Roberto Bolaño assassinated Carmen, and we caught him

Abstract

<p>This article is the outcome of a research seminar on recent Latin American police stories, developed in the course Latin American Novel of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at La Salle University. The theoretical foundation of the seminar had as general frame the Aesthetics of Reception, a literary theory founded by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser in the School of Constanza, in Germany. In the specific case of literary theory on police stories, from a sociological perspective, we prefer the foundational reflections of Roger Caillois (1942). These reflections have the suggestive subtitle, roughly translated into English: “Detective Novel: how intelligence removes from the world to devote itself to its games, and how society includes its problems in these games.” On the other hand, we chose Roberto Bolaño’s short story, La pista de hielo [The Ice Rink], and we elaborated different hypothesis of work about it, until we reach a literary theory proposal that tells of a new detective narrative.</p>