A provocative examination of the artistic interpretation of twelve of Borges’s most famous stories.

The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges contextualizes the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges's work for a new generation of twenty-first-century readers and critics. Most known for his creative fictions that tackle literary questions of authorship as well as more philosophical notions such as multiverse theory, Borges has captivated scholars from a variety of disciplines since his emergence on the international scene. This volume shifts the emphasis to Borges's working life, his writing processes, his collaborations and networks, and the political and cultural background of his production. It also evaluates his impact on a variety of other fields ranging from political science and philosophy to media studies and mathematics.

"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's influence on the fiction, literary theory, and arts of our time."--Publishers website.

Until now Jorge Luis Borges has been considered an asexual author who could not read or write about sex, but in this study historian Ariel de la Fuente reveals for the first time the relationship between Borges’s sexual biography, his erotic readings, and the expression of desire and sex in his literature.

Norah Borges (1901–98) was the sister of the celebrated Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. She first began producing art in Switzerland, where her family was trapped during the First World War, and travelled to Spain before returning to her native Argentina with her new styles of painting. In the 1920s, her work was published on the covers of important cultural magazines, but she is now largely forgotten. In her works, Borges created a world full of almost angelic figures – describing it as a smaller, more perfect world – mostly a serene space dominated by women. This book explores how Borges created that space and developed her own unique style of painting, studying the connections she made with the leading artists and writers of her time.

A compilation of the twenty-five lectures Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature.

From reviews of the first edition: "A compulsively readable account of the life and works of our greatest...writer of fantasy. With a keen appreciation of Borges himself and a pleasant disregard for the critical clichés, Bell-Villada tells us all we really want to know about the modern master-from pronouncing his name to understanding the stories." —New York Daily News "Of the scores of Borges studies by now published in English, Bell-Villada's excellent book stands out as one of the freshest and most generally helpful.... Lay readers and specialists alike will find his book a valuable and highly readable companion to Ficciones and El Aleph." —Choice Since its first publication in 1981, Borges and His Fiction has introduced the life and works of this Argentinian master-writer to an entire generation of students, high school and college teachers, and general readers. Responding to a steady demand for an updated edition, Gene H. Bell-Villada has significantly revised and expanded the book to incorporate new information that has become available since Borges' death in 1986. In particular, he offers a more complete look at Borges and Peronism and Borges' personal experiences of love and mysticism, as well as revised interpretations of some of Borges' stories. As before, the book is divided into three sections that examine Borges' life, his stories in Ficciones and El Aleph, and his place in world literature.

In Rethinking Philosophy with Borges, Zambrano, Paz, and Plato, Hugo Moreno argues that in Ficciones, Claros del bosque, and El mono gramático, Jorge Luis Borges, María Zambrano, and Octavio Paz practice a literary way of philosophizing—a way of seeking and communicating knowledge of reality that takes up analogical procedures. They deploy analogy as an indispensable and irreplaceable heuristic tool and literary device to convey their insight and perplexities on the nature of existence. Borges’ ironic approach involves reading and writing philosophy as fiction. Zambrano’s poetic reason is a mode of writing and thinking based on an imaginative sort of recollection that is ultimately a visionary’s poetizing technique. Paz’s poetic thinking relies on analogy to correlate and harmonize an array of worldviews, ideas, and discourses. In the appendix, Moreno shows that Plato's Republic is a forerunner of this way of philosophizing in literature. Moreno suggests that in the Republic, Plato reconciles philosophy and poetry and creates a rational prose poetry that fuses argumentation and narration, dialectical and analogical reasoning, and abstract concepts and poetic images.

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.

Visually appealing, conceptually startling, and intellectually engaging-these phrases aptly describe the art of Liliana Porter. Florencia Bazzano-Nelson's study focuses on the principal theme in the Argentine-born artist's work since the 1970s: her playful but subversive dismantling of the limits that separate everyday reality from the world of illusion and simulacra. Over the years, Porter's own evolving interest in perception lead the author to explore a series of interconnected and timely issues in her artistic production, such as the representative function of art, the structural links between art and language, and the witty re-signification of the art-historical images and mass-produced kitsch figurines she has so often featured in her art. Strongly founded in critical theory, Bazzano-Nelson's approach considers Porter's art as the site of conceptually exciting dialogues with Jorge Luis Borges, Ren?agritte, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard. Her carefully crafted interdisciplinary analysis not only combines art-historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives but also addresses the artist's work in different media, such as printmaking, conceptual art, photography, and film.