Borges Criticism – Comparative Criticism
- At August 21, 2019
- By Great Quail
- In Borges
- 0
There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”
Borges Criticism: Comparative Criticism
This page collects English-language “comparative criticism” about Borges and his writing. These studies generally involve politics, culture, and linguistics; and may include postcolonial studies, critical gender theory, Marxist theory, and so on. Also included are works that compare Borges with other writers, or locate Borges’ work within a broader literary context, such as genre fiction or Latin American Literature. Works of general criticism such as surveys, conference notes, and indexes may be found under General Criticism. The Borges Criticism main page features a “Quick Reference Card” with more details.
Most of the books profiled in this section are accompanied by a brief description, a summary of contents, and the official publisher’s blurb. Original commentary is included only for those books I’ve read, although I’ve included a few reviews excerpted from other sources. If any visitor would like to contribute informed commentary for any of these works, please contact the Garden! The books are listed in chronological order of publication. Clicking the image of a book takes you directly to Amazon.com.
Borges y el cine
Borges In/And/On Film
Borges In/And/On Film
By Edgardo Cozarinsky.
Translation by Ronald Christ.
1. Borges y cine; Sur, 1974.
2. Lumen Books, 1988.
Edgardo Cozarinsky is an Argentine novelist, filmmaker, and film critic who was acquainted with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares in the 1960s. In 1974, he published Borges y el cine. A popular book, it was translated into Italian in 1978 and into French the following year. In 1980 it was reprinted in Spanish with the title Cozarinsky had originally preferred, Borges en/y/sobre cinema, which was translated into English as Borges In/And/On Film in 1988. Containing all of Borges’ own film reviews, Borges In/And/On Film also features two major essays by Edgardo Cozarinsky, a Borges-related filmography, and Cozarinsky’s reviews of all cinematic Borges adaptations from from Diás de odio (1954) to Oraingoz Izen Gabe (1986). The Garden of Forking Paths has a full description and review of Borges In/And/On Film available on the “Borges Reviews” section.
Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts
Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts
Edited by Edna Aizenberg.
University of Missouri Press, 1989.
An emeritus professor at Marymount Manhattan College for over fifty years, Edna Aizenberg (1945-2018) was widely recognized a pioneer of Jewish studies in Latin American literature. Borges and His Successors is the second of Aizenberg’s three books that focus on Borges.
From the University of Missouri Press:
In the first book devoted to the impact made by Borges on the contemporary aesthetic imagination, Aizenberg brings together specially commissioned essays from international scholars in a variety of disciplines to provide a wide-ranging assessment of Borges’ influence on the fiction, literary theory, and arts of our time.
The contents are as follows:
Edna Aizenberg, “Introduction”
I. Redefining National Literatures
- Ana María Barrenechea, “On the Diverse (South American) Intonation of Some (Universal) Metaphors
- Marta Morello-Frosch, “Borges and Contemporary Argentine Writers: Continuity and Change”
- Robert Ross, “It Cannot NotBe There: Borges and Australia’s Peter Carey”
- Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, “Borges In Germany: A Difficult and Contradictory Fascination”
- Françoise Collin, “The Third Tiger; or, From Blanchot to Borges”
II. A New Critical Idiom
- Jaime Alazraki, “Borges’s Modernism and the New Critical Idiom”
- Gerry O’Sullivan, “The Library Is on Fire: Intertextuality in Borges and Foucault”
- Suzanne Jill Levine, “Borges and Emir: The Writer and His Reader”
- Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Borges and Derrida: Apothecaries”
- Herman Rapaport, “Borges, De Man, and the Deconstruction of Reading”
- Christine de Lailhacar, “The Mirror and the Encyclopedia: Borgesian Codes in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose”
III. In Dialogue with Other Writers
- Jerry Varsava, “The Last Fictions: Calvino’s Borgesian Odysseys”
- Geoffrey Green, “Postmodern Precursor: The Borgesian Image in Innovative American Fiction”
- Malva F. Filer, “Salvador Elizondo and Severo Sarduy: Two Borgesian Writers”
IV. The Visual Arts
- Richard Peña, “Borges and the New Latin American Cinema”
- Jules Kirschenbaum, “Dream of a Golem”
V. Hebraism and Poetic Influence
- Edna Aizenberg, “Borges and the Hebraism of Contemporary Literary Theory”
- Edna Aizenberg, “Introduction to Two Lectures by Borges”
- Jorge Luis Borges, “The Book of Job”
- Jorge Luis Borges, “Baruch Spinoza”
About the Contributors
Index
Garden Visitor John Canup writes: “Interesting not merely for the essays, but also for the two Borges lectures, ‘The Book of Job’ and ‘Baruch Spinoza.’ The frontispiece photo shows Borges, with cane, seated in his apartment, beneath a painting by his sister and above the Borgesian cat (pure white, and thus perhaps deaf? a blind poet with a deaf cat)—doubtless the one that chewed to pulp the sleeve of Paul Theroux’s wool jacket in The Old Patagonian Express, Chapter 20, ‘The Buenos Aires Subterranean.’”
The Contemporary Praxis of the Fantastic: Borges and Cortázar
The Contemporary Praxis of the Fantastic: Borges and Cortázar
By Julio Rodríguez-Luis
Garland Science/Routledge 1991.
A Cuban writer and translator “living in exile” in the United States, Julio Rodríguez-Luis specializes in Caribbean and Latin American literature. This book was published as Volume 143 in Garland’s “Reference Library of the Humanities.”
From Book News:
This study views Borges’ and Cortázar’s stories strictly from the point of view of a theory of the fantastic, with the intention of determining whether some of the stories are in fact fantastic narratives and, if so, to what extent. The book includes a brief review of the critical analysis of the fantastic, taking into account its Latin American manifestations.
The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story
The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story
By John T. Irwin.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
A former Navy officer, John Irwin is a poet and literary critic who served as the editor of the Georgia Review in the mid-1970s. After relocating to the Johns Hopkins University, he published a book about William Faulkner. The Mystery to a Solution is Irwin’s third book, and was singled out for prestigious awards in comparative criticism from both Phi Beta Kappa and the MLA.
From the Johns Hopkins Press:
In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly examines the deeper significance of the analytical detective genre which Poe created and the meaning of Borges’ efforts to ‘double’ the genre’s origins one hundred years later. Combining history, literary history, and practical and speculative criticism, Irwin pursues the issues underlying the detective story into areas as various as the history of mathematics, classical mythology, the double-mirror structure of self-consciousness, the anthropology of Evans and Frazer, the structure of chess, the mind-body problem, the etymology of the word labyrinth , and dozens of other topics. Irwin mirrors the aesthetic impact of the genre by creating in his study the dynamics of a detective story—the uncovering of mysteries, the accumulation of evidence, the tracing of clues, and the final solution that ties it all together.
A Garden visitor contributes the following comment:
Irwin’s award winning book is a stimulating application of now traditional “new” literary criticism/analysis and more recent and trendy (read: quasi-post-modern) devices. The result is a frequently absorbing study of the labyrinthine minds of Poe and Borges, as seen principally through their related six detective pieces. Unfortunately the sutures as well as the strivings-for-effect from Irwin’s foundational lectures stand too proud, making for greater appeal to academics than to even highly motivated general readers. Irwin’s work would find and deserve more cover-to-cover readers, rather than citation researchers, if a second edition were edited for repetitiveness and prolixity.
Borges and the European Avant-Garde
Borges and the European Avant-Garde
By Linda S. Maier
Peter Lang, 1996.
A Spanish language professor at the University of Alabama, Linda Maier specializes in poetry and Latin American literature, with a particular focus on love, sexuality, and the voices of Hispanic women. Borges and the European Avant-Garde is her first full-length book.
From Peter Lang:
This study examines Borges’ association with the European avant-garde during the late 1910s and early 1920s. It explores the Argentine author’s literary origins under the tutelage of the avant-garde, his earliest publications in Spanish journals, and his decisive role in the Ultraist movement, whose ideas shaped his early career and channeled his subsequent literary development. Maier’s analysis and interpretation of these early texts document Borges’ career as an avant-garde theorist and poet. This book explains the pertinence of Borges’ literary apprenticeship to his later works and establishes the basic unity of his writing.
“Maier assembles for the first time many of Borges’ earliest texts, poems and manifestoes published in Spain between 1919 and 1926. Her book sheds needed light on Borges’ participation in European avant-garde literary movements, and lucidly points out Ultraist tendencies in his mature work.” —Mary L. Friedman, Wake Forest University.
Borges and the Politics of Form
Borges and the Politics of Form
By José Eduardo González.
Garland, 1998.
José Eduardo González is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Nebraska, where he specializes in “Contemporary and Recent Latin American Narrative.” Borges and the Politics of Form is his first full-length book.
From Garland:
Jorge Luis Borges—one of the most important Latin American writers—has also attained considerable international stature, and his work is commonly cited in a wide array of scholarship on contemporary fiction. Partly as a consequence of Borges’ international identity, and partly because of a long-standing view in Borges criticism that his writing is principally concerned with abstract ideas, critics have been reluctant to address the question of politics in his writing. Filling this critical gap, González begins by rejecting the proposition that Borges withdraws from the “real,” and provides a detailed analysis of the various political issues that Borges takes up in his essays and short stories. The author places particular emphasis on the turbulent questions that shaped Argentine social history during the period of Borges’ output.
Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine-Jewish
Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine-Jewish Writing
By Edna Aizenberg.
Brandeis University Press, 2002.
An emeritus professor at Marymount Manhattan College for over fifty years, Edna Aizenberg (1945-2018) was widely recognized a pioneer of Jewish studies in Latin American literature. Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires is the final of Aizenberg’s three books that focus on Borges.
Description from Brandeis University Press:
On July 18, 1994, the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), which housed major Argentine Jewish organizations and served as a storehouse of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Argentine Jewish documents and literature, was bombed by terrorists. Although over 80 people were killed and the bomb leveled a city block in downtown Buenos Aires, the perpetrators were never found.
Taking the bombing as her starting point, Edna Aizenberg crafts an unusual and powerful study of two canonical Argentine writers, Jorge Luis Borges and Alberto Gerchunoff. Examining in particular the literary and cultural reverberations in other authors of Gerchunoff’s 1910 story collection, The Jewish Gauchos and Borges’ Judaically inspired work, Aizenberg delves into the primary issues of Argentine and Latin American Jewish cultural production: Holocaust writing, resistance to dictatorship, pluralism and identity, and the position of the writer-scholar as a direct and vital participant in the transformation of culture and society. Situating Latin American Jewish literature within the multiple contexts of the Holocaust, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, Aizenberg argues that a literature celebrating pastiche, hybridity, and carnivalization is more democratic than literature that does not. She makes a brave case for the power of the pen in a contemporary world dominated by the power of the sword.
Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist: Old English and Old Norse in His Life and Work
Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist: Old English and Old Norse in His Life and Work
By M.J. Toswell.
Palgrave Pivot, 2014.
M.J. Toswell is a Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. The second revision of an earlier work, this book is part of Palgrave’s “New Middle Ages” series, which focuses on “pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analysis.”
From Palgrave:
The Argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges was many things during his life, but what has gone largely unnoticed is that he was a medievalist, and his interest in Germanic medievalism was pervasive throughout his work. This study will consider the medieval elements in Borges creative work and shed new light on his poetry.
The contents are as follows:
1. Introduction
2. The Germanic Medievalism of Borges’ Life
3. Borges the Poet
4. Borges the Scholar and Write
5. Borges the Fabulist
6. Borges’ Medievalism
Bibliography
Index
Bandit Narratives in Latin America
Bandit Narratives in Latin America
By Juan Pablo Dabove.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.
I have recently acquired this book, which has an entire chapter devoted to Borges. Commentary is forthcoming. Until then, the University of Pittsburgh Press offers this description:
Bandits seem ubiquitous in Latin American culture. Even contemporary actors of violence are framed by narratives that harken back to old images of the rural bandit, either to legitimize or delegitimize violence, or to intervene in larger conflicts within or between nation-states. However, the bandit escapes a straightforward definition, since the same label can apply to the leader of thousands of soldiers (as in the case of Villa) or to the humble highwayman eking out a meager living by waylaying travelers at machete point. Dabove presents the reader not with a definition of the bandit, but with a series of case studies showing how the bandit trope was used in fictional and non-fictional narratives by writers and political leaders, from the Mexican Revolution to the present. By examining cases from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, from Pancho Villa’s autobiography to Hugo Chávez’s appropriation of his “outlaw” grandfather, Dabove reveals how bandits function as a symbol to expose the dilemmas or aspirations of cultural and political practices, including literature as a social practice and as an ethical experience.
Postcolonial Borges: Argument and Artistry
Postcolonial Borges: Argument and Artistry
By Robin Fiddian.
Oxford University Press, 2017.
Robin Fiddian is Emeritus Fellow at Wadham College, University of Oxford. Specializing in Latin American literature and cinema, he has written extensively on Fernando del Paso and Gabriel García Márquez.
From Oxford University Press:
Postcolonial Borges is the first systematic account of geo-political and postcolonial themes in a range of writings by Borges, from the poetry and essays of the 1920s, through the prose and poetry of the middle years (the 40s, 50s, and 60s), to the stories of El informe de Brodie and the poems of La cifra and other later collections. Robin Fiddian analyses the development of a postcolonial sensibility in works such as ‘Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires’, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, and ‘Brodie’s Report’. He examines Borges’s treatment of national and regional identity, and of East-West relations, in several essays and poems, contained, for example, in Other Inquisitions and Seven Nights. The theoretical concepts of ‘coloniality’ and ‘Occidentalism’ shed new light on several works by Borges, who acquires a sharper political profile than previously acknowledged. Fiddian pays special attention to Oriental subjects in Borges’s works of the 70s and 80s, where their treatment is bound up with a critique of Occidental values and assumptions. Classified by some commentators over the years as a precursor of post-colonialism, Borges in fact emerges as a prototype of the postcolonial intellectual exemplified by James Joyce, Aime Cesaire (for example), and Edward Said. From a regional perspective, his repertoire of geopolitical and historical concerns resonates with those of Leopoldo Zea, Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Galeano, and Joaquin Torres García, who illustrate different strands and kinds of Latin American post-colonialism(s) of the twentieth century. At the same time, manifest differences in respect of political and artistic temperament mark Borges out as a postcolonial intellectual and creative writer who is sui generis.
The contents are as follows:
Introduction: ‘Borges, Latin America, and Postcolonial Discourse’
1. Setting the Political and Cultural Agenda: Selected Writings of the 1920s and 1930s from Inquisitions to Discussion
2. Giving Voice(s) to Argentina: From ‘The Language of the Argentines’ to ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’
3. ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’: Reflections on/of Coloniality
4. Self, Family, Nation: Writing Postcolonial Argentina in ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ and Other Texts
5. Consolidating the Postcolonial Agenda: Culture and Politics in Selected Writings of the 1950s and 1960s
6. Europe In the Dock: An Intertextual Reading of ‘Brodie’s Report’
7. Borges the Post-Orientalist: Selected Writings of the 1970s and 1980s
Conclusion: ‘Borges, Politics, and the Postcolonial’
Borges’ Classics: Global Encounters with the Graeco-Roman Past
Borges’ Classics: Global Encounters with the Graeco-Roman Past
By Laura Jansen.
Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Laura Jansen lectures in Latin Language and Literature at the University of Bristol.
From Cambridge University Press:
In Borges’ Classics, Laura Jansen reads the oeuvre of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges as a radically globalized model for reimagining our relationship with the classical past. This major study reveals how Borges constructs a new ‘physics of reading’ the classics, which privileges a paradoxical vision of the canon as universal yet centreless, and eschews fixed ideas about the cultural history of the West. Borges’ unique approach transforms classical antiquity into a simultaneously familiar and remote world, whose legacy is both urgent and unstable. In the process, Borges repositions the classical tradition at the intersection of the traditional Western canon and modernist literature of the peripheral West. Jansen’s study traces Borges’ encounters with the classics through appeal to themes central to Borges’ thought, such as history and fiction, memory and forgetfulness, the data of the senses, and the vectors that connect cultures and countries.
Borges Criticism
Main Page — Return to the Borges Criticism main page and index.
Biography — Borges biography and memoir.
General Criticism 1 — General literary criticism and commentary written during Borges’ life, 1965–1986.
General Criticism 2 — General literary criticism and commentary written from 1987 to the present.
Religious & Esoteric Criticism — Borges criticism from a religious, metaphysical, or philosophical perspective.
Scientific Criticism — Borges criticism within the disciplines of science, mathematics, and technology.
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 1 December 2019
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com