John Burns
Associate Professor of Spanish
Presents:
 

Who were the Infrarrealistas? These poets who plied their trade in Mexico City in the 1970s were the inspiration for the fictional Visceral Realists, a rambunctious bunch of young bohemians who populate the pages of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. This talk will look at the representation of the Infrarrealistas both in their own poetry and in Roberto Bolaño’s seminal novel. Their origins were markedly oppositional. As the prefix “infra” implies, the group was interested in mining the possibilities of the grittier side of reality, and they positioned their own work as an alternative to what they viewed as elitist, state-sponsored modes of writing. How did these writers, many of whom continue to write and publish their work into the present moment, seek to reimagine themselves after they were portrayed by Bolaño?