In the following discussion of Borges's fiction, Stabb analyzes the elements that define the pieces as characteristically Borgesian.

In the following essay, Wardi applies psychoanalytic techniques to the interpretation of Borges's story “Emma Zunz.”

In the following essay, Kushigian explores the significance of “Orientalism” in Borges's fiction.

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.

In the following essay, Alazraki traces the significance of the Jewish mystical doctrine of the Kabbalah in Borges's work.

In the following essay, Sanger considers the function of “self-enacting discourse” in Borges's poetry.

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 Threshold” with Rudyard Kipling's “On the City Wall.”

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 meaning of “immortality” is for him.

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 Menard” was first published.

In the following essay, Irwin uses psychoanalytic methodology to postulate the symbolic significance of chess for Borges.

In the following essay, Balderston suggests defense against repressed homosexuality as a motive for and motif in Borges's fiction.

In the following excerpt, Read subjects Borges's fiction to a Marxist-psychoanalytic critique.

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.

In the following interview, Borges discusses the poetic influences of Walt Whitman, Edgar A. Poe, and others.

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.”

In the following excerpt, Stabbs examines Borges's early poetry.

In the following essay, Giskin explores the role and significance of mythical experience in Borges's work.

My concern with the relationship between woman and representation bears directly on the critical controversies raised by Borges' work, specifically the relationship between his formalism/idealism and his textual politics. I will identify (1.) the strategies by which symbols or metaphors of the feminine—as idealized or poetic objects of desire—serve his mystical and metaphysical interests, and (2.) the ways in which the presence of an apparently more localized theme in Borges' wor...

In the following excerpt, Merrell discusses the place of Nominalism and Idealism in Borges's work.

In the following essay, Sarlo examines the influence of Argentine literature on Borges's writing.

In the following essay, Fragola compares the concept of time in works by Borges and the French New Novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet.

In the following essay, Howard discusses the nature of Borges's collaboration with Norman Thomas di Giovanni, one of his English translators.

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.

In the following excerpt, Stabb offers a brief survey of Borges's later poetry.

In the following essay, Balderston discusses the significance of scars in Borges's work.

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 true of the latter. If Newton had not lived, I have seen it argued, Huygens and Leibniz would have gone on to do his principal work; Wallace was closing in on the theory of evolution for which Darwin has since been recognized as a hero of science; and Edison's work could as readily have been done by Swan (on the incandescent lamp) and Hughe...

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 local color.

"Don Quixote", Menard told me, "was above all else an entertaining book: but now it has become an occasion for patriotic toasts, for grammatical insolence, for obscene de luxe editions. Glory is a form of incomprehension and it is perhaps the very worst."      "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"

In the following essay, Ormsby praises some new editions of Borges's work.

In the following essay, Alazraki examines Borges's later poetry, and praises its ability to convey “verbal music.”

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 influence on the two poets.

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 philosophers in the West despair of them, as offering unfounded, contradictory, and frequently incredible representations of the cosmos. Borges is not in the least sceptical of the human mind, only of its medium, language, whose co-ordination with reality, which is not verbal, he rightly finds unconvincing. (p. 21) He values philosophy for somethi...

In the following essay, Pennington relies on the historical and social contexts surrounding Borges's “The Ethnographer” to elucidate the text.

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 discusses the peculiar problems that arise when the author has translated some of his own work.

In the following essay, Stone discsses Borge's influence on Mempo Giardinellis short story “La entrevista”.

In the following essay, Bartoloni compares the use of time and travel in the fictions of Borges and the Australian writer, Gerald Murane.

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 American literary and cultural theory.

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 the representation of that situation.

In the following excerpt, Merrell explores Borges's use of paradox.

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 experience.

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 the following essay, originally published in 1989, Abadi compares Borges's two sonnets about the philosopher Benedict de Spinoza.

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.

In the following essay, Jones explores Borges's debt to Robert Browning,, especially, in his adaptation of the dramatic monologue.

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.

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."

In the following essay, Zubizarreta advances interpretive strategies for reading “Borges and I” as a short story.

Film—an idea of film, really—recurs in Borges's writing linked to the practice of narration, even to the possibility of attempting narration. Films also appear as reading matter, one among the countless motives for reflection lavished on us by the universe. The examples offered to Borges by films illustrate widely disparate themes: the hilarious response of a Buenos Aires audience to some scenes from Hallelujah and Underworld provoked his bitter commentary on "Our Impossibilities...

In the following essay, Stiehm argues that Borges criticizes established cultural values through manipulation of the common meaning of words.

In the following essay, Durbin recounts the history of Borges's relationship with María Kodama, whom he married shortly before his death.

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 and to the figure of the tiger. I suggest we start with the former. How did labyrinths enter your literary work; what fascinates you about them? [Borges]: Well, I discovered the labyrinth in a book published in France by Garnier that my father had in his library. The book had a very odd engraving that took a whole page and showed a building that res...

In the following essay, Kodama discusses Borges's use of the traditional Japanese poetic forms of tanka and haiku.

In the following excerpt, Bastos argues that Walt Whitman is a major influence on Borges's poetry.

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.

In the following interview, Lewald and Borges discuss several common themes in Borges 's poetry.

In the following essay, Paulau de Nemes examines the “modernist” aspects of Borges's early poetry.

In the following essay, Holditch examines Borges's appreciation of and affinity with Ralph Waldo Emerson as a poet.

In the following essay, diGiovani discusses the process of collaborating with Borges in the translation of his poetry.

In the following essay, Alazraki discusses the significance of mirrors in Borges's poetry.

In the following essay, Manguel argues that Borges's significance as a writer derives from his delight in language and his faith in literature.

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 personal statement in the form of a modest fiction: the creation of a character named Borges, based on certain documents that have appeared in the English language bearing that name. The title of this performance might have been even more presumptuous—"Borges and I"—or, most presumptuous, "My Borges." My Bor...

The themes of [Borges'] stories are inspired by the metaphysical hypotheses accumulated through many centuries of the history of philosophy, and by theological systems that are the scaffoldings of several religions. Borges, skeptical of the veracity of the former and of the revelations of the latter, strips them of their claims of absolute truth and pretended divinity and makes them instead raw material for his inventions. In this way, he returns to them the character of aesthetic creation and wonder...

In the following essay, Stojkov discusses Borges's early essays and his “formalist” theory of literature.

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.

In the following essay, Stevens examines Borges's debt to De Quincey.

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. Borges himself has stressed the essentially amoral and literary perspective which distinguishes his work from that of more ethically oriented writers: "I want to make it quite clear that I am not, nor have I ever been, what used to be called a preacher of parables … and is now known as a committed writer." The committed writer,...

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 man of letters who turns his own perplexities and that respected system of perplexities we call philosophy into the forms of literature." More often than not, the forms that Borges's fictions take in their investigations of philosophical perplexities are fantastic. Like the Tlönists in his story "Tlön, Uqbar, a...

In the following essay, Petersen defends Borges's later fiction against criticism that it is inferior to his earlier work.

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, however, have noted the discomforts of fitting Borges, along with other Latin American authors, into the postmodern mold; as one critic asked graphically, if with some gender bias: "Is the corset too tight for the fat lady?" One place where the corset pinches is in its elision of the Latin American condition of the texts. Typically, the...

In the following essay, Alazraki discusses Borges' use of the device of enumeration in his poetry.

In the following essay, Maier endeavors to establish Borges's early poetry as romantic love poetry.

In the following essay, Barnstone examines how Borges transformed himself into a seer.

In the following essay, Shumway considers the similarities between Borges and T. S. Eliot regarding their ideas about tradition and individual talent.

In the following essay, Tyler demonstrates Borges's interest in medieval Germanic literature, and points to elements of it in his poetry.

In the following essay, Arrington describes the translation of Borges's “El Muerto” from short story to film.

In the following essay, Couture discusses the centrality of “vanity” as a word and as a concept in Borges's writing.

In the following review, Stavans evaluates the Andrew Hurley translation of Borges's Collected Fictions, and offers comparisons with other translations.

Otras inquisiciones (Other Inquisitions) is Borges' best collection of essays, and forms a necessary complement to the stories of Ficciones and El Aleph, which have made him famous. Otras inquisiciones was first published in 1952, but its pieces had appeared separately (most of them in Victoria Ocampo's review Sur or in the literary supplement of La Nación) over the preceding thirteen years. The title harks back to Borges' first volume of essays, published in 1925, when he was tw...

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.

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 in the 1920s.

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 themes of love, death and the self. He also wrote many essays on subjects of literary criticism, metaphysics and language, essays reminiscent of Chesterton's in their compactness and unexpected paradoxes. The lucidity and verbal precision of these writings belie the agitated conditions of avant-garde polemic and playfulness under which ...

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 hacedor—I don't know whether he may have changed his mind—his book, the book most likely, in his opinion, to be remembered when all the rest are forgotten. And the book—Borges loved to play with this idea—that would make his earlier works unnecessary, including his two extraordinary collections of sto...

[Though] incredibly recondite in learning, and familiar with many ancient and mainly forgotten authors and speculations, [Borges] treats scholarship, like art and life, as a game. Entirely fictitious sources mingle with real ones, in texts and footnotes, some of the latter ascribed to 'editors' who are in fact the author himself. Continuing preoccupation with the dubious reality of art, of the cosmos, of himself, is one ingredient of the lucid and economical scepticism pervading his work. In o...

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.

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.

[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 tale detailing the structure of his own psyche. This aspect of Agnon's work links him not to Kafka, to whom he has often been compared, but to Borges, in whose work we find a similar interest in language as self-conscious dreaming. Both writers seek to evoke the dreamlike moment in which the symbol-making activity of language is half-hidde...

In the following essay, Wink praises Borges as a writer of sonnets.

That the governing structural principle of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" is the analogy among fictional levels goes almost without saying. In the fashion of Chinese boxes, many parallels are established between the characters Yu Tsun, Stephen Albert, and Ts'ui Pên, forming a chain that modern psychoanalysis would call "intersubjective repetition." (p. 639) What is less self-evident is that the analogies between the diegetic and the metadieg...

In the following review, Parini discusses the volume Selected Poems of Borges (1999), edited by Alexander Coleman.

In the following essay, Cañas explores affinities between Borges and the poet Wallace Stevens.

[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 rarely found in his poetry. By contrast we see in it the other Borges—the sincere and ardent youth of the 1920's or the contemplative and nostalgic writer of the 1950's and 1960's. For many this is an unknown Borges: perhaps it is the real Borges. (p. 27) At first glance the forty-five short pieces of free verse in Bor...

In the following essay, Ammon interprets Borges's “The Library of Babel” as a commentary on the philosopher Ludwig Wittegenstein's Tractatus.

Borges's affinity for the "cult of courage" (a phrase he took from the poet Evaristo Carriego) stretches across four decades of fiction-writing to 1970, when he filled the stories of Doctor Brodie's Report with duels and death. These primeval battles take on, by accumulation, the look of legend or myth and seem to celebrate Argentina's heroic, violent past—her national glory and tragedy. But Borges's fascination with bravery is much more than a preoccupation ...

[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 the semantic and morphological syntaxes which combine the elements of a story into a whole, or it can show how structuralist intuitions, many of them philosophical in nature, illuminate what a writer is doing. I shall choose the second of these options; in the long run an exposition of the second kind better serves the general reader, since it ...

In the following review, Barnstone offers a positive assessment of In Praise of Darkness.

In the following essay, Pennington interprets one of Borges's later stories, “El disco,” as a criticism of his critics.

In the following column, one of Borges's biographers sketches a portrait of the writer.

In the following review, Bell-Villada praises Collected Fictions.

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 intriguing network of symbols in the Argentinian writer's artistic world. Primarily, though, they embody human insights: throughout his work, the most striking effects, as well as true meanings, are to be found not in his allegory, however fascinating, but in his construction of images and characters. So, too, with the new collections. ...

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.”

In Borges' most famous fiction a contemporary writer, Pierre Menard, is called "author of the Quixote," a title that he does not entirely deserve, since he wrote only certain segments of Cervantes' masterpiece. But those segments which he did write correspond in every particular, and without the slightest help from Cervantes, to the text of the earlier work. The deadpan narrator of this story makes clear that, superficial identity aside, Menard's work is utterly original, ...