This book, available for the first time in English, offers a thorough introductory reading of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most remarkable and influential writers of the twentieth century. Julio Premat, a specialist in the field of Borges studies, presents the main questions posed by Borges's often paradoxical writing, and leads the novice through the complexity and breadth of Borges's vast literary production.
Originally published in French by an Argentine ex-pat living in Paris, Borges includes the Argentine specificities of Borges’s work—specificities that are often unrecognized or glossed over in Anglophone readings.
This book is a boon for university students of philosophy and literature, teachers and researchers in these fields who are looking to better understand this complex author, and anyone interested in the advanced study of literature. Somewhere between a guidebook and an exhaustive work of advanced research, Borges is the ultimate stepping-stone into the deeper Borgesian world.
Introduction: A Classic of Modernity
Part I: A Plural I, a Single Gloom: Figures
Chapter 1: The Works of the Hero
Inventing Buenos Aires
Founding a Work
Writing in Other Ways
Finding Filiation
Youthful Mistakes
Chapter 2: The Son at Work
An Unexpected Encounter in the Stairway
The 1930s: The Black Box
Writing Don Quixote
A Position on Culture
A Narcissistic Utopia
The Years of Expansion
The Prestige of Melancholy
The Pleasures of Loss
Chapter 3: The Perspicacity of the Blindman
A New Learning Process
A Fertile Old Age
The Gifts of an Author
Being Homer
The Wise Man
A Cyclical Agony
The Immortal Dead Man
Part II: A Pensive Inclination: Materials
Chapter 4: Driven by His Germanic Blood: Biography and the Meaning of Story
Statistics and Destiny
Infamies
The Forms of a Life
Chapter 5: The Universe, Whodunit? Reading and the Detective Story
Meaning, This Elegant Hope
Imminent Revelation
A Performative Incredulity
Chapter 6: The Library: Tradition, Betrayal, Transgression
Narrative Syntax
The Argentine Writer and Tradition
A Universal Periphery
Chapter 7: Forms of Eternity
Bifurcations of Time
Literary History: Innovation and Anachronism
Literary History: Inventing One's Precursors
Social History: Barbarism
Social History: National Heroes
The Inevitable
