Borges

by De Behar, Lisa Block

• ISBN13: 9780791455562
• ISBN10: 0791455564
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-11-01
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

Borges cites innumerable authors in the pages making up his life's work, and innumerable authors have cited and continue to cite him. More than a figure, then, the quotation is an integral part of the fabric of his writing, a fabric made anew by each reading and each re-citation it undergoes, in the never-ending throes of a work-in-progress. Block de Behar makes of this reading a plea for the very art of communication; a practice that takes community not in the totalized and totalizable soil of pre-established definitions or essences, but on the ineluctable repetitions that constitute language as such, and that guarantee the expansiveness -- through etymological coincidences of meaning, through historical contagions, through translinguistic sharings of particular experiences -- of a certain index of universality.

Author Biography

Lisa Block de Behar is Professor of Semiotics and Theory of Interpretation at the Universidad de la Republica in Montevideo, Uruguay and is a renowned Jorge Luis Borges scholar.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
The Interpretive Fix and the Fixations of Fiction: The Ars Interpretans of Lisa Block de Behar	ix
William Egginton
First Words	1	(4)
Variations on a Letter Avant-la-lettre	5	(10)
Paradoxa Ortodoxa	15	(16)
On ``Ultrarealism'': Borges and Bioy Casares (The Interlacing of the Imagination and Memory on the Thresholds of Other Worlds)	31	(12)
A Complexly Woven Plot: Borges, Bioy Casares, Blanqui (Conjectures and Conjunctions at the Limits of Possible Worlds)	43	(12)
Theoretical Invention in Fiction: Marvels, Miracles, and the Gazes of Miranda	55	(16)
The Ironies of a Blind Seer	71	(22)
Symbols and the Search for Unity	93	(14)
The Paradoxes of Paradoxes	107	(16)
Vox in Deserto: Borges and the Story of Sand	123	(10)
The Mystery of the Name	133	(8)
The Imagination of Knowledge	141	(8)
The Place of the Library	149	(16)
Notes	165	(36)
Index	201