Mathematics in Literature
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
The Crimson Hexagon. Books Borges Never Wrote
Allen Ruch The Crimson Hexagon Books Borges Never Wrote “The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverish- ing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few min- utes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commen- tary… More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.” (Jorge Luis Borges). he fiction of Borges is filled with references to encyclopedias that do not exist, reviews of imaginary books by fictional au- T thors, and citations from monographs that have as much real existence as does the Necronomicon or the Books of Bokonon. As an intellectual exercise of pure whimsical uselessness, I have cata- logued here all these “imaginary” books that I could find in the stories of the “real” Argentine. I am sure that Borges himself would fail to see much of a difference… Note: In order to flesh out some of the details, I have elaborated a bit - although much of the detail on these books is really from Borges. I have added some dates, some information on contents, and a few general descriptions of the book’s binding and cover; I would be more than happy to accept other submissions and ideas on how to flesh this out. Do you have an idea I could use? The books are arranged alphabetically by author. Variaciones Borges 1/1996 122 Allen Ruch A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön (1824-1914) The 40 volumes of this work are rare to the point of being semi- mythical. -
Time, Infinity, Recursion, and Liminality in the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges
Kevin Wilson Of Stones and Tigers; Time, Infinity, Recursion, and Liminality in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and Pu Songling (1640-1715) (draft) The need to meet stones with tigers speaks to a subtlety, and to an experience, unique to literary and conceptual analysis. Perhaps the meeting appears as much natural, even familiar, as it does curious or unexpected, and the same might be said of meeting Pu Songling (1640-1715) with Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), a dialogue that reveals itself as much in these authors’ shared artistic and ideational concerns as in historical incident, most notably Borges’ interest in and attested admiration for Pu’s work. To speak of stones and tigers in these authors’ works is to trace interwoven contrapuntal (i.e., fugal) themes central to their composition, in particular the mutually constitutive themes of time, infinity, dreaming, recursion, literature, and liminality. To engage with these themes, let alone analyze them, presupposes, incredibly, a certain arcane facility in navigating the conceptual folds of infinity, in conceiving a space that appears, impossibly, at once both inconceivable and also quintessentially conceptual. Given, then, the difficulties at hand, let the following notes, this solitary episode in tracing the endlessly perplexing contrapuntal forms that life and life-like substances embody, double as a practical exercise in developing and strengthening dynamic “methodologies of the infinite.” The combination, broadly conceived, of stones and tigers figures prominently in -
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. -
In “Death and the Compass” Borges Presciently Anticipates De
SYMMETRY OF DEATH w Adrian Gargett n “Death and the Compass” Borges presciently anticipates de- velopments in contemporary physics and scientific thought, I constructing a literary environment that systemically gives the lie t o the dream of rational determinism, suggesting instead some- thing like a “primordial disorder” out of which the shifting, provi- sional orders of culture and science emerge. In constructing a subtle and complex argument via the parallel in- teractions of a Deleuzo-guattarian mechanism, this project artfully attempts to weave the principal discursive strands into an animated investigative framework. The first strand is a close analysis of sections from “Death and the Compass”. The second is the articulation of the critical concepts from the Deleuzo-guattarian scheme. The third is the embedding of the issues of chance and causality within the work of Borges. J (NORTH) The first murder occurred in the Hotel du Nord – that tall prism which dominates the estuary whose waters are the colour of the de- sert. To that tower (which quite glaringly unifies the hateful white- ness of a hospital, the numbered divisibility of a jail and the general Variaciones Borges 13 (2002) 80 ADRIAN GARGETT appearance of a bordello) there came on the third day of December the delegate from Podolsk to the Third Talmudic Congress, Doctor Marcel Yarmolinsky, a grey-bearded man with grey eyes. (Labyrinths 106) Deleuze and Guattari cast literature as an exemplary mode to demonstrate systems of machinic functioning; how litera- ture/books/writing operates in terms of such functioning – in terms of a “rhizomatic” analysis as presented in “A Thousand Plateaus”.1 Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic conceptual vehicle maps a schizoanalytic application to Borges disseminating literary texts. -
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. -
1 Jorge Luis Borges the GOSPEL ACCORDING to MARK
1 Jorge Luis Borges THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK (1970) Translated by Norrnan Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), an outstanding modern writer of Latin America, was born in Buenos Aires into a family prominent in Argentine history. Borges grew up bilingual, learning English from his English grandmother and receiving his early education from an English tutor. Caught in Europe by the outbreak of World War II, Borges lived in Switzerland and later Spain, where he joined the Ultraists, a group of experimental poets who renounced realism. On returning to Argentina, he edited a poetry magazine printed in the form of a poster and affixed to city walls. For his opposition to the regime of Colonel Juan Peron, Borges was forced to resign his post as a librarian and was mockingly offered a job as a chicken inspector. In 1955, after Peron was deposed, Borges became director of the national library and Professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Since childhood a sufferer from poor eyesight, Borges eventually went blind. His eye problems may have encouraged him to work mainly in short, highly crafed forms: stories, essays, fables, and lyric poems full of elaborate music. His short stories, in Ficciones (1944), El hacedor (1960); translated as Dreamtigers, (1964), and Labyrinths (1962), have been admired worldwide. These events took place at La Colorada ranch, in the southern part of the township of Junin, during the last days of March 1928. The protagonist was a medical student named Baltasar Espinosa. We may describe him, for now, as one of the common run of young men from Buenos Aires, with nothing more noteworthy about him than an almost unlimited kindness and a capacity for public speaking that had earned him several prizes at the English school0 in Ramos Mejia. -
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. -
The-Circular-Ruins-Borges-Jorge
THE CIRCULAR RUINS miseroprospero.com/the-circular-ruins 31 March 2017 FRIDAY FICTION [3] A short story from Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges NO ONE saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud, but within a few days no one was unaware that the silent man came from the South and that his home was one of the infinite villages upstream, on the violent mountainside, where the Zend tongue is not contaminated with Greek and where leprosy is infrequent. The truth is that the obscure man kissed the mud, came up the bank without pushing aside (probably without feeling) the brambles which dilacerated his flesh, and dragged himself, nauseous and bloodstained, to the circular enclosure crowned by a stone tiger or horse, which once was the colour of fire and now was that of ashes. The circle was a temple, long ago devoured by fire, which the malarial jungle had profaned and whose god no longer received the homage of men. The stranger stretched out beneath the pedestal. He was awakened by the sun high above. He evidenced without astonishment that his wounds had closed; he shut his pale eyes and slept, not out of bodily weakness but of determination of will. He knew that this temple was the place required by his invincible purpose; he knew that, downstream, the incessant trees had not managed to choke the ruins of another propitious temple, whose gods were also burned and dead; he knew that his immediate obligation was to sleep. Towards midnight he was awakened by the disconsolate cry of a bird. -
Blue Gum 2 Complete
Blue Gum, No. 2, 2015, ISSN 2014-21-53, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians, Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona A Glimpse at Paul Auster and Jorge L. Borges through the Tinted Glass of Quantum Theory Myriam M. Mercader Varela Copyright©2015 Myriam M. Mercader Varela. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. Abstract . The works of Jorge Luis Borges and Paul Auster seem to follow the rules of Quantum Theory. The present article studies a number of perspectives and coincidences in their oeuvre, especially a quality we have named “inherent ubiquity” which highlights the importance and of authorship and identity and the appearance of blue stones to mark the doors leading to new dimensions on the works of both authors. Keywords: Jorge L. Borges, Paul Auster, Authorship and Identity, Quantum Theory, Inherent Ubiquity, Blue Stones. Quantum Theory has ruled the scientific milieu for decades now, but it is not only for science that Quantum Theory makes sense. Literary critics have surrendered to its logic as a unique way to interpret literature because the world we live and write in is one and the same; it forms part of a whole. Although this article does not aim to analyze Quantum Theory, we would like to make a short summary of its basis in order to shape the arena we are stepping into. In 1982 a famous experiment undertaken by Alain Aspect proved that a very large percentage of the polarization angles of photons emitted by a laser beam was identical, which meant that particles necessarily communicate their position so that each photon’s orientation can parallel that of the one that serves as its pair. -
Ficciones Free
FREE FICCIONES PDF Jorge Luis Borges | 143 pages | 01 Oct 1997 | Random House USA Inc | 9780679422990 | English | New York, United States Ficciones - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre He returned to Buenos Aires inwhere he Ficciones to found several avant-garde literary periodicals. Inafter Ficciones fall of Juan Peron, whom he vigorously opposed, he was appointed director of the Argentine National Ficciones. Borges regularly taught and lectured throughout the United States and Europe. His ideas have been a Ficciones influence on writers throughout the Western world and on the most recent developments in literary and critical theory. A prolific writer of essays, short stories, and plays, Borges's concerns are perhaps clearest in his stories. He regarded people's endeavors to understand an incomprehensible world as fiction; hence, Ficciones fiction is metaphysical and based on what he called an esthetics of the intellect. Some critics have called him a mystic of the intellect. Dreamtigers is considered a masterpiece. A Ficciones image in Borges's work is the labyrinth, a mental and poetic construct, that he considered a universe in miniature, which human beings build and therefore believe they control but which nevertheless traps them. In spite of Ficciones belief that people cannot understand Ficciones chaotic world, he continually attempted to do so in his writing. Much of his work deals with people's efforts to find the center of the labyrinth, symbolic of achieving understanding of their place in a mysterious Ficciones. In such later works as The Gold of the Tigers, Borges wrote of his lifelong descent into blindness and Ficciones it affected his perceptions of the world and himself Ficciones a writer.