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The article starts from the premise that much of the critical work dedicated to Roberto Bolaño's 2666 centres upon the idea of depersonalisation, generally understood as a subtraction of what is most properly personal in the human individual. The thesis put forward is that Bolaño's style and technique of characterisation, particularly in the passages dedicated to the victims of human rights abuses, is best appreciated by recurring to the idea of "impersonality", conceived as a third pole between personality and depersonalisation. The first section of the article is dedicated to connecting the idea of literary incorporation to that of human rights, thus showing how historically situated conceptions of "person" often influence readers' expectations of what would constitute a dignified and just rendition of victims of real abuses in fiction. In the second section, it is suggested that Bolaño's project intentionally diverges from the aims of literary incorporation and is more finely attuned to the philosophy of the impersonal which is to be found in the work of Maurice Blanchot and Simone Weil. The article concludes by interpreting Bolaño's literary gesture in relation to existing critiques of human rights discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is a novel that can be situated, aesthetically, within the traditions of utopian fiction and the North American encyclopaedic, postmodern novel. It is also, however, a text that is exemplary of a type of didacticism that cloaks its mechanism behind an overloaded structure. One of the explicit targets of this didacticism is the neo-liberal university that, in 2666, is structurally twinned with the police department and is thus complicit in the novel's femicides. This article suggests the ways in which Bolaño's novel attempts to discipline the academy while also outlining its mode of crypto-didacticism. Taking theoretical cues from Theodor W. Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu, this article reads 2666 as a metafictional work that signals its own desire to teach, thereby representing a fresh approach for ethics in the postmodern novel and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The celerity of Roberto Bolaño’s canonization as one of the avatars of world literature stems from the success of his magnum opus,2666. This five-part novel is an impassioned indictment of the abdication of ethics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century modernity, an era that saw the rise of both literal and structural gender-based violence. Bolaño offers the city of Santa Teresa—the fictional analogue to the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez—as the paradigmatic example of a city afflicted by such violence, where a network of global factors has conspired to create a milieu in which the murders of young Mexican women have become so frequent as to be banal.2666stipulates that violence necessarily attends the rise of Mexican modernity in the twentieth and twenty-first century; this essay will explore five spheres where this modernity takes on violent dimensions: economic and political structures, narratology, ocularcentrism, exile, and literary form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]