Borges, Language and Reality

Borges, Language and Reality
Author: Alfonso J. García-Osuna
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2018-11-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319959123

This book brings together the work of several scholars to shed light on the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges' complex relationship with language and reality. A critical assumption driving the work is that there is, as Jaime Alazraki has put it, 'a genuine effort to overcome the narrowness that Western tradition has imposed as a master and measure of reality' in Borges' writing. That narrowness is in large measure a consequence of the chronic influence of positivist approaches to reality that rely on empirical evidence for any authentication of what is 'real'. This study shows that, in opposition to such restrictions, Borges saw in fiction, in literature, the most viable means of discussing reality in a pragmatic manner. Moreover, by scrutinising several of the author's works, it establishes signposts for considering the truly complicated relationship that Borges had with reality, one that intimately associates the 'real' with human perception, insight and language.

Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation

Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation
Author: Silvia G. Dapía
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2015-08-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317394836

Making an important contribution to studies in Literature and Philosophy, this book reads Jorge Luis Borges philosophically, particularly in reference to his use of representation and reality. Rather than attempting to subordinate Borges to a set of philosophical constructs, to reduce Borges’ texts to mere exemplifications or illustrations of philosophical theories, the book uses Borges’s short stories to demonstrate how philosophical questions related to representation develop out of literature and actually serve as precursors to the various strains of post-analytic philosophy that later developed in the United States. The volume discusses American post-analytic philosophers Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, Nelson Goodman, and Arthur Danto, as well as a wide-ranging set of philosophical ideas including reflections on Keynes, Hayek, Schopenhauer and many others . Chapters offer detailed readings of Borges’ texts extending from 1939 to 1983, locating where he thematizes issues of representation, and pursuing the logic of Borges’s text toward its philosophical implications without neglecting their literary value. The book argues that Borges’ exploration of the relationship between representation and reality places him unmistakably in the position of a precursor to the post-analytic philosophers. Illuminating the role that language plays in the creation of reality and representation, this volume makes significant contributions not only to Borges scholarship but also post-structuralism, post-analytic studies of language, semiotics, comparative literature, and Latin American literature.

Literary Philosophers

Literary Philosophers
Author: Jorge J. E. Gracia (ed)
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2002
Genre: Literature
ISBN: 9780415929189

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Borges and Me

Borges and Me
Author: Jay Parini
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-08-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0385545835

In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kindof novelistic memoir,” Jay Parini takes us back fifty years, when he fled the United States for Scotland—in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. Borges—visiting his translator in Scotland—is in his seventies, blind and frail. When Borges hears that Parini owns a 1957 Morris Minor, he declares a long-held wish to visit the Highlands, where he hopes to meet a man in Inverness who is interested in Anglo-Saxon riddles. As they travel, stopping at various sites of historical interest, the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of Western literature and ideas, while promising to teach him about love and poetry. As Borges’s idiosyncratic world of labyrinths, mirrors, and doubles shimmers into being, their escapades take a surreal turn. Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It’s also a magical mystery tour of an era, like our own, in which uncertainties abound, and when—as ever—it’s the young and the old who hear voices and dream dreams.

Labyrinths

Labyrinths
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1964
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811200127

Forty short stories and essays have been selected as representative of the Argentine writer's metaphysical narratives.

The Book of Sand

The Book of Sand
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Dutton Books
Total Pages: 136
Release: 1977
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Thirteen new stories by the celebrated writer, including two which he considers his greatest achievements to date, artfully blend elements from many literary geares.

Sammlung

Sammlung
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
Total Pages: 560
Release: 1999
Genre: Argentine literature
ISBN: 9780141183022

Though best known in the English speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction prose. In THE TOTAL LIBRARY, more than 150 of Borges' most brilliant pieces are brought together for the first time in one volume - all in superb new translations. More than a hundred of the pieces have never previously been published in English. THE TOTAL LIBRARY presents Borges at once as a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and as the inventor of a universe that is an indispensible guide to Borges

A Personal Anthology

A Personal Anthology
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2015-05-12
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 080219074X

Handpicked works from the greatest Argentinian writer of the twentieth century. “Without Borges the modern Latin American novel simply would not exist” (Carlos Fuentes, author and diplomat). After almost a half a century of scrupulous devotion to his art, Jorge Luis Borges personally compiled this anthology of his work—short stories, essays, poems, and brief mordant “sketches,” which, in Borges’s hands, take on the dimensions of a genre unique in modern letters. In this anthology, the author has put together those pieces on which he would like his reputation to rest; they are not arranged chronologically, but with an eye to their “sympathies and differences.” A Personal Anthology, therefore, is not merely a collection, but a new composition. “An important work, by far the best yet available to the reader . . . who seeks a representative sampling of the great Argentine writer . . . the standard introduction to Borges in England and the United States.” —Saturday Review

Collected Fictions

Collected Fictions
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 577
Release: 1999-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0140286802

For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in a single volume “An event, and cause for celebration.”—The New York Times A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books. Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Labyrinths

Labyrinths
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2000
Genre: Classical fiction
ISBN: 9780141184845

Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays showcasing one of Latin America's most influential and imaginative writers. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, with an introduction by James E. Irby and a preface by André Maurois. Jorge Luis Borges was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his stories, including the celebrated 'Library of Babel', whose infinite shelves contain every book that could ever exist, 'Funes the Memorious' the tale of a man fated never to forget a single detail of his life, and 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', in which a French poet makes it his life's work to create an identical copy of Don Quixote. In later life, dogged by increasing blindness, Borges used essays and brief tantalising parables to explore the enigma of time, identity and imagination. Playful and disturbing, scholarly and seductive, his is a haunting and utterly distinctive voice. Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A poet, critic and short story writer, he received numerous awards for his work including the 1961 International Publisher's Prize (shared with Samuel Beckett). He has a reasonable claim, along with Kafka and Joyce, to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. If you enjoyed Labyrinths, you might like Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis and Other Stories, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'His is the literature of eternity'Peter Ackroyd, The Times 'One of the towering figures of literature in Spanish'James Woodall, Guardian 'Probably the greatest twentieth-century author never to win the Nobel Prize'Economist