Traces of the Thousand and One Nights in Borges
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Dearth and Duality: Borges' Female Fictional Characters
DEARTH AND DUALITY: BORGES' FEMALE FICTIONAL CHARACTERS When studying Borges' fiction, the reader is immediately struck by the dear_th of female characters or love interest. Borges, who has often been questioned about this aspect of his work confided to Gloria Alcorta years ago: "alors si je n 'ecris pas sur ses sujects, c 'est simplememnt par·pudeur ... sans doute ai-je-ete trop ocupe par l'amour dans rna vie privee pour en parler dans roes livres."1 At the age of eighty, when questioned by Coffa, Borges said: "If I have created any character, I don't think so, I am always writing about myself ... It is always the same old Borges, only slightly disguised. "2 Many critics have decried lack of female characters and character development. Alicia Jurado likens Borges to a stage director who uses women as one would furniture or sets, in order to create environment. She says:" son borrosos o casuales o lo minimo indiferenciadas y pasi vas. "3 E.D. Carter calls Borges' women little more than abstractions or symbolic interpretations.4 Picknhayn says that Borges' women "aparecen distorsionadas ... hasta el punto de transformar cada mujer en una cosa amorfa y carente de personalidad. " 5 and Lloyd King feels that the women of Borges' stories "always at best seem instrumental. "6 All of the above can be said of most of his male characters because none of Borges' characters can be classified in the traditional sense. A Vilari or Hladik is no more real than a Beatriz or Ulrica. Juan Otalora is no more real than la Pelirroja and Red Scharlach is no more real than Emma Zunz. -
The Unimagined: Catalogues and the Book of Sand in the Library of Babel
THE UNIMAGINED: CATALOGUES AND THE BOOK OF SAND IN THE LIBRARY OF BABEL w W. L. G. Bloch INTRODUCTION. We adore chaos because we love to produce order. M. C. Escher t’s an ironic joke that Borges would have appreciated: I am a mathematician who, lacking Spanish, perforce reads The Library I of Babel in translation. Furthermore, although I bring several thousand years of theory to bear on the story, none of it is literary theory! Having issued these caveats, it is my purpose to apply mathe- matical analysis to two ideas in the short story. My goal in this task is not to reduce the story in any capacity; rather it is to enrich and edify by glossing the intellectual margins and substructures. I sub- mit that because of his well-known affection for mathematics, ex- ploring the story through the eyes of a mathematician is a dynamic, useful, and necessary addition to the body of Borgesian thought. Variaciones Borges 19 (2005) 24 W. L. G. BLOCH In the first section, Information Theory: Cataloging the Collection, I consider the possible forms a Catalogue for the Library might take. Then, in Real Analysis: The Book of Sand, I apply elegant ideas from the 17th century and counter-intuitive ideas of the 20th century to the “Book of Sand” described in the final footnote of the story. Three variations of the Book, springing from three different interpretations of the phrase “infinitely thin,” are outlined. I request an indulgence from the reader. This introduction is writ- ten in the friendly and confiding first-person singular voice. -
Between Borges and Barthes a Text and Book Conundrum
IMPACT: International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Literature (IMPACT: IJRHAL) ISSN (P): 2347-4564; ISSN (E): 2321-8878 Vol. 6, Issue 7, Jul 2018, 133-138 © Impact Journals BETWEEN BORGES AND BARTHES: A TEXT AND BOOK CONUNDRUM Muzaffar Karim Department of English, University of Kashmir, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, India Received: 05 Jul 2018 Accepted: 11 Jul 2018 Published: 16 Jul 2018 ABSTRACT In his story The Book of Sand, Borges defines the book as ‘infinite’ with no beginning and no end. In almost the same way when Barthes discusses his notion of text, in contrast to work, he defines text as ‘infinite deferment of the signified.’ Critically speaking Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Book Of Sand and the kind of novel offered in the story The Garden of Forking Paths draw a clear resemblance and constantly comment on the Barthesian distinction between a ‘Work’ and a ‘Text’. This paper concerns itself with discussing Borges’ notion of ‘Book’ and proceeds to develop a contrast with the Roland Barthes conception of Work and Text. KEYWORDS: Work, Text, Borges, Barthes, Derrida, Blanchot, Author, Signified A book no longer belongs to a genre; every book pertains to literature alone. Maurice Blanchot 1 Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read. -
Noumerous Sand
Peter Standish Numerous Sand t is part of the natural order of things for sand to get everywhere, whether we wish it or not. Into the literary world of Jorge Luis I Borges, however, it enters in a wholly artificial, intentional man- ner; it is even highlighted and thematised in the titles of at least two of his texts. Moreover, deserts abound in Borges’ stories, and there is some evidence that in general Borges was worried, even obsessed, by such open spaces. Estela Canto, in her book, Borges a contraluz, implies that his interest in open spaces verged on phobia. In her presence, he apparently dismissed the beach as a “terreno baldío donde la gente se pone en paños menores”—a wasteland where people go about in their underwear (50). One cannot know whether Canto is right in her inter- pretation of this antipathy (she speculates that Borges’ statement re- flected the fact that he himself was ill at ease and resented her own en- joyment of the beaches of her native Uruguay), but one can say with confidence that there are plenty of monstruous open spaces in Borges’ fictions and that they are quite frequently sandy. However, few critics have stopped to ponder upon the role of “arena” in Borges, or at- tempted to pin down the meanings associated with sand in the some- what rarified world of his literature.1 My purpose in this paper, then, is to explore some of the sandy areas, and in part my justification—a ba- nal one indeed in the ambit of literary criticism—is the assumption that this most elliptical of writers, this follower of Stevenson’s dictum that the only true art is one of omission, cannot have been making refer- ences to sand in a casual way. -
Ge Fei's Creative Use of Jorge Luis Borges's Narrative Labyrinth
Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. DOI 10.1007/s40647-015-0083-x ORIGINAL PAPER Imitation and Transgression: Ge Fei’s Creative Use of Jorge Luis Borges’s Narrative Labyrinth Qingxin Lin1 Received: 13 November 2014 / Accepted: 11 May 2015 © Fudan University 2015 Abstract This paper attempts to trace the influence of Jorge Luis Borges on Ge Fei. It shows that Ge Fei’s stories share Borges’s narrative form though they do not have the same philosophical premises as Borges’s to support them. What underlies Borges’s narrative complexity is his notion of the inaccessibility of reality or di- vinity and his understanding of the human intellectual history as epistemological metaphors. While Borges’s creation of narrative gap coincides with his intention of demonstrating the impossibility of the pursuit of knowledge and order, Ge Fei borrows this narrative technique from Borges to facilitate the inclusion of multiple motives and subject matters in one single story, which denotes various possible directions in which history, as well as story, may go. Borges prefers the Jungian concept of archetypal human actions and deeds, whereas Ge Fei tends to use the Freudian psychoanalysis to explore the laws governing human behaviors. But there is a perceivable connection between Ge Fei’s rejection of linear history and tradi- tional storyline with Borges’ explication of epistemological uncertainty, hence the former’s tremendous debt to the latter. Both writers have found the conventional narrative mode, which emphasizes the telling of a coherent story having a begin- ning, a middle, and an end, inadequate to convey their respective ideational intents. -
Postmodern Or Post-Auschwitz Borges and the Limits of Representation
Edna Aizenberg Postmodern or Post-Auschwitz Borges and the Limits of Representation he list of “firsts” is well known by now: Borges, father of the New Novel, the nouveau roman, the Boom; Borges, forerunner T of the hypertext, early magical realist, proto-deconstructionist, postmodernist pioneer. The list is well known, but it may omit the most significant encomium: Borges, founder of literature after Auschwitz, a literature that challenges our orders of knowledge through the frac- tured mirror of one of the century’s defining events. Fashions and prejudices ingrained in several critical communities have obscured Borges’s role as a passionate precursor of many later intellec- tuals -from Weisel to Blanchot, from Amery to Lyotard. This omission has hindered Borges research, preventing it from contributing to major theoretical currents and areas of inquiry. My aim is to confront this lack. I want to rub Borges and the Holocaust together in order to unset- tle critical verities, meditate on the limits of representation, foster dia- logue between disciplines -and perhaps make a few sparks fly. A shaper of the contemporary imagination, Borges serves as a touch- stone for concepts of literary reality and unreality, for problems of knowledge and representation, for critical and philosophical debates on totalizing systems and postmodern esthetics, for discussions on cen- ters and peripheries, colonialism and postcolonialism. Investigating the Holocaust in Borges can advance our broadest thinking on these ques- tions, and at the same time strengthen specific disciplines, most par- ticularly Borges scholarship, Holocaust studies, and Latin American literary criticism. It is to these disciplines that I now turn. -
Worlds of Libraries: Metafictional Works by Arlt, Borges, Bermani, and De Santis Cynthia Gabbay University of Haifa
Worlds of Libraries: Metafictional Works by Arlt, Borges, Bermani, and De Santis Cynthia Gabbay University of Haifa La historia suele quemar la historia. Y nos transformamos en la sombra que se apaga 241 con la letra. Las bibliotecas pueden ser una prisión, un refugio, o una hoguera. Emmanuel Taub, “Tesis sobre la escritura” The culture of Spanish America was marked by the white man’s effacement of the indigenous cultures when the colonizers occupied the lands of “the New World.” Occupiers saw the Mayan and Aztec cultures as meaningless and pagan. Led first by Hernán Cortés (1519), they set fire to texts of the Mayas, Aztecs, Zapotecs, and Mixtecs. In 1529, at Tlatelolco, Juan de Zumárraga, who was by then New Spain’s Bishop, ordered whole archives containing folk tales, works of history, science, eco- nomics, agriculture, theology, and astronomy, as well as holy scriptures, to be burned. Polastron describes the holocaust of the indigenous archives: Juan de Zumárraga, Bishop of Mexico, then high inquisitor of Spain outside the walls between 1536 and 1543, proudly burned all the Aztec codices that the conflagration of Cortez had missed—all the tonalamatl, the sacred books that he sent his agents to collect or that where found gathered together in amoxcalli, the halls of archives. […] Thus in 1529, Zumárraga had the library of the “most cultivated capital in Anahuac, and the great depository of the national libraries”1 brought to the market square of Tlatelolco until they formed “a mountain heap,” which the monks approached, brandishing their torches and singing. Thousands of polychrome pages went up in smoke. -
17.Abs. Format
IMPACT: International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Literature (IMPACT: IJRHAL) ISSN (P): 2347-4564; ISSN (E): 2321-8878 Vol. 6, Issue 7, Jul 2018, 133-138 © Impact Journals BETWEEN BORGES AND BARTHES: A TEXT AND BOOK CONUNDRUM Muzaffar Karim Department of English, University of Kashmir, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, India Received: 05 Jul 2018 Accepted: 11 Jul 2018 Published: 16 Jul 2018 ABSTRACT In his story The Book of Sand, Borges defines the book as ‘infinite’ with no beginning and no end. In almost the same way when Barthes discusses his notion of text, in contrast to work, he defines text as ‘infinite deferment of the signified.’ Critically speaking Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Book Of Sand and the kind of novel offered in the story The Garden of Forking Paths draw a clear resemblance and constantly comment on the Barthesian distinction between a ‘Work’ and a ‘Text’. This paper concerns itself with discussing Borges’ notion of ‘Book’ and proceeds to develop a contrast with the Roland Barthes conception of Work and Text. KEYWORDS: Work, Text, Borges, Barthes, Derrida, Blanchot, Author, Signified A book no longer belongs to a genre; every book pertains to literature alone. Maurice Blanchot 1 Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read. -
The Library of Babel" and the Dream of Totality Jonathan Edward Basile, Emory University
Tar for Mortar: "The Library of Babel" and the Dream of Totality Jonathan Edward Basile, Emory University Publisher: Punctum Books Publication Place: California, USA Publication Date: 2018 Edition: First Type of Work: Book | Final Publisher PDF Permanent URL: https://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/s8jqw Final published version: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/tar-for-mortar/ Copyright information: © 2018 by Jonathan Basile This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Accessed October 1, 2021 9:37 PM EDT tar for mortar Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-proft press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afoat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t fnd a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) tar for mortar: “the library of babel” and the dream of totality. Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Basile. Tis work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books en- dorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. -
URBAN COWBOYS: an EXAMINATION of GAÚCHO IDENTITY FORMATION in RIO GRANDE DO SUL, BRAZIL by JAMES D. SAULS THESIS Submitted in P
URBAN COWBOYS: AN EXAMINATION OF GAÚCHO IDENTITY FORMATION IN RIO GRANDE DO SUL, BRAZIL BY JAMES D. SAULS THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Latin American Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Advisers: Lecturer Glen Goodman Associate Professor Dara Goldman ABSTRACT This piece investigates the historical, economic, and social development of South America’s cowboy, the gaúcho. Situated in southern Brazil, it tracks the emergence of a particular rural way of life and the subsequent conservative social movement established to safeguard the identity it created. It illustrates how the elites in Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazilian’s southernmost state Rio Grande do Sul, separated the gaúcho from his historical home on the vast plains of the Campanha and changed him into an idealized hero of the Farroupilha Revolution of 1835, a separatist regional revolution. Applying ethnographic research methods, this project tracks the establishment of gaúcho culture and the ways in which individuals adopt an idealized characterization of it to develop meaningful regional identities in the early years of the twenty-first century. Then, it examines the relationship between four individuals’ formal and informal participation in the traditionalist movement, as well as their attempts to negotiate and (re)define gaúcho identity based on their own experiences and beliefs. The thesis argues that although the traditional way of life of the gaúcho collapsed after the introduction of new technologies in the late nineteenth century, the idealized rural figure continues to be a strong source of pride for urbanites in the southernmost Brazilian state and beyond. -
Jorge Luis Borges and the South
Madeleine Byrne Jorge Luis Borges and the South Madeleine Byrne’s ather than a slow fade into the twilight of old age, the last two articles have appeared Rdecades of Jorge Luis Borges’s life saw the transformation of his in Australia, the UK, literary reputation and personal life (through the first International the US and France. Publishers’ Prize in 1961; then later the Spanish-speaking world’s most prestigious literary award, the Cervantes; the translation of his collected works into English and French and his late marriage to María Kodama). And yet in a way not unlike the knife-fighters seeking their deaths in his imagined Buenos Aires, this success appeared to come at a price. Following the 1976 Argentine coup d’état, Borges characterised the junta as ‘a government of soldiers, of gentlemen, of decent people’.1 After lunching with General Videla, he accepted honours from the regime of Augusto Pinochet. During a speech at the Chilean academy the same year, Borges urged the military to forge a patria fuerte (a strong fatherland) ‘in a barbarous continent’. Despite rejecting these views by 1980, the writer’s reputation among many, especially in Argentina and those on the Left, is yet to recover. To speak of Borges in the 1970s, one Argentine writer recalls, it was necessary to do so in a whisper. Few writers attract such critical extremes as Borges; with readers 217 MADELEINE BYRNE responding to his work in light of their bias as that of a right-wing appeaser, postmodern precursor, reactionary, lover. Yet moral absolutes are hard to divine in his literary universe. -
Jorge Luis Borges: Visions of Culture and Knowledge Professor Dr
(PALAS 420) Jorge Luis Borges: Visions of Culture and Knowledge Professor Dr. Alejandro Manara Program in Argentine and Latin American Studies Universidad de Belgrano Course Syllabus 2013 Course Information M-W 1:00-2.30PM Instruction in: English Contact Information [email protected] Course Description Borges’ vision of the world as a Library of Babel and an Aleph anticipated the information age and the development of the Internet by several decades. However, although Borges can be regarded as the least representative Latin American writer, not all his fictions address universal problems. This course shows how many of his short stories, essays and poems are embedded in and have contributed to the Latin American and Argentine literary traditions. The course also considers Borges’ precursors (Poe, Marcel Schwob and Kafka) and his followers (Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, among others). Finally, it looks at Borges’ presence in visual culture: film, architecture and art. Course Requirements Following UB policy, students need a minimum of 75% of attendance to be in good standing for the final exam. Sliding the ID card is the only way to track record of attendance. Classes missed for national holidays will not be recovered. Students are expected to do close readings, participate in class, and do at least one oral presentation. During the semester, students will write two short position papers. The requirements also include a midterm and a final exam. In addition to this, each student will be expected to make a significant contribution to the classroom dialogue. Grading Policy In-class Participation 10 % Oral Presentation 20 % Short Papers (2) 30 % Midterm Exam 20 % Final Exam 20 % For a better understanding of the comparable table for grading: check the International Student Handbook (see orientation kit packet).