DOCSLIB.ORG

The Aleph and Other Stories

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text

Load more

The aleph and other stories Continue Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges' most fully realized human characters. With supernatural understanding, he takes us into the minds of unrerecious Nazis, imprisoned Mayan priests, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting revenge on her father's killer, and a man waiting for his killer in a guest house in Buenos Aires. This volume also contains obsessively brief vignettes about literary imagination and personal identity, collected in Maker, which Borges wrote as a lack of vision and public fame began to undermine his sense of self. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classical literature in the English-speaking world. With over 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics is a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and in various genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts reinforced by the introduction and notes of outstanding scholars and contemporary authors, as well as modern translations of award-winning translators. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jorge Borges was educated as an English governess in 1899 and later studied in Europe. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1921, where he helped create several avant-garde literary periodicals. In 1955, after the fall of Juan Peron, whom he strongly opposed, he was appointed Director of the Argentine National Library. Together with Samuel Beckett, he was awarded the $10,000 International Publishers Award in 1961, helping him to establish himself as one of the most outstanding writers in the world. Borges regularly taught and lectured throughout the United States and Europe. His ideas had a profound impact on writers all over the Western world and on recent developments in literary and critical theory. A prolific author of essays, short stories and plays, Borges's problems are perhaps most clear in his stories. He regarded people's desire to understand the incomprehensible world as fiction; hence his fiction is metaphysical and based on what he called the aesthetics of intelligence. Some critics call it the mysticism of intelligence. Dreamers (1960) is considered a masterpiece. The central image in Borges's work is the labyrinth, the mental and poetic structure, which he considered the universe in miniature, which is built by people and therefore believe that they control, but which, nevertheless, traps them. Despite Borges' belief that people could not understand the chaotic world, he constantly tried to do so in his letter. Much of his work focuses on people's efforts to find the center of the labyrinth, symbolic to achieve an understanding of their place in the mysterious universe. In later works such as The Golden Of the Tigers, Borges wrote about his lifelong blindness and how it affected his perception of the world and himself as a Borges died in 1986. Jorge Luis Borges (Author) Andrew Hurley (Introduction) and 1 more Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges' most fully realized human characters. With supernatural understanding, he takes us into the minds of unrerecious Nazis, imprisoned Mayan priests, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting revenge on her father's killer, and a man waiting for his killer in a guest house in Buenos Aires. This volume also contains obsessively brief vignettes about literary imagination and personal identity, collected in Maker, which Borges wrote as a lack of vision and public fame began to undermine his sense of self. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classical literature in the English-speaking world. With over 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics is a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and in various genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts reinforced by the introduction and notes of outstanding scholars and contemporary authors, as well as modern translations of award-winning translators. Price $17.00 $15.64 Publisher Penguin Group Publish Date July 27, 2004 Pages 224 Dimensions 6.7 x 7.7 x 0.59 in 0.39 lb English Type Paperback EAN / UPC 9780142437889 Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and educated in Europe. One of the most famous writers of our time, he published numerous collections of poems, essays and short stories, before his death in June 1986. In 1961, Borges shared the International Publishers Award with Samuel Beckett. The Ingram Merrill Foundation awarded him an annual literary award in 1966 for his outstanding contribution to literature. In 1971, Columbia University awarded him the first of many degrees of the doctor of literature, honoris causa, that he had to receive from the English-speaking world. In 1971, he received the fifth biennial Jerusalem Prize, and in 1973 he received the Alfonso Reyes Award, one of Mexico's most prestigious cultural awards. In 1980, he shared the Cervantes Prize (the highest literary award in the Spanish world) with Gerardo Diego. Borges was director of the Argentine National Library from 1955 to 1973. In tribute to Borgeus, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote: His world of clear, pure and at the same time unusual ideas... expressed in words of great directness and restraint. He was an excellent storyteller. One reads most of Borges's tales with a hypnotic interest, usually reserved for reading detective fiction... Andrew Hurley is the translator of numerous works of literature, criticism, history and memoirs. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Puerto Rico. He had more than anyone repaired the language of fiction and, thus paved the way for a remarkable generation of Spanish-American Spanish-American Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Jose Donoso and Mario Vargas Llosa admitted their duty to him. --J.M. Coetzee, New York Review of BooksOn rose fiction from a flat land where most of our novels and short stories still occur. --John Updike World Lit in VIEW LIST (106 BOOKS) El Aleph First editionAuthorjorge Luis BorgesCountryACountryArgentinaLanguageSpanishPublisherEditorial Losada, Buenos AiresPublication date1949 The Aleph and Other Stories (Spanish: El aleph, 1949) is a book of short stories by Argentine writer Luis Borges. The title work, Aleph, describes a point in space that contains all other spaces at the same time. The work also represents the idea of infinite time. Borges writes in the original afterword, dated May 3, 1949 (Buenos Aires), that most of the stories belong to the fantasy genre, mentioning such themes as identity and immortality. Borges added four new stories to the collection in the 1952 edition, for which he presented a brief postscript to the afterword. Contents The Immortal (El inmortal) The Dead Man (El Muerto) The Theologians (Los teólogos) Story of the Warrior and the Captive (Historia del guerrero y la cautiva) A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874) (Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874)) Emma Zunz The House of Asterion (La casa de Asterión) The Other Death (La otra muerte) Deutsches Requiem (Deutsches réquiem) Averroes's Search (La busca de Averroes) The Zahir (El zahir) The Writing of the God (La escritura del Dios) Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth [1] (Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto) The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths [1] (Una leyenda arábiga (Historia de los dos reyes y los dos laberintos, como nota de Burton) ) The Wait [1] (La espera) The Man on the Threshold [1] (El hombre en el umbral) The Aleph (El Aleph) See also Novels portal Bibliography of Jorge Luis Borges Notes ^ a b c d Added to the 1952 edition of The Aleph This storybook is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.vte extracted from (short_story_collection) oldid'981741769 © 1996-2014, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates All that can drive a person crazy if that person can't manage to put it out of his mind map of Hungary! Obsession is the unifying theme of virtually all of these stories, which is entirely appropriate because I'm starting to be a trifle obsessed with myself. This is perhaps the most central place in zahir.I have collected fiction (with copious translator notes), but I'm splitting my review of what's in its components listed in the order of publication: Collected Fiction - all reviews. It is the fourth, pu All that can drive a person crazy if this man manage to put it out of your mind -- even... Map of Hungary! Obsession is the unifying theme of virtually all of these stories, which is entirely appropriate because I'm starting to be a trifle obsessed with myself. This is perhaps the most central place in zahir.I have collected fiction (with copious translator notes), but I'm splitting my review of what's in its components listed in the order of publication: Collected Fiction - all reviews. This is the fourth, published in 1949. Now the familiar Borges trails are also abundant here: time, reality and dreams, immortality, infinity, mirrors and opposites, labyrinths, recursion and circularity, memory. At this stage of the work, although Borja collected fiction, I feel a deep connection. There is still a beguiling, mysterious layer, but it is not impenetrable by any means, although I know very well that I am nowhere near as erudite as Borges, so although I know many of the great literary names it falls to, I am not necessarily intimately familiar with their works. Immortal 6 What is the price of immortality? And what a discovery premise: the story is rarely a dealer's book, found by a princess, in a copy of Ilyad! The very story of a mysterious, obsessive quest to find the secret city of the Immortals.The journey includes Roman soldiers; Escape Loneliness; Fear of others Unusual architecture Find a way through a maze of caves, stairs, doors and several rooms; sinister troglodytes, references to the Odyssey, and many reflections on life, death, mortality and the nature of time.
Recommended publications
  • Waiting for Redemption in the House of Asterion: a Stylistic Analysis

    Waiting for Redemption in the House of Asterion: a Stylistic Analysis

    Open Journal of Modern Linguistics 2012. Vol.2, No.2, 51-56 Published Online June 2012 in SciRes (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ojml) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojml.2012.22007 Waiting for Redemption in The House of Asterion: A Stylistic Analysis Martin Tilney Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia Email: [email protected] Received February 20th, 2012; revised March 7th, 2012; accepted March 15th, 2012 The House of Asterion is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that retells the classical myth of the Cretan Minotaur from an alternate perspective. The House of Asterion features the Minotaur, aka Asterion, who waits for “redemption” in his labyrinth. Many literary critics have suggested that the Borgesian labyrinth is a metaphor for human existence and the universe itself. Others have correctly interpreted Asterion’s ironic death at the hands of Theseus as his eagerly awaited redemption. Borges’ subversion of the reader’s expectations becomes the departure point for a systemic functional stylistic analysis of the story in one of its English translations, revealing how deeper-level meanings in the text are construed through its lexico- grammatical structure. A systemic functional stylistic reading suggests that on a higher level of reality, Asterion’s redemption is not only the freedom that death affords, but also a transformation that transcends his fictional universe. Asterion’s twofold redemption is brought about not only by the archetypal hero Theseus but also by the reader, who through the process of reading enables Asterion’s emancipation from the labyrinth. Keywords: The House of Asterion; Borges; Minotaur; Labyrinth; Systemic Functional; Stylistic Introduction the latter half of the twentieth century (for a detailed discussion of the difference between the terms “postmodernity” and Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is best “postmodernism” see Hassan, 2001).

  • Introduction

    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19339-9 - The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges Edited by Edwin Williamson Excerpt More information EDWIN WILLIAMSON Introduction Jorge Luis Borges was one of the great writers of the twentieth century and the most infl uential author in the Spanish language of modern times. He had a seminal infl uence on Latin American literature and a lasting impact on literary fi ction in many other languages. Although a poet and essayist, he was best known for his fi cciones – short stories or prose texts whose brevity condensed mental play into reverberating images and situations. Rejecting the constraints of psychological or social realism, Borges encour- aged writers to accept fi ction as a self-conscious artifact, susceptible to fan- tasy and to overtly intellectual, and even philosophical, concerns. Borges challenged the supremacy of the novel in the hierarchy of modern literature: he favored modes of storytelling which had long preceded the novel – fable, epic, parable, and folktale – as well as subgenres such as thrillers, science fi ction, and detective stories. He also blurred generic categories by bringing book reviews, scholarly essays, and footnotes within the bounds of fi ction. Even metaphysics and theology, he famously observed, could be regarded as branches of the literature of fantasy. Borges’s interest in metaphysics and literary ideas fostered the impres- sion that his work belonged in a kind of literary utopia, divorced from per- sonal experience or historical reality. This impression was underscored by the blindness which affl icted him a few years before he became famous, and which lent him the aura of an otherworldly, sightless bard.
  • August 18, 2012 Meeting 1:45-2:45 Joshua Corin, Whose Thriller

    August 18, 2012 Meeting 1:45-2:45 Joshua Corin, Whose Thriller

    Aug 15 David Fulmer’s Fiction Shop starts Aug 18 Speakers: Janell Walden Agyeman & Joshua Corin Aug 31 Creative Writing Competition deadline August/2012 August 18, 2012 meeting 1:45-2:45 Joshua Corin, whose thriller series protagonist is a woman, will speak about writing from the perspective of the opposite sex 3:15-4:14 Janell Agyeman, agent for Marie Brown Assoc., will speak about writ- ing from the perspective of a different race or culture The August meeting will be at the regular location: Georgia Perimeter College, NC-1100 auditorium ...founded in 1914 We are a social and educational club where local writers meet to discuss the craft and business of writing. We also sponsor contests for our members and host expert speakers from the worlds of writing, publishing, and entertainment. Inside this Edition Officers In Context 3 President: American Literately Merit Award 5 Clay Ramsey August Speakers 6 Officer Emeritus: Class for Fledgling Writers 7 George Weinstein Support Your Library 8 Membership VP: Atlanta Story Development Private Workshop 9 Ginny Bailey Authors’ Reception 10 Programs VP: Books for Heroes 11 Anjali Enjeti-Sydow Texas Review Press Breakthrough Poetry Prize 11 Soniah Kamal Prep Workshop for Manuscripts Critiques 12 Secretary: Loretta Hannon Presents 13 Bill Black Spring Contest Winners 14 Treasurer: Atlanta Writers Conference 15 Kimberly Ciamarra Book Your Success 16 Creative Writing Competition 17 Operations VP: Workshop Photos 18 Valerie Connors Seeking Manuscripts 19 Contests, Awards, Writing Contest 20 Scholarships VP: Moonlight & Magnolias 21 Nedra Roberts Fall AWC Contest Guidelines 23 Marketing/PR VP: Looking Ahead 26 Tara Lynne Groth Critique Groups 27 Social Director: Membership Information 28 Cindy Wiedenbeck Membership Form 29 Volunteers: Historian/By- Laws: Adrian Drost It's time again to call on our members for support, and ask for volunteers to help out with some of the many exciting programs heading our way in the coming months.
  • Foucault's Heterotopia in the Fiction of James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov

    Foucault's Heterotopia in the Fiction of James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov

    Real Places and Impossible Spaces: Foucault’s Heterotopia in the Fiction of James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and W.G. Sebald Kelvin Knight Thesis submitted for the qualification of Doctor of Philosophy University of East Anglia School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing February 2014 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. Abstract This thesis looks to restore Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to its literary origins, and to examine its changing status as a literary motif through the course of twentieth-century fiction. Initially described as an impossible space, representable only in language, the term has found a wider audience in its definition as a kind of real place that exists outside of all other space. Examples of these semi- mythical sites include the prison, the theatre, the garden, the library, the museum, the brothel, the ship, and the mirror. Here, however, I argue that the heterotopia was never intended as a tool for the study of real urban places, but rather pertains to fictional representations of these sites, which allow authors to open up unthinkable configurations of space. Specifically, I focus on three writers whose work contains numerous examples of these places, and who shared the circumstance of spending the majority of their lives in exile: James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and W.G.
  • Borges and I It's Borges, the Other One, That Things Happen To. I Walk Through Buenos Aires and I Pause

    Borges and I It's Borges, the Other One, That Things Happen To. I Walk Through Buenos Aires and I Pause

    Borges And I about at the foot of a statue by his friends' It's Borges, the other one, that things happen impatient knives, discovers among the faces to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause— and the blades the face of Marcus Junius mechanically now, perhaps—to gaze at the arch Brutus, his ward, perhaps his very son—and so of an entryway and its inner door; news of Caesar stops defending himself, and cries out Et Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on tu, Brute? Shakespeare and Quevedo record a list of academics or in some biographical that pathetic cry. dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis symmetries. Nineteen centuries later, in the Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but southern part of the province of Buenos Aires, a in a vain sort of way that turns them into the gaucho is set upon by other gauchos, and as he accoutrements of an actor. It would be an falls he recognizes a godson of his, and says to exaggeration to say that our relationship is him in gentle remonstrance and slow surprise hostile—I live, I allow myself to live, so that (these words must be heard, not read): Pero, Borges can spin out his literature, and that ¡che! Heches, but he does not know that he has literature is my justification. I willingly admit died so that a scene can be played out again.

  • Almost Seven Key Symbols to Joyfully Lose Oneself in the Labyrinths of Borges*1

    IBERO-AMERICANA PRAGENSIA – AÑO XLIV – 2010 – PP. 79–90 ALMOST SEVEN KEY SYMBOLS TO JOYFULLY LOSE ONESELF IN THE LABYRINTHS OF BORGES*1 by ANDRÉS LEMA-HINCAPIÉ (University of Colorado Denver) 1. Introductory Remarks As with all literature and art in general, the work of Jorge Luis Borges confronts us with what we inevitably were and are and can and cannot become. In his stories, chockfull of erudite references, philosophical thoughts, memorable words, some- what chaste passions, we are lost and found: We are lost, because these stories aim to disorient the reader, to play with him, to beat him, to mock him. We are found, because when we manage to embrace and go beyond the uncertainty of the initial disorientation we feel, with absolute certainty and even joy, the existential truth of that famous proverb of Horace: mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur – when you change the names, this story is about you. Borges either writes us or writes about us. I offer you the partial meaning of seven Borges’s symbols. They could be the keys that, unlike the threads of Ariadne, do not allow us to escape the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur. They are keys for happily embracing what Borges suggests: Life is lived in uncertainty; and nevertheless, despite the uncertainty and even be- cause of that uncertainty, it is worth living in the utmost intensity. Here there is no use for the definitive answers of science, of religions, of family, of political parties, of race, of State laws, of customs, of labor regulations or of social classes.

  • Fishburn and Hughes

    A DICTIONARY OF BORGES (Revised Edition) Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes Forewords by Mario Vargas Llosa & Anthony Burgess Duckworth First published in 1990 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. The Old Piano Factory 43 Gloucester Crescent, London NW1 7DY © 1990 by Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 0 7156 2154 8 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Fishburn, Evelyn A dictionary of Borges. 1. Fiction in Spanish. Argentinian writers. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986. Critical studies I. Title II. Hughes, Psiche 863 ISBN 0-7156-2154-8 Photoset in North Wales by Derek Doyle & Associates, Mold, Clwyd. Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Press Ltd, Melksham. ii Contents Maps Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa Foreword by Anthony Burgess Introduction Abbreviations DICTIONARY Biographical summary iii For F.J.F. & P.H. iv Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa This is a book that would have been to Borges's taste. Although he used to pride himself on never having read anything that was written about his life or his work, I am sure he would have read it from beginning to end. This is because it is a book of imaginative erudition, or erudite fantasy, an unusual combination which he used with greater originality than anyone else, so that the genre, though of the greatest antiquity, seems now almost to have been invented by him. Like the strange sect of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' which wished secretly to interpolate a fictitious universe into the real one, Borges too, throughout his life as a writer, sought to distil beings, titles and events which his fantasy had forged into the history and literature of reality.
  • Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges

    Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges

    FICCIONES Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Andrew Hurley ALLEN LANE THE PENGUIN PRESS Published by the Penguin Group Contents A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INIQUITY (1935) Preface to the First Edition Preface to the 1954 Edition The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro The Widow Ching—Pirate Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette --- Kôtsukéno Suké Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv Man on Pink Corner Etcetera Index of Sources FICTIONS (1944) THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS (1941) Foreword Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote The Circular Ruins The Lottery in Babylon A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain The Library of Babel The Garden of Forking Paths ARTIFICES (1944) Foreword Funes, His Memory The Shape of the Sword The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero Death and the Compass The Secret Miracle Three Versions of Judas The End The Cult of the Phoenix The South THE ALEPH (1949) The Immortal The Dead Man The Theologians Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874) Emma Zunz The House of Asterion The Other Death Deutsches Requiem Averroës' Search Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths The Wait The Man on the Threshold The Aleph Afterword THE MAKER (1960) Foreword: For Leopoldo Lugones The Maker Dreamtigers A Dialog About a Dialog Toenails Covered Mirrors Argumentum Ornithologicum The Captive The Mountebank Delia Elena San Marco A Dialog Between Dead Men The Plot A Problem The Yellow Rose The Witness Martín Fierro Mutations Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote Paradiso, XXXI, 108 Parable of the Palace Everything and Nothing Ragnarök Inferno, 1, 3 Borges and I MUSEUM On Exactitude in Science In Memoriam, J.F.K.
  • Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges

    Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges

    FICCIONES Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Andrew Hurley ALLEN LANE THE PENGUIN PRESS Published by the Penguin Group Contents A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INIQUITY (1935) Preface to the First Edition Preface to the 1954 Edition The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro The Widow Ching—Pirate Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette --- Kôtsukéno Suké Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv Man on Pink Corner Etcetera Index of Sources FICTIONS (1944) THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS (1941) Foreword Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote The Circular Ruins The Lottery in Babylon A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain The Library of Babel The Garden of Forking Paths ARTIFICES (1944) Foreword Funes, His Memory The Shape of the Sword The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero Death and the Compass The Secret Miracle Three Versions of Judas The End The Cult of the Phoenix The South THE ALEPH (1949) The Immortal The Dead Man The Theologians Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874) Emma Zunz The House of Asterion The Other Death Deutsches Requiem Averroës' Search Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths The Wait The Man on the Threshold The Aleph Afterword THE MAKER (1960) Foreword: For Leopoldo Lugones The Maker Dreamtigers A Dialog About a Dialog Toenails Covered Mirrors Argumentum Ornithologicum The Captive The Mountebank Delia Elena San Marco A Dialog Between Dead Men The Plot A Problem The Yellow Rose The Witness Martín Fierro Mutations Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote Paradiso, XXXI, 108 Parable of the Palace Everything and Nothing Ragnarök Inferno, 1, 3 Borges and I MUSEUM On Exactitude in Science In Memoriam, J.F.K.
  • An Analysis of the Fantastic by Sarah Haselhorst

    An Analysis of the Fantastic by Sarah Haselhorst

    Haselhorst !1 Sarah Haselhorst An Analysis of the Fantastic in “La migala”, “Lejana” and “Funes el memorioso” The fantastic genre has existed since antiquity in the classic myths and legends that were part of the Mesopotamian, Roman and Greek cultures. In the modern age, almost everyone is familiar with fantastic stories that capture interest while entertaining the reader with their supernatural elements. Over time, fantastic literature has developed with the influence of writers like Borges, Arreola and Cortázar who have advanced the genre with their unique writing style. However, although the genre has distinct characteristics it is most known for its ambiguity, and for this reason every reader has to use the fantastic elements to form their own conclusions about the plot. “Lejana”, “La migala” and “Funes el memorioso” are three fantastic stories by different authors that each exemplify the genre and its classic characteristics. There are many theories concerning the definition of a fantastic story and a great number of literary scholars have written studies about the genre. For the purpose of this investigation, the fantastic, according to Cynthia Duncan, is a break in everyday reality with an extraordinary event that produces a transformation in the world of the character. The event does not have a rational explanation and this element of uncertainty is extremely important in identifying the fantastic. Fantastic stories are also situated against reality, which make the fantastic event or element seem even more unreal and out of place. Additionally, the fantastic genre has certain characteristics that contribute to the plot while capturing the interest of the reader.
  • A Dictionary of Borges

    A Dictionary of Borges

    A DICTIONARY OF BORGES Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes Forewords by Mario Vargas Llosa & Anthony Burgess Duckworth i First published in 1990 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. The Old Piano Factory 43 Gloucester Crescent, London NW1 7DY © 1990 by Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 0 7156 2154 8 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Fishburn, Evelyn A dictionary of Borges. 1. Fiction in Spanish. Argentinian writers. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986. Critical studies I. Title II. Hughes, Psiche 863 ISBN 0-7156-2154-8 Photoset in North Wales by Derek Doyle & Associates, Mold, Clwyd. Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Press Ltd, Melksham. ii Contents Maps Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa Foreword by Anthony Burgess Introduction Abbreviations DICTIONARY Biographical summary iii For F.J.F. & P.H. iv Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa This is a book that would have been to Borges's taste. Although he used to pride himself on never having read anything that was written about his life or his work, I am sure he would have read it from beginning to end. This is because it is a book of imaginative erudition, or erudite fantasy, an unusual combination which he used with greater originality than anyone else, so that the genre, though of the greatest antiquity, seems now almost to have been invented by him. Like the strange sect of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' which wished secretly to interpolate a fictitious universe into the real one, Borges too, throughout his life as a writer, sought to distil beings, titles and events which his fantasy had forged into the history and literature of reality.
  • Translation and the Reception and Influence Of

    Translation and the Reception and Influence Of

    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ETD - Electronic Theses & Dissertations TRANSLATION AND THE RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE OF LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES By James Remington Krause Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Spanish and Portuguese December, 2010 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Earl E. Fitz Professor William Luis Professor Emanuelle Oliveira Professor Marshall C. Eakin To Aimee, Daniel, Rebekah, and Baby Krause ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS With the benefit of hindsight, it is all too easy to gloss over the challenges and to highlight the triumphs; therefore, I recognize that the process of writing this dissertation—from inception to completion—has been a constant ebb and flow of successes and failures. Many people have given me unwavering support and I wish to thank them. I express gratitude to my dear companion, confidant, and wife, Aimee. She continues to lift me with her loving and caring concern. Although my children may not fully appreciate the importance of this accomplishment, they do know I spent hours, days, weeks, and months away from them and I think they are glad to have me back. My parents, Tom and Yvonne Krause, and my in-laws, Tom and Anita Sanders, cheered me on over the years, serving as a constant source of encouragement and support. I came to Vanderbilt with aspirations to study under Earl Fitz and with some luck it worked out. He has helped me navigate these murky waters with persistence, patience, and kindness.