Dear Bilkent colleagues and students,
The Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas cordially invites you to the next talk in its colloquium series, featuring Assistant Professor Cory Stockwell (CCI): “On Stars and the Exhaustion of Destiny in Bolaño”. Dr Stockwell will hold his talk on Tuesday, December 20 at 12:40 in the Bilkent Main Campus Library Art Gallery. Sandwiches and refreshments will be available. An abstract for Dr Stockwell’s talk is below.
Thank you for your consideration and best wishes,
Willian Coker
Sjoerd Levelt
CCI Colloquium Committee
On Stars and the Exhaustion of Destiny in Bolaño
Dr Cory Stockwell (CCI)
We find stars at work in several key moments in Bolaño’s novels and stories; unsurprisingly, given the symbolic value of the stars in our cultures and traditions, these stars – whether they are signs of the zodiac, proper names, portents or bad omens – often have a distinctly hermetic resonance. This paper proposes to examine a pair of stars that are found in Bolaño’s 1996 novel Distant Star, arguing that these stars, in this deeply political novel, open onto the problem of destiny, in ways that make us think the concept anew – keeping destiny alive, while at the same time impoverishing it.