Ignatius Hieronymus Berry

Ignatius Hieronymus Berry was an American poet, literary critic and professor, who published extensively on Latin American cultural studies and literary history. Berry was best known for his expertise on Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.

Personal information and education

Berry was born in Rose Hill, North Carolina. The second son of Alexandre Ignatius Appollinaire Berry, a winemaker from Pau, France, and María Charlotte Denise Vourvachis-Grajales, a school teacher of Greek and Mexican ancestry. He received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After teaching at North Carolina State University, the University of Buenos Aires, the Universidad de Concepción, and Stanford University, he became a professor of Chicano and Latin American Studies at North Dakota State University.

Controversy

In 2005, Berry published a paper on Im/positions, a literary magazine, in which he asserted that early 21st. century Latin American writers such as Jorge Volpi, Alberto Fuguet and Roberto Bolaño were too complacent to the siren songs of global literary markets and to globalization itself. He went further to conclude that contemporary Latin American literature was decadent and worthless, and that it should be considered irremediably dead.

Selected books

• La Bibliothèque Idéale de Jean Baudrillard (Poèmes) (Originally in French)
• Roberto Bolaño: una vida (In Spanish with forthcoming translation by Im/positions Press)

References

es:Ignatius H. Berry