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Ryan Long

Ryan Long headshot in a brown background

Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center

2215C Jiménez Hall
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Research Expertise

Latin America
Literary Studies
Mexico

Ryan Long's primary areas of study are Mexican literature and culture, the writing of Roberto Bolaño, and the life and work of Hannes Meyer. He is interested in the intersections of: literature, visual culture, and politics; anti-normative sexuality, temporality, and close reading; transnational cultural production and politics; and architectural theory and textual analysis. His published books are Queer Exposures: Sexuality and Photography in the Fiction and Poetry of Roberto Bolaño (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Fictions of Totality: The Mexican Novel, 1968, and the National-Popular State (Purdue, 2008). He is currently writing a book titled The Poetics of Place and Displacement: Hannes Meyer and Postrevolutionary Mexico. His other publications include studies of: representations of violence and the border in contemporary Mexican literature; mid-twentieth-century Mexican literature; the Taller de Gráfica Popular; the writing of Juan Villoro; and the writing of Álvaro Mutis. He is currently working on a book chapter about women photographers in twentieth-century Mexico and an article about the fiction of Emiliano Monge. He has published interviews with Carlos Montemayor, Juan Villoro, and Bruno Montané Krebs. He also edits the Mexican prose fiction section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies.

Publications

Queer Exposures, Sexuality and Photography in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry

Emphasizing the processes of exposure associated with photography and sexuality, especially queer sexuality, provides readers and scholars with a versatile method for comprehending Bolaño’s constellation of texts.

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Author/Lead: Ryan Long
Dates:
Queer Exposures, Sexuality and Photography in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) stands out among recent Latin American writers because of his unique combination of critical acclaim, popularity, and literary significance. Queer Exposures analyzes two central but understudied topics in Bolaño’s fiction and poetry: sexuality and photography. Moving beyond a consideration of how his texts represent these topics, Ryan F. Long demonstrates that, when considered in tandem, they form the basis for a new innovative and critical approach. Emphasizing the processes of exposure associated with photography and sexuality, especially queer sexuality, provides readers and scholars with a versatile method for comprehending Bolaño’s constellation of texts. With close readings of a broad range of texts, from poetry written just after his arrival in Spain in the late 1970s to his posthumously published novels, Queer Exposures concludes that an emphasis on sexuality and photography is essential for understanding how Bolaño’s texts function in dialogue with one another to elucidate and critique the interrelations of writing, visual representation, and power.

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