Ashley Pérez is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies.
Drawing on fictions by Silvina Ocampo, Fernando Vallejo, and Roberto Bolaño, among others, this talk explores how literary style and form affect our response to narrated cruelty. It shows how certain works deform and resist the satisfactions of empathy, identification, and understanding that we sometimes expect from fiction, and it proposes that this resistance to traditional modes of reading has profound ethical implications. For all their apparent perversity, engagements with literary cruelty in deformative fictions demand greater attention to the particularity of the works themselves, even when they distress or bewilder us. The talk draws on Ashley Pérez’s book manuscript in progress, Deformative Fictions: Reading Cruelty in 20th-Century Latin American Literature.
