Trajectories of Productive Failure: Alberto Fuguet between World Literature, the Region, and the Nation

Abstract

This chapter considers the authorial trajectory of Americanised Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet across national, regional (Latin American) and international (US) fields of reception. Fuguet, like many writers before him, deployed a series of artistic strategies to become a world author, yet failed in his ambitions. Rather than seeing this as a failure, Nulley-Valdés considers it a form of “trajectory of productive failure,” that is, a way in which authors exchange and reinvest international symbolic capital for national symbolic capital at a surplus value, permitting Fuguet entry into a newly woven Chilean literary tradition he played a role in reforming.