Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) was a Chilean poet and educator. Her poetry earned her the Nobel Prize for literature in 1945.Gabriela Mistral was born Lucila Godoy Alcaya on April 6, 1889, at Vicu&ntild...
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Gabriela Mistral, literary pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, was the first Spanish American author to receive the Nobel Prize in literature; as such, she will always be seen as a representative figu...
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Biography EssayThe Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary world literature. Continuing the tradition of fantastic literature established by Edgar Allan...
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The Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was one of Latin America's most original and influential prose writers and poets. His short stories revealed him as one of the great stylists of the ...
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Although Ireneo Funes, a Uruguayan teenager, was paralyzed and confined to his chair, he "knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in h...
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The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary world literature. Continuing the tradition of fantastic literature established by Edgar Allan Poe in the nin...
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Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina's best-known writer, was born on 24 August 1899 in a traditional old house in central Buenos Aires (not far from today's financial district) and grew up in the neighborhoo...
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Critical Essay by Robert Scholes
Borges needs neither praise nor explanation from me or anyone else. My discussion of him, then, must be neither of these, though it may partake of both. It is a perso...
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Critical Essay by Robert Martin Adams
Borges appears before us with the modest but cheerful demeanor of a stage-magician performing small acts of legerdemain with rapid confidence. Linguistically his...
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Critical Essay by Robert Magliola
[The main concern of this article will be] a structuralist treatment of Dr. Brodie's Report. Structuralist analysis can do either of two things: it can expose...
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Critical Essay by Carter Wheelock
Borges's affinity for the "cult of courage" (a phrase he took from the poet Evaristo Carriego) stretches across four decades of fiction-writing ...
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Critical Essay by John Sturrock
Borges enjoys metaphysics for what it offers him as a writer of fiction. He appreciates speculative styles of philosophy for the very reasons that most practising phil...
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Critical Essay by Anthony Kerrigan
Borges, we all know by now, is too good, and too "wrong" in his politics, ever to receive a Nobel Prize awarded in accord with Swedish Realpolitik...
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Critical Essay by Grace Schulman
Two new works by Jorge Luis Borges, The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems, and The Book of Sand, a collection of prose tales, offer a deeper realization of the...
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Critical Essay by Robin Lydenberg
The short stories of Jorge Luis Borges are representative of a major trend in twentieth-century fiction which concentrates on aesthetic rather than moral issues. Bor...
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Critical Essay by Martin S. Stabb
[Borges] reveals more of himself in his verse than in any other kind of writing. The capriciousness, the learned frivolity and playfulness of much of his prose are r...
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Critical Essay by Jaime Alazraki
The themes of [Borges'] stories are inspired by the metaphysical hypotheses accumulated through many centuries of the history of philosophy, and by theological...
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Critical Essay by Clarence Brown
In Borges' most famous fiction a contemporary writer, Pierre Menard, is called "author of the Quixote," a title that he does not entirely deserve...
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Critical Essay by Katherine Singer KovÁcs
[The] shy and once ignored author of Ficciones is fast becoming an Argentinean national myth….
To those who are familiar with his writings, ...
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Critical Essay by Joseph Chrzanowski
On a most basic level, "Emma Zunz" has been classified as a "cuento policíaco" in which a young and innocent girl plans and car...
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Critical Essay by A. E. Dyson
[Though] incredibly recondite in learning, and familiar with many ancient and mainly forgotten authors and speculations, [Borges] treats scholarship, like art and life, ...
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Critical Essay by Murray Baumgarten
[S. Y. Agnon's] language demands attention, like a dream calling attention to itself, or a narrator telling a story about his friends that turns out to be a...
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Critical Essay by Shlomith Rimmon-kenan
That the governing structural principle of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" is the analogy among fictional levels goes alm...
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In the following essay, Foster argues that Borges creates an atmosphere of "dis-reality" in Fervor de Buenos Aires, which transcends the ordinary boundaries of time and space.
No hab...
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In the following essay, Murchison argues that Borges's poetic voice is at once humble and intended to be the voice of the eternal creator.
Not much has been written about Borges' poet...
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In the following review, the unsigned critic responds to the idiosyncratic imagination of Borges's poetry in In Praise of Darkness.
Borges is the modern poet who best expresses not the power...
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In the following review, Barnstone offers a positive assessment of In Praise of Darkness.
Like Miguel de Cervantes, about whom he often writes, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges sees himself primaril...
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In the following interview, Lewald and Borges discuss several common themes in Borges 's poetry.
[H. Ernest Lewald]: In this interview I would like to ask a few questions about certain theme...
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In the following essay, Mandlove explores Borges 's use of archetypal patterns in his sonnets "Ajedrez I, " "Ajedrez II, " and "A un poeta del siglo XIII.�...
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In the following interview, Borges discusses the poetic influences of Walt Whitman, Edgar A. Poe, and others.
[Willis Barnstone]: In the years that we have known each other we have spoken almost ex...
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In the following essay, Maier endeavors to establish Borges's early poetry as romantic love poetry.
The name Jorge Luis Borges rarely comes to mind in a survey of Hispanic love poets. The om...
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In the following essay, Running studies the "secret complexity " of Borges's poetry, which arises from the poet's awareness of the ambiguity of language and of human experi...
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Critical Essay by James E. Irby
Until about 1930 Borges's main creative medium was poetry: laconic free-verse poems which evoked scenes and atmospheres of old Buenos Aires or treated timeless ...
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Critical Essay by Edna Aizenberg
1. Postmodernism holds center stage as the major critical practice of the moment. And Borges is there, of course. Critics working in Latin American literature, howeve...
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Miguel Enguídanos
From the very first pages the English-speaking reader will discover that this El hacedor translated as Dreamtigers is an intimate, personal book…. Borges considered El...
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Critical Essay by James E. Irby
Otras inquisiciones (Other Inquisitions) is Borges' best collection of essays, and forms a necessary complement to the stories of Ficciones and El Aleph, which ...
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Critical Essay by Edgardo Cozarinsky
Film—an idea of film, really—recurs in Borges's writing linked to the practice of narration, even to the possibility of attempting narration....
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Jorge Luis Borges with Roberto Alifano
Alifano: Borges, I would like to talk with you about two images which seem to obsess you and which you repeat throughout your work. I am referring to labyrinths...
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Critical Essay by James Neilson
"Don Quixote", Menard told me, "was above all else an entertaining book: but now it has become an occasion for patriotic toasts, for grammatical ...
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Critical Essay by Stanton Hager
In the preface to Ronald Christ's Narrow Act: Borges' Art of Allusion, J. L. Borges wrote: "I am neither a thinker nor a moralist, but simply a ma...
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Critical Essay by Joseph Epstein
One of the interesting differences between high art and great science is that the former is both unique and its emergence unpredictable in a way that is not quite tru...
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Critical Essay by Bella Brodzki
My concern with the relationship between woman and representation bears directly on the critical controversies raised by Borges' work, specifically the relation...
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In the following essay, Kadir uses concepts of meta-physics and theology to examine the nature and aesthetic value of terror in the works of Jorge Luis Borges.
The paths to Borges' work thro...
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In the following excerpt, Bastos argues that Walt Whitman is a major influence on Borges's poetry.
1. the Wish to Express the Totality of Life
In 1925, referring to the extreme subjectivity ...
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In the following essay, Giskin explores the role and significance of mythical experience in Borges's work.
A reader of Borges is likely to notice that his work, especially his short stories,...
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In the following excerpt, Stabbs examines Borges's early poetry.
Borges became famous as a writer through his prose rather than through his poetry. Today he is usually thought of first as th...
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In the following excerpt, Stabb offers a brief survey of Borges's later poetry.
Later Poetry
In 1964, Borges's publishers, the Buenos Aires firm of Emecé Editores, brought out ...
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In the following essay, Polette finds similarities in the conception of God held by Borges and that of seventeenth-century Puritan minister, Edward Taylor.
The power of the imagination to unify opp...
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In the following essay, Tyler demonstrates Borges's interest in medieval Germanic literature, and points to elements of it in his poetry.
Libros como el de Job, LA DIVINA COMEDIA, Macbeth (y...
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In the following essay, Coleman demonstrates the strong influence of Walt Whitman on the poetry of both Borges and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Coleman focuses on the contrasting effects of this inf...
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In the following essay, Shaw introduces two of Borges's earliest poems, including variants and a French translation of one, which were discovered in a little-known magazine published in Paris i...
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In the following essay, Wink praises Borges as a writer of sonnets.
Some years ago I heard an otherwise bright young man announce in the student union at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville ...
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In the following essay, Sanger considers the function of “self-enacting discourse” in Borges's poetry.
In his speech on the topic of arms and letters in Chapters 37 and 38 of t...
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In the following excerpt, Strong contrasts the relationship of Borges and his fellow Argentine writer Oliviero Girondo to the Spanish modernist movement known as Ultraísmo.
Borges and Girondo...
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In the following essay, Cañas explores affinities between Borges and the poet Wallace Stevens.
I don’t know what mysterious reason Borges had in his 1967 Introduction to American Lite...
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In the following excerpt, Hirsch discusses Borge’s love of reading and of languages, focusing on his conception of poetry as “a collaborative act between writer and the reader.”
...
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In the following essay, Couture discusses the centrality of “vanity” as a word and as a concept in Borges's writing.
Twisting an old Spanish saying, Bryce Echenique wrote that ...
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In the following essay, diGiovani discusses the process of collaborating with Borges in the translation of his poetry.
In November 1967, in Harvard Square, I walked into Schoenhof's Foreign ...
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In the following review, Parini discusses the volume Selected Poems of Borges (1999), edited by Alexander Coleman.
With Pablo Neruda and Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges set in motion the wave o...
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In the following essay, Holditch examines Borges's appreciation of and affinity with Ralph Waldo Emerson as a poet.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Borges' deep love for the lit...
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In the following essay, Jones explores Borges's debt to Robert Browning,, especially, in his adaptation of the dramatic monologue.
In a rather backhanded tribute to Robert Browning, Jorge Lu...
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In the following essay, Kodama discusses Borges's use of the traditional Japanese poetic forms of tanka and haiku.
In the foreword to his Collected Writings (1969), and in other works, Borge...
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In the following essay, Alazraki discusses Borges' use of the device of enumeration in his poetry.
Enumerations in literature are as old as the Old Testament, but in modern times they have a...
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In the following essay, Alazraki discusses the significance of mirrors in Borges's poetry.
In the Preface to his fifth book of poetry—In Praise of Darkness—Borges writes: ...
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In the following essay, Alazraki examines Borges's later poetry, and praises its ability to convey “verbal music.”
From his early poems of the twenties to his later collection ...
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In the following essay, Abadi discusses the influence of the philosopher Spinoza on Borge's poetry, focusing on his sonnets “Spinoza,” and “Baruch Spinoza.”
In th...
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In the following essay, Balderston discusses the significance of scars in Borges's work.
… ese paciente laberinto de líneas traza la imagen de su cara.
(Borges)1
…...
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In the following note on “The Draped Mirrors,” Gonzalez describes how Borges uses the concept of narcissism.
Critics have associated Borges's use of mirrors in his short storie...
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In the following essay originally published in 1995, Brant argues that the relationship between male characters in two of Borges's stories is defined by a repressed homoeroticism.
Sex and wo...
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In the following essay on Borges's debt to the writer H. P. Lovecraft, Buchanan discusses the nature of the minotaur in the Borgesian labyrinth.
This tale of Jorge Luis Borges, “There...
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In the following essay, Petersen defends Borges's later fiction against criticism that it is inferior to his earlier work.
When readers of Borges reach for his later works, they are often a ...
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In the following essay, Zubizarreta advances interpretive strategies for reading “Borges and I” as a short story.
An Autobiographical Page?
Due to its autobiographical appearance, &#x...
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In the following essay, Pennington relies on the historical and social contexts surrounding Borges's “The Ethnographer” to elucidate the text.
This essay takes as a point of de...
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In the following review of Collected Fictions, a new translation of Borges's short fiction, Coetzee traces the development of Borges's stories, evaluates the new translation, and discuss...
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In the following review, Bell-Villada praises Collected Fictions.
From the midsixties through the early eighties, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges—the man and his thoughts both—seem...
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In the following review, Stavans evaluates the Andrew Hurley translation of Borges's Collected Fictions, and offers comparisons with other translations.
Jorge Luis Borges is no longer a writ...
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In the following review of the Collected Fictions, the writer sees Borges as a “master of intellectual subtleties.”
A single substantial book of short stories may seem a relatively mo...
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In the following essay, Pennington interprets one of Borges's later stories, “El disco,” as a criticism of his critics.
The prose works of Jorge Luis Borges from 1969 are not c...
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In the following essay, Wardi applies psychoanalytic techniques to the interpretation of Borges's story “Emma Zunz.”
In a talk given at the Freudian School of Psychoanalysis in...
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In the following essay, Laraway considers the implications of Borges's strategy of moving between first-and third-person narration in “The Mark of the Sword.”
A scar, as Homer ...
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In the following excerpt, Merrell explores Borges's use of paradox.
I don't like writers who are making sweeping statements all the time. Of course, you might argue that what I'...
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In the following discussion of Borges's fiction, Stabb analyzes the elements that define the pieces as characteristically Borgesian.
Borges's present fame rests on a relatively small ...
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In the following essay, Ammon interprets Borges's “The Library of Babel” as a commentary on the philosopher Ludwig Wittegenstein's Tractatus.
In Borges' story &#x...
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In the following essay, Irwin uses psychoanalytic methodology to postulate the symbolic significance of chess for Borges.
In Borges's first collection of pure fictions, The Garden of Forking...
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In the following essay, Balderston examines Borges's use of colonial India in his fiction, and his attitude toward colonialism, contrasting Borges's story “The Man on the Threshol...
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In the following essay, Barnstone examines how Borges transformed himself into a seer.
The author of a very famous Spanish novel, Don Quijote de la Mancha, was born in Buenos Aires in the year 1899...
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In the following essay, Stevens examines Borges's debt to De Quincey.
In his piece on De Quincey in his Introducción a la literatura inglesa, Borges compares De Quincey to Sir Thomas ...
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In the following essay, Fayad examines Borges's influence on Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel L'Enfant de sable, in which Borges appears as a character.
Moroccan write...
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In the following excerpt, Read subjects Borges's fiction to a Marxist-psychoanalytic critique.
Critics have been accustomed to emphasize the subjective integrity of Borges in the early part ...
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In the following essay, Sarlo examines the influence of Argentine literature on Borges's writing.
Borges's work offers one of the paradigms—perhaps the paradigm—of Argen...
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In the following essay, Mosher argues that Borges's formulation of the nature of time and space is the same as the one advanced in modern physics.
Modern physics has made it plainly evident ...
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In the following essay, Stone discsses Borge's influence on Mempo Giardinellis short story “La entrevista”.
Almost twenty years ago, Harold Bloom began his landmark study of th...
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In the following essay, Balderston suggests defense against repressed homosexuality as a motive for and motif in Borges's fiction.
Near the end of a 1931 essay on the defects of the Argentin...
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In the following essay contrasting Borges with several literary predecessors, Jullien explores the process by which Borges moves his characters from “existence to essence,” and what the ...
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In the following essay, using Borges's story “Death and the Compass,” Ostergard formulates a definition of the unconscious as the difference between the reality of a situation and...
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In the following essay, Lagos discusses the shift in Borges's experience of himself and of the world which is indicated by a shift in his poetic subjects and images during the 1930's.
...
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In the following essay, Bartoloni compares the use of time and travel in the fictions of Borges and the Australian writer, Gerald Murane.
The image of the journey in time characterises much of twen...
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In the following essay, Durbin recounts the history of Borges's relationship with María Kodama, whom he married shortly before his death.
The year 1996 marked the tenth anniversary of...
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In the following essay, Fragola compares the concept of time in works by Borges and the French New Novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Alain Robbe-Grillet acknowledges that Jorge Luis Borges's sh...
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In the following essay, Howard discusses the nature of Borges's collaboration with Norman Thomas di Giovanni, one of his English translators.
“In the long run, perhaps,” wrote ...
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In the following essay, Strong outlines Borges's literary and political attitudes by tracing those of Sur, an Argentine journal with which he was closely associated, and in which “Pierre...
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In the following essay, Stiehm argues that Borges criticizes established cultural values through manipulation of the common meaning of words.
I. Borges in History
Borges is less a case of history i...
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In the following essay, Stojkov discusses Borges's early essays and his “formalist” theory of literature.
Jorge Luis Borges's international fame as a short story writer ...
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In the following essay, Ormsby praises some new editions of Borges's work.
It was ironic of fate, though perhaps predictable, to allow Jorge Luis Borges to develop over a long life into his ...
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In the following essay, Weinberger, editor of Borges's Selected Non-Fictions, discusses Borges's uncollected texts and deplores the absence of well-edited editions of the published works...
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In the following column, one of Borges's biographers sketches a portrait of the writer.
This was the first Spanish city Jorge Luis Borges ever knew. He and his family, holed up in Switzerlan...
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In the following essay, Paulau de Nemes examines the “modernist” aspects of Borges's early poetry.
“One of the cardinal functions of poetry”—wrote Octavio ...
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In the following essay, Manguel argues that Borges's significance as a writer derives from his delight in language and his faith in literature.
The visible work of Jorge Luis Borges may appe...
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In the following essay, Sarlo links the avant-garde movement in the Argentina of the 1920's, in which Borges participated, with the literary movement to define Argentine national tradition and ...
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In the following essay, Shumway considers the similarities between Borges and T. S. Eliot regarding their ideas about tradition and individual talent.
Except for an Eliot poem Borges translated and...
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In the following essay, Alazraki traces the significance of the Jewish mystical doctrine of the Kabbalah in Borges's work.
When asked several years ago about his interest in the Kabbalah, Bo...
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In the following essay, originally published in 1989, Abadi compares Borges's two sonnets about the philosopher Benedict de Spinoza.
In the same tongue in which Spinoza refuted the Jewish au...
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In the following essay, Arrington describes the translation of Borges's “El Muerto” from short story to film.
Originally published in Sur in November 1946 and later included in...
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In the following essay, Kushigian explores the significance of “Orientalism” in Borges's fiction.
The Orient, presented ironically, with familiarity, and at times inverted and ...
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In the following excerpt, Merrell discusses the place of Nominalism and Idealism in Borges's work.
The deeper you try to go into the character of these universal relations which have always ...
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In the following essay, Bell discusses Jorge Luis Borges 's literary output during a fifteen-year period of personal and political crisis, and assesses his subsequent influence on North America...
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Argentine poet Juan Gelman, who wrote about the pain of loss under his country's military juntas, has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's top literary award.The $133,000 award was...
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Kiran Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss," a narrative of global discovery and displacement that has already won the Man Booker Prize, received another literary honor Thursday night: the National Boo...
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Clive James has a high-maintenance girlfriend: the reader. To educate this girlfriend, to correct her wayward mind and haphazard schooling, he has written more than 100 loosely related essays on ar...
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Gabriela Mistral
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga
Jorge Luis Borges
Critical Essay by Robert Scholes
Argentine poet wins literature prize
