Google Narrative and the Contemporary Novel or what to do with la revolución?

Speaker(s): Pola Oloixarac

With all its global-state code-force, Google acts like a super-counter novel to the human novel. It advances, it indexes everything: the statistics of your choices, the likelihood of your futures. Beyond our control, we are the characters filling the representation that gets indexed and registered, for others to see - others who we do not know, but who are probably looking for something real - a kind of real that leads to vigilance and control. In this new political scenario, can literature hack into this narrative? Are La Revolución and literary résistance actually passing?

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Pola Oloixarac’s debut novel Las teorías salvajes was deemed “one of the first classics of the 21 century in Spanish language” by El Mundo, and has been widely translated. She is one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Novelists and has received fellowships at the International Writers Program in Iowa, Yaddo, Saint Nazaire, Dora Maar, and the national grant of the Argentine Endowment of the Arts among others. She has contributed articles on politics and arts to the New York Times, Folha de Sao Paulo and Pagina 12, among other media. Her second novel, Las constelaciones oscuras, is coming out this year. She is a founding editor of the Buenos Aires Review.

Picture by Sebastian Freire