Resistance to the present

This work explores productive linkages between social and political criticism and literature. Following the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, it takes a clinical approach, suggesting that literature reflects a kind of diagnosis of the state of the world. The work argues that if literature does not offer propositional, well-defined answers to overtly posed or covertly insinuated problems, this is not therefore a weakness, but a strength. This work concurs with Deleuze and Guattari in asserting that literature is a site of becoming and of lines of flight: resistant practices against imposed order and (self)closure of the subject. The method here eschews a semiotic approach to literature with "what does the work mean?", instead, the clinical approach taken here asks “what does the text do?” Using this approach, the central literary object in this work is author Roberto Bolano, whose two novels––The Savage Detectives and 2666––serve to illustrate literature’s vast potential as valuable critique and resistance to the social and political ills of the present.