest to the mass marketing of individual memory and loss, claiming they serve as symbols of the polarities of dictatorship and neoliberalism. Fornazzari then relates the subsuming of the individual under both fascism and neoliberalism by recalling the iconic imbunche (a mutilated figure whose orifices have been sewn closed) in works by Donoso and the visual artist Catalina Parra. He continues the theme of subsumption in his discussion of the obliteration of the divide between physical labor and intellectualism under neoliberalism, as evidenced in the detective novel A la sombra del dinero by Ramón Díaz Eterovic. In these examples and others, Fornazzari presents a firmly grounded theoretical analysis that will appeal to Latin Americanists in general and to those interested in the intersection of economics and culture. The Chilean experience provides a case study that will also inform students and scholars of neoliberal transitions globally.
Blest Gana Via Machiavelli and Cervantes by ISBN: 9781443899772Publication Date: 2017This book analyzes the work of iconic Chilean author Alberto Blest Gana (1830–1920) through the lens of Machiavelli and Cervantes. Transatlantic in scope, it uses literary studies and cultural history to delve into Chile's emergence as a nation and to illustrate a set of conflicts among the political parties and social classes in the early days of independence, the 1830s and 1850s. With a focus on Martín Rivas: Novela de costumbres politico-sociales [Martin Rivas: A Novel of Socio-Political Manners] (1862), El ideal de un calavera [The Ideal of a Rogue/Libertine] (1863), and Durante la Reconquista [During the Re-Conquest] (1897), this study examines the political and social exchanges and the place of social order in a critical period in Chile's national development. Blest Gana's three novels vividly depict the whys and hows of Chile's early political struggles, dramatically underscoring the painfully real and very deep disagreements about the nation's early direction and sense of identity, and showing how political and cultural antagonisms resulted from social hierarchies. For some, patria was synonymous with order itself; order needed to be established and maintained no matter how severe the measures. The book is informed by a desire to use early narrative expressions of Chile's national identity to illuminate the political and cultural heritage of the twentieth century, especially the disruptions that occurred during the government and ultimate ousting of Salvador Allende Gossens (1908–1973), president of Chile from 1970 to 1973. In Blest Gana's three texts, the enmities among Chileans reveal a fundamental and ongoing social, political and cultural disunity. This crack in the national foundation accounts in part for what erupted during the government of Allende, an idealist and a quixotic individual who believed in socialism via democracy and fought for equality in society. Betrayed from all sides, Allende was violently removed from power by a military junta led by Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1915–2006), who ruled from 1973 to 1990. Under Pinochet's dictatorship, books and print materials were scrutinized and censored in a way that was not unlike the period when Cervantes published the first and second parts of Don Quijote. Martín Rivas, however, continued to be read in schools, but mostly as a love story, with its political commentary effectively concealed.
