Borges Criticism – General 1987 to Present
- At August 22, 2019
- By Great Quail
- In Borges
- 0
It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Avatars of the Tortoise”
Borges Criticism: General Criticism 1987–Present
This page collects literary criticism written about Borges in the years after his death. All of these works are available in English, and focus on “general criticism” such as surveys, compendiums and correspondences, conference proceedings, traditional literary analysis, etc. For Borges criticism written during his lifetime, refer to General Criticism 1965–1986. Borges biographies occupy their own page, and more specific works of criticism are filed under Comparative Criticism, Religious Criticism, and Scientific 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.
The Poetry and Poetics of Jorge Luis Borges
The Poetry and Poetics of Jorge Luis Borges
By Paul Cheselka.
Peter Lang, 1987.
Paul Cheselka is a professor at DePaul University in Chicago, where he specializes in “Spanish and Spanish-American literature, Hispanic poetry, modernism, avant-garde movements, Borges, and peninsular generations of 1898 and 1927.” I believe this is his only published book, also known by the catchy title of “American University Studies, Series II: Romance Languages and Literature, Vol. 44.”
Description from Peter Lang:
This study traces Borges’ career as a poet from his earliest poetic endeavors before the 1923 publication of Fervor de Buenos Aires through the middle of the 1960’s. Paul Cheselka considers Borges’ better-known poetry collections, such as Fervor de Buenos Aires, Luna de enfrente, and Cuaderno San Martín; and he shows the often-neglected 1930-1960 period to be an important phase in the evolution of Borges’ poetry. The poems are studied chronologically with particular emphasis on the relation of their themes to the poet’s life and ideas. Cheselka’s contribution is that of providing a clearer delineation of Borgesian poetics; the poems themselves are shown to be the evidence and very substance of the poet’s definitions.
The Emperor’s Kites
The Emperor’s Kites: A Morphology of Borges’s Tales
Friedman, Mary Lusky.
Duke University Press, 1987.
Mary Friedman is professor of Spanish at Wake Forest University. In 1981, she was awarded a grant to study Borges’ early pieces of journalism in Buenos Aires. Eventually this research led to a deeper understanding of Borges’ development as a writer, which Friedman frames as an Oedipal conflict between Borges and his father.
The Emperor’s Kites was reviewed by Evelyn Fishburn for Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos. One of the co-authors of A Dictionary of Borges, Fishburn praises Friedman’s work, but maintains some reservations about her thesis:
This illuminating study of Borges’ fiction is based on two premises: the first, that the entire corpus of Borges’ fiction, from the comparatively simple tales of A Universal History of Infamy to his last renderings in The Book of Sand can be seen as variations upon a basic narrative or ur-text and the second that this ur-text is essentially a story of oedipal strife. This contention is linked to the change that occurred at the time of his father’s death, in Borges’ career as a writer. I must confess that the prospect of a study combining a morphological and psychoanalytical approach filled me with misgivings of crude reductionism, but happily these fears have been proved unfounded. Prof. Lusky’s analysis is not only original and ingenious, but offers specific readings of exceptional insight. The basic plot-beneath-the plot is neatly summarized by the author: “a mishap which sets in motion a protagonist, who responds to the calamity by setting out on a journey. In the course of this journey Borges’ hero travels through surroundings that are progressively more impoverished and irreal until at last he arrives at a structure that walls him in. Immured there, he is privy to a marvellous but blighting experience, an experience that blasts his selfhood and annihilates him.” Each component of the paradigm is imaginatively established, with supporting tables of recurring motifs and imagery and with surprisingly little sense of overstrain or manipulation. The initial mishap that spurs the action of the story can be, variously, the outbreak of a fire, the purloining of something valuable, or the death of a character. The impoverishing journey mostly consists of a search whose object can be a person, a mysterious country (Uqbar), some document, and enigmatic truth; on the other hand, it may involve getting rid of a possession, such as the coin in the Zahir or the woman who is the object of love and hate in “The Intruder.” […] The suggestion is that these stories are the manifest renderings of an obsessive, latent conflict between Borges and his father.
[…] The last chapter, entitled “Mourning” attempts to explain the radical change that occurred in the quality of Borges’ writings at around 1939, with the publication of “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” a few months after the death of his father the previous year. The sense of two-dimensional irreality noted above and which pervaded the stories of A Universal History of Infamy gave way to the more complex, metaphysical irreality of his later masterpieces. It does not seem very novel to highlight this new dawn in Borges’ fiction writing: Borges has explained it as the result of having been at death’s door; critics, such as Matamoro and Rodríguez Monegal have attributed it to feelings of liberation from his father’s tutelage. But Lusky goes further in seeing Borges’ relationship with his father as the one obsessive inspiration in his work. She argues that the original paradigm, which had evolved around a basic motif of oedipal strife, was now re-enacted and reworked in every story with unconstrained creative power so that “the mourning process itself may have helped to catalyze Borges’ transformation into a fiction writer of genius.” The presentation of a classical Oedipal situation of filial strife is irrefutable in the way that very general comments tend to be; as Borges said Hume said of Berkeley’s arguments, “no admiten la menor réplica y no producen la menor convicción.” This is in no way to imply that they are valueless and as far as The Emperor’s Kites is concerned one may perhaps fail to be fully persuaded by the main argument proffered, but the general reading model and the close textual analysis of individual stories remain an important contribution to the interpretation of Borges’ work.
[Excerpts from Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Vol. 14, No. 3, Presencia y ausencia de la mujer en las letras hispnáicas (Primavera 1990), pp. 633-635.]
The Meaning of Experience in the Prose of Jorge Luis Borges
The Meaning of Experience in the Prose of Jorge Luis Borges
By Ion T. Ageana.
Peter Lang, 1988.
Born in Romania, Ion T. Agheana (1937-2018) was a professor of Romance Languages at Dartmouth, and later Hope College. His two areas of specialty were Jorge Luis Borges and the Romanian philosopher Emil Ciora. Also known by the even-catchier title of “American University Studies, Series II: Romance Languages and Literature, Vol. 71,” The Meaning of Experience in the Prose of Jorge Luis Borges refutes the common assertion that Borges’ fictions are more about “ideas” than “character.”
This somewhat abstruse description comes straight from Peter Lang:
The absence of metonymical emphasis in Borges’ prose, of the “realism” promoted by nineteenth-century writers, and the vaguely nihilistic tenor of twentieth-century philosophy, have contributed to the opinion that the Borgesian character is, at best, a spectral presence. To negate the individual, however, is to negate the vital experience that gives him identity, and Borges, arguably, does not deny human experience. The Borgesian protagonist is not really incomplete, only projected and perceived incompletely. Lived experience informs Borges’ prose fiction, and is indeed central to his critical readings of the great masters. Even the reader’s own visual experience—particularly chromatic perception—is subtly alerted and drawn into some of Borges’ prose writings.
A Dictionary of Borges
A Dictionary of Borges
By Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes.
Duckworth, 1990. [Download as PDF]
Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes are professors at the University College of London. They specialize in Latin American culture, feminist literature, and the arts. In 1990 they compiled A Dictionary of Borges, featuring entries on the “names of, or allusions to, personal or fictional characters, places, titles, quotations, and philosophical and religious movements” in Borges’ work. The entries are arranged alphabetically and indexed by appearance in his oeuvre. The Dictionary boasts a pair of forewords written by Anthony Burgess and Mario Vargas Llosa.
From Duckworth:
There are more than 1200 entries in all, from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Zarathustra; every relevant subject is treated, from Classical and Icelandic folklore to Chinese etiquette and the heresies of Gnosticism. Textual references are to the English and American versions and also to the Spanish originals. Dr Fishburn and Dr Hughes, both specialists in Borgesian studies, have produced an admirably concise work of reference which makes accessible to the general reader the imaginative world of one of the most challenging writers of the modern age.
A Borges Dictionary is thorough and well-researched, and makes fascinating reading all on its own. One is reminded of Borges’ fondness for paging through encyclopedias, and in some ways Fishburn and Hughes’ project is like a Borges mixed tape—just flip to a random page, and you are sure to discover some delightfully esoteric surprise! Long out of print, fortunately A Dictionary of Borges may be freely downloaded as a PDF from the Borges Center in Pittsburgh.
A Concordance to the Works of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
A Concordance to the Works of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
Rob Isbister & Peter Standish.
Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.
Compiled by Rob Isbister or Stirling University and Peter Standish of Glasgow University, this sprawling concordance to Borges’ complete works is a remarkable achievement, organized alphabetically across seven volumes. It is also prohibitively expensive, clearly designed for the libraries of academic institutions!
Cristina Parodi of the Borges Center offers this summary:
Esta obra, monumental bajo varios aspectos, está destinada a especialistas interesados en cuestiones de estilo y referencias. En la concordancia se han catalogado cuatro volúmenes en prosa (Ficciones, El Aleph, El informe de Brodiey El libro de arena), de los que se registran unas 18.000 palabras en más de 125.000 apariciones; cada palabra (incluidos pronombres, preposiciones, conjunciones y artículos) está citada en su marco textual inmediato, con indicación del volumen, cuento, página y línea en que aparece en la edición de Alianza/Emecé de 1971. Como apéndice, se incluye una lista de frecuencia de palabras, que registra todos los términos con más de una aparición. El enorme esfuerzo de los compiladores ha dado por resultado una obra que tal vez -citando sus propias palabras- sea “the most boring read of the nineties”, pero que, sin duda, “will help researchers on their way to interesting things”.
Translated with some help from Google:
This work—in several aspects monumental—is intended for specialists interested in styles and references. The Concordance catalogs four prose volumes (Ficciones, The Aleph, Dr. Brodie’s Report, and The Book of Sand), of which some 18,000 words are recorded in more than 125,000 appearances; each word (including pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and articles) is cited in its immediate textual frame, with indication of the volume, story, page, and line in which it appears in the Alliance/Emecé edition of 1971. The appendix is a list of “word frequencies,” a record of every term which occurs more than once. The enormous effort of the compilers has resulted in a work that perhaps—quoting their own words—is “the most boring read of the nineties,” but that, without a doubt, “will help researchers on their way to interesting things.”
Borges Revisited
Borges Revisited
By Martin S. Stabb.
Twayne Publishing, 1991.
Martin Stabb is a professor of Romance Languages at the Pennsylvania State University. In 1970 he wrote Jorge Luis Borges, a “student introduction” of Borges that offered a brief biography and notes on Borges’ major works. Borges Revisited is a “fresh assessment of the Argentine master’s position as a major Western literary presence,” an expsnion of the earlier book that encompasses Borges’ entire life.
Bruno Bosteels reviewed Borges Revisited in the University of Pennsylvania’s Hispanic Review:
Both [Stabb’s] earlier and the present book are marked by the advantages and shortcomings inherent in these kinds of introductory volumes. However, this external factor should not keep the reader from asking to what degree a second visit helps him to gain a better understanding of Borges. And from a critic so thoroughly acquainted with his subject, one would have expected a more challenging synthesis.
Though fully aware of the purely “organizational value” of such divisions, Stabb orders Borges’s work into three partially overlapping “developmental phases.” The “early or formative period,” from 1923 to the 1940s, is discussed in “The Making of a Writer,” which presents Borges’s youth and family life as well as his early poetry. This first poetic phase closes with the “almost surrealistic disintegration” and tone of “ennui” reflected in some of the poems of the 1930s, suggesting “a period of transition.” While numerous quotes exemplify thematic and stylistic aspects of Fervor de Buenos Aires, Luna de enfrente, and Cuaderno San Martín, the commentaries are, however, rarely innovative. In the same chapter, Stabb also comments upon the major collections of essays. Borges “was no philosopher” for Stabb, nor can he “be viewed as a systematic literary critic,” but his miscellaneous notes or essayistic proseworks “have had a marked impact upon contemporary literary theory.” Why this is the case, however, is never really discussed; instead, the essays are merely summarized.
The second phase, which runs from the late 1930s to the early 1950s and covers the major prose texts, is studied in “The Canonical Works,” and here especially those stories from Ficciones and El Aleph not yet fully discussed in Stabb’s earlier book are analyzed in greater detail. However, Stabb’s desire to account for all stories seems to make it difficult to do more than merely restating the plot. […] The book’s interest lies mostly in the last three chapters, which transform what seemed to be another predictable introduction to Borges into a valuable guide that could provoke further investigations along similar lines of development. Chapter Three, “A Late Harvest,” studies how, after the creative hiatus of the late 50s and much of the 60s, Borges reemerges in a “remarkable renaissance.” Given that it is one of the author’s main purposes to compare the earlier to the later Borges, the book pays special attention to this third phase, consisting in a “shift away from the erudite literary gamesmanship and noonday brilliance of the canonical texts toward the more somber allegories and autumnal hues of Borges’s later period.”
In the reception of Borges—a field where “it appears that virtually everything that could be said has indeed been said”—a gap has yet to be filled. Borges’s “paradigmatic” role for the Latin American “boom,” for postmodernist fiction, and for (post)structuralist theory has not yet received the comprehensive overview it deserves. The Chapters “The Critical Trajectory” and “Borges in Perspective” offer valuable references concerning, for example, the polemics against Borges, the links with “new criticism” (a motley category that unduly includes structuralism, semiotics, and poststructuralism), and Borges’s position with respect to postmodernism and metafiction. In spite of initial promises, however, the author insists that to pursue similar lines of thought “obviously lies beyond the limits of this study.”
Students who are searching for a compact introduction will find in this book a convenient guide, written in a very pleasant, musing style (unfortunately marred by about two dozen typos). It is not the least merit of this book that the success-story of the Argentine among the “Borgephiles” has become, if not exactly interpreted, at least demonstrated and problematized. Future readers need not live “under the spell of the French critical circle—and its branch offices in places like Buenos Aires or New Haven” to appreciate the welcome opportunity which Stabb creates for further, more systematic interpretations of the Wirkungsgeschichte of Borges’s literature in twentieth-century culture.
[Excerpts from Hispanic Review, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 594-596.]
Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges
Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges
By Daniel Balderston.
Duke University Press, 1993.
A preeminent Borges scholar and literary critic, Daniel Balderston is currently the Mellon Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh. Balderston is also the chair of the Borges Center and the editor of Variaciones Borges.
From Duke University Press:
In Jorge Luis Borges’s finely wrought, fantastic stories, so filigreed with strange allusions, critics have consistently found little to relate to the external world, to history—in short, to reality. Out of Context corrects this shortsighted view and reveals the very real basis of the Argentine master’s purported “irreality.” By providing the historical context for some of the writer’s best-loved and least understood works, this study also gives us a new sense of Borges’s place within the context of contemporary literature.
Through a detailed examination of seven stories, Daniel Balderston shows how Borges’s historical and political references, so often misread as part of a literary game, actually open up a much more complex reality than the one made explicit to the reader. Working in tension with the fantastic aspects of Borges’s work, these precise references to realities outside the text illuminate relations between literature and history as well as the author’s particular understanding of both. In Borges’s perspective as it is revealed here, history emerges as an “other” only partially recoverable in narrative form. From what can be recovered, Balderston is able to clarify Borges’s position on historical episodes and trends such as colonialism, the Peronist movement, “Western culture,” militarism, and the Spanish invasion of the Americas.
Informed by a wide reading of history, a sympathetic use of critical theory, and a deep understanding of Borges’s work, this iconoclastic study provides a radical new approach to one of the most celebrated and – until now – hermetic authors of our time.
The contents are as follows:
1. Introduction: History, Politics, and Literature in Borges
2. Menard and His Contemporaries: The Arms and Letters Debate
3. The “Labyrinth of Trenches without Any Plan” in “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”
4. Prague, March 1939: Recovering the Historicity of “El milagro secreto”
5. Cryptogram and Scripture: Losing Count In “La Escritura Del Dios”
6. Going Native: Beyond Civilization and Savagery in “Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva”
7. On the Threshold of Otherness: British India in “El hombre en el umbral”
8. Behind Closed Doors: The Guayaquil Meeting and the Silences of History
9. Conclusion
A Spanish version of Balderston’s book is available as Fuera de contexto?, Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997.
Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge
Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge
By Beatriz Sarlo.
Verso, 1993. [Web version]
Born in Buenos Aires in 1942, Beatriz Sarlo is one of Argentina’s most prominent literary, cultural, and social critics, a renown public intellectual and founder of several magazines. Widely recognized as one of the best books about Borges, A Writer on the Edge was developed from a series of lectures Sarlo delivered at Cambridge University.
From Library Journal:
Drawing both from textual analysis and Borges’s Buenos Aires literary circles, Sarlo challenges—and deftly refutes—the conventionally held proposition that “Borges’s reputation in the world has cleansed him of nationality.” She then successfully demonstrates that Borges lived and wrote in a richly diverse, cosmopolitan milieu with dual Argentine-European roots. Even in his most fantastic, problematic fiction (best exemplified in the three stories “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Library of Babel,” and “The Lottery in Babylon”), Borges is shown to address real social and philosophical questions of the day.
The contents are as follows:
Introduction
Chapter 1: A Landscape for Borges
Chapter 2: Borges and Argentine Literature
Chapter 3: Tradition and Conflicts
Chapter 4: Tropes of Fantastic Literature
Chapter 5: Imaginary Constructions
Chapter 6: A Question of Order
Chapter 7: The Adventure of Martín Fierro: The Avant-Garde & Criollismo
Chapter 8: Utopia & the Avant-Garde
Appendix: Borges and the Little Magazines in the 1920s.
Bibliography.
Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge is out of print, but Sarlo has allowed the Borges Center to host an abbreviated online version.
Jorge Luis Borges
(Bloom’s Major Short Story Writers)
Jorge Luis Borges
Edited by Harold Bloom.
Chelsea House, 2002.
One of the United States’ genuine literary lions, Harold Bloom (1930-2019) was an influential scholar and critic, a celebrated Shakespearian, and a famously staunch defender of the “Western canon.” A professor at Yale University for over sixty years, Bloom published dozens of books, from explorations of the Kabbalah to The Anxiety of Influence, a key work of twentieth-century literary criticism. Indeed, Bloom’s name became something of a brand, as evidenced by books such as this one, part of Bloom’s “Major Short Story Writers” series.
Designed as a student resource, Jorge Luis Borges examines five of Borges’ most well-known stories: “Death and the Compass,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Immortal,” “The Aleph,” and “The South.” Each chapter includes a synopsis, a list of characters, and excerpts from various critical essays.
Jorge Luis Borges
(Bloom’s BioCritiques)
Jorge Luis Borges
Edited by Harold Bloom.
Chelsea House, 2004.
Part of Harold Bloom’s “BioCritiques” series, this is a collection of essays and papers on Borges with an introduction by Harold Bloom.
From Chelsea House:
In addition to a lengthy biography, each book includes an extensive critical analysis of the writer’s work, as well as critical views by important literary critics throughout history. These volumes are the perfect introduction to critical study of the important authors currently read and discussed in high schools, colleges, and graduate schools. Struggling with poor eyesight and eventual blindness for most of his life, Borges went on to become of one of the greatest short-story writers of 20th century. His fiction, often metaphysical and fantastic has been said to influence the great magical realists.
A Companion to Jorge Luis Borges
A Companion to Jorge Luis Borges
By Steven Boldy.
Tamesis Books, 2009.
Steven Boldy is a professor of Latin American Literature at Cambridge University. Description from Tamesis Books:
This Companion has been designed for keen readers of Borges whether they approach him in English or Spanish, within or outside a university context. It takes his stories and essays of the forties and fifties, especially Ficciones and El Aleph, to be his most significant works, and organizes its material in consequence. About two thirds of the book analyzes the stories of this period text by text. The early sections map Borges’s intellectual trajectory up to the fifties in some detail, and up to his death more briefly. They aim to provide an account of the context which will allow the reader maximum access to the meaning and significance of his work and present a biographical narrative developed against the Argentine literary world in which Borges was a key player, the Argentine intellectual tradition in its historical context, and the Argentine and world politics to which his works respond in more or less obvious ways.
The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges
The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges
Edited by Edwin Williamson.
Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Edwin Williamson is the King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies at the University of Oxford, and the author of Borges: A Life. Description from Cambridge University Press:
Jorge Luis Borges was one of the great writers of the twentieth century and the most influential author in the Spanish language of modern times. He had a seminal influence on Latin American literature and a lasting impact on literary fiction in many other languages. However, Borges has been accessible in English only through a number of anthologies drawn mainly from his work of the 1940s and 1950s. The primary aim of this Companion is to provide a more comprehensive account of Borges’s oeuvre and the evolution of his writing. It offers critical assessments by leading scholars of the poetry of his youth and the later poetry and fiction, as well as of the ‘canonical’ volumes of the middle years. Other chapters focus on key themes and interests, and on his influence in literary theory and translation studies.
Borges Beyond the Visible
Borges Beyond the Visible
By Max Ubelaker Andrade
Penn State University Press, 2019.
The Garden of Forking paths will have a full review of this book available in the autumn of 2022. According to Penn State University Press:
Borges Beyond the Visible presents radically new readings of some of Jorge Luis Borges’s most celebrated stories. Max Ubelaker Andrade shows how Borges employed intertextual puzzles to transform his personal experiences with blindness, sexuality, and suicide while allowing readers to sense the transformative power of their own literary imaginations. In readings of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “El Aleph,” and “El Zahir,” Ubelaker Andrade argues that Borges, considering his own impending blindness, borrowed from Islam’s prohibitions on visual representation to create a “literary theology”—a religion focused on the contradictions of literary existence and the unstable complexities of a visual world perceived without everyday sight. Embracing these contradictions allowed Borges to transform his relationships with sex, sexuality, and family in multilayered stories such as “Emma Zunz,” “La intrusa,” and “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.” Yet these liberating transformations, sometimes offered to the reader as a paradoxical “gift of death,” are complicated by “La salvación por las obras,” a story built around Borges’s relationship with a suicidal reader and the woman to whom they were both connected. The epilogue presents “Místicos del Islam,” an unpublished essay draft by Borges, as a key source of insight into an irreverent, iconoclastic writing practice based on a profound faith in fiction. Compelling and clear, Borges Beyond the Visible is a revelatory examination of the work of one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. It opens up exciting areas of inquiry for scholars, students, and readers of Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges in Context
Jorge Luis Borges in Context
Edited by Robin Fiddian.
Cambridge University Press, 2020.
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, Gabriel García Márquez, and Jorge Luis Borges. According to Cambridge University Press:
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is Argentina’s most celebrated author. This volume brings together for the first time the numerous contexts in which he lived and worked; from the history of the Borges family and that of modern Argentina, through two world wars, to events including the Cuban Revolution, military dictatorship, and the Falklands War. Borges’ distinctive responses to the Western tradition, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Kafka, and the European avant garde are explored, along with his appraisals of Sarmiento, gauchesque literature and other strands of the Argentine cultural tradition. Borges’ polemical stance on Catholic integralism in early twentieth-century Argentina is accounted for, whilst chapters on Buddhism, Judaism and landmarks of Persian literature illustrate Borges’s engagement with the East. Finally, his legacy is visible in the literatures of the Americas, in European countries such as Italy and Portugal, and in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, representing the Global South.
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.
Comparative Criticism — Borges criticism with a strong political, cultural, or linguistic component, including postcolonial criticism, genre studies, and author comparisons.
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: 5 August 2022
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com