Northwestern Events Calendar

Oct
27
2016

Everyday Luxury Objects in the Literature of Globalization: Lecture by Héctor Hoyos

When: Thursday, October 27, 2016
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM CT

Where: Kresge Hall, 5531, 1880 Campus Drive , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Jacob Plevin   (847) 491-4793

Group: Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

The talk interrogates Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism from the vantage point of new materialisms. Complicating the notion that counternarrative may reveal the social relations behind the fascination toward commodities, Hoyos draws from fiction writers like Fernando Vallejo and Margo Glantz to characterize a mode of storytelling he calls “hyperfetishist.” Hyperfetishism exacerbates social tension, seeking to disturb our relationship with the object, rather than to demystify it. The advantage of this mode is manifold, for it affirms the reality of fetishism and recognizes its connection to material properties, instead of searching for a supposedly hidden truth. From the softness of shoes to the glow of faux gold, from unfashionable toilets to crumbling houses, Hoyos shows how contemporary Latin American fiction theorizes globalization’s emerging material paradigms.

Héctor Hoyos is Associate Professor of Latin American literature at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Cornell University, and degrees in Philosophy and Literature from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. His book, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (Columbia UP, 2015), examines post-1989 Latin American novels of globalization and their relevance for world literature. He edited the special journal issues “Theories of the Contemporary in South America” for Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (2014) and “La cultura material en las literaturas y cultura iberoamericanas de hoy” for Cuadernos de literatura (2016). His current manuscript, for which he has received an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, develops the concept of transculturation as a way of integrating new and historical strands of materialism in the study of narrative.

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