Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Borges Beyond the Visible presents radically new readings of some of Jorge Luis Borges's most celebrated stories. Focusing on the tensions between fiction and intimacy, Max Ubelaker Andrade shows how Borges employed his famous intertextual puzzles to create multilayered texts that privately transformed his personal experiences with blindness, sexuality, and suicide while publicly shaping the contours of his literary project.
In readings of "Tl n, 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" that elevated language and imagination over the visual in fiction while pushing his readers to sense their personal capacity for radical reinvention through literary interpretation. Borges similarly transformed his relationships with sex, sexuality, and family in stories such as "Emma Zunz," "La intrusa," and "El jard n de senderos que se bifurcan." These liberating transformations (and their relationship with the "death" of the reader) are complicated by "La salvaci n por las obras," a story that reimagines Borges's relationship with a suicidal reader and the woman that they were both connected to. The epilogue presents "M sticos del Islam," an unpublished essay draft of Borges, as a key source of insight into an iconoclastic writing practice that combined irreverence and faith to create contradictory spaces of creativity, intimacy, and freedom.
Clear and accessible, 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 new, exciting areas of inquiry for scholars, students, and readers of Borges.
Synopsis
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 "Tl n, 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 jard n de senderos que se bifurcan." Yet these liberating transformations, sometimes offered to the reader as a paradoxical "gift of death," are complicated by "La salvaci n 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 "M sticos 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.
Synopsis
Presents a new approach to Jorge Luis Borges' work, exploring dimensions of his literary project involving theology, blindness, literary imagination, gender, sexuality, and suicide.