About

Jonathan B. Monroe is a professor at Cornell University in the College of Arts & Sciences, with academic interests spanning modern and contemporary poetry, aesthetics and politics, history and literary history, philosophy and critical theory, poetics, economies, and ecologies, across Europe and the Americas. His work focuses on innovative, experimental, and alternative poetries of the past two centuries, including avant-garde movements and their contemporary legacies, as well as the prose poem and cross-genre writing. Monroe has authored and edited several books, notably 'Framing Roberto Bolaño,' which explores themes of poetry, fiction, literary history, and politics, and is involved in ongoing research on poetics and media.

Research topics

• Art
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Literature
• Political Science
• Law
• Philosophy
• History
• Visual arts
• Art history

Selected publications

• Transnational, Intermedial Pressures in Roberto Bolaño’s Prose Poem Novels

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Literature
  • Political Science

  Abstract Roberto Bolaño demonstrated an acute sense of the transnational, intermedial pressures facing the novel in the last two decades of the twentieth century and first few years of the twenty-first. These pressures are strikingly manifest in his two bookend novels El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción (The Spirit of Science Fiction, 2016, written 1980–1984) and Una novelita lumpen (A Little Lumpen Novelita, 2002). While the former stages Bolaño’s early attempts to negotiate the aspiring Latin American writer’s peripheral “Third World” status in the Cold War era, the latter explores in a European context, from a post-Cold War perspective, the thoroughgoing displacement of literary-historical frames of reference by media and popular culture. At the core of Bolaño’s novels, from his initial interest in science fiction to his much greater investment in detective fiction, are questions of value posed by an increasingly global, media-saturated culture to the novel and to literature generally.

  PublisherDOI

• Mapping Bolaño’s Worlds

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art

  Mapping Roberto Bolaño’s worlds, “literary” and “non-literary” alike, invites the work of many hands. In that collaborative spirit, conceived and organized in four parts – “Geographical, Social, and Historical Contexts,” “Shaping Events and Literary History,” “Genres, Discourses, Media,” and “Aesthetics, Culture, and Politics” – the twenty-nine essays that follow bring together the work of a distinguished group of scholars representing a range of disciplines. The volume itself is thus a nexus of many overlapping worlds, of locations and perspectives aligned and divergent, a site to encourage conversations about Bolaño’s work for generations to come, to 2666 and beyond.

  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-11-30

  paratext1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• 3 Novalis’ HYMNEN AN DIE NACHT and the Prose Poem AVANT LA LETTRE

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Philosophy
  • Literature
  PublisherDOI

• From the Known to the Unknown University

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-09-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The question of the prose poem, of Bolaño’s prose poem novels, is the question of literature itself and its synecdochic powers of representation. In his late short story, “Photos,” Bolaño offers a glimpse of a growing recognition, near the end of his life, of the extent to which his literary worlds had remained limited to Europe and the Americas. What remains clear, in an age increasingly dominated by visual media, is that his work speaks passionately against forgetting those who will never be represented, read, made visible. That sustained awareness of the marginal, the neglected, the forgotten, is one he builds into his work at every turn, a core value that merits affirmation and celebration, merits even, perhaps, a certain recognition as exemplary, as representative, as synecdochic, as of a part searching for a greater, more capacious, more inclusive whole. What is called poetry, prose, is not one thing, Bolaño’s work teaches us, but many things, always in process, always becoming historical, its identity not singular but multiple. Situated not between but among genres, discourses, media, his prose poem novels encourage and embrace a paradoxical distinction, a poetics not of opposition but of apposition, a poetics for the twenty-first century.

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• Introduction: The Prose Poem as a Dialogical Genre

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-05-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER 1. Universalpoesie as Fragment: Friedrich Schlegel and the Prose Poem

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-05-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frequently Cited References

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-05-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “What a Relief to Give Up Literature”

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-09-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Begun in 1999 and published in 2004, a year after Bolaño’s death, 2666 gives priority, more than in any other work of his career, not to poetry, but to the novel. Where The Savage Detectives expands and ultimately breaks the frame of its prose-poetic search for “true” poetry, 2666 offers Bolaño’s most explicit, sustained elaboration of the novel’s centrality to his prose-poetic, fictive imaginary, even as it challenges the monumental literary ambitions of the novel as form so manifestly on display in 2666 itself. Expanding the scope of its five-part, multi-discursive investigation from literary criticism (four European critics) to philosophy and poetry (Amalfitano and his daughter Rosa); to investigative journalism (the African-American Oscar Fate); to gender violence (serial murders), entertainment, and electronic media; to the novel, history, and literary history (the German novelist Benno Von Archimboldi, aka Hans Reiter), 2666 concludes with a titled two-page prose poem, “Fürst Pückler,” that affirms, with consummate irony, the value of small works and little books, and of the extra-literary over the literary, at the end of Bolaño’s most ambitious work, a novel acutely aware, as Bolaño is at virtually all points, of questions of scale and innovation, of literary evolution and social change.

  PublisherDOI

• Poetry, Politics, Critique

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-09-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Returning a year after the publication of Amulet to the site of the historical trauma of his generation, Bolaño’s 2000 novella By Night in Chile resumes the challenge of a coming-to-terms with the 1973 coup which he had made his sustained focus, four years earlier, in Distant Star. Combining Distant Star’s focus on poiesis with that of Amulet on aesthesis, By Night in Chile completes Bolaño’s trilogy of short novels of poetic apprenticeship by exploring the conjunction of poiesis and aesthesis in a single character who figures both, the Catholic father/priest and poet-critic Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix/H. Ibacache. Mirroring the central protagonist’s dual identities as poet (Urrutia Lacroix) and critic (Ibacache), the text inscribes, through its uninterrupted monological structure, a maximal tension between acts of writing and reading. Pivoting in the novella’s final pages to an explicit focus on politics, pedagogy, and the making of literature, Bolaño suggest the extent to which relations between readers and writers, history and literary history, ideology and critique remain to be determined through the dynamic interplay of aesthesis and poiesis, an increasingly accelerated process that carries within it the potential, though far from a guarantee, of more democratic, non-binary configurations to come.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alice Fulton

  1 shared

• Walter Kalaidjian

  1 shared

• Harold Bloom

  1 shared

• Satya P. Mohanty

  1 shared

• George Hartley

  1 shared

• Ann Lauterbach

  1 shared

• Irving Wohlfarth

  1 shared

• Carl G. Herndl

  University of South Florida

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Cornell Merrill Presidential Scholar Outstanding Educator
• Research University of the Year (by Time and The Princeton R…