Borges And Joyce

"Borges and Joyce stand as two of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth-century. Both are renowned for their polyglot abilities, prodigious memories, cyclical conception of time, labyrinthine creations, and for their shared condition as European emigres and blind bards of Dublin and Buenos Aires. Yet at the same time, Borges and Joyce differ in relation to the central aesthetic of their creative projects: the epic scale of the Irishman contrasts with the compressed fictions of the Argentine. In this comprehensive and engaging study, Patricia Novillo-Corvalan demonstrates that Borges created a version of Joyce refracted through the prism of his art, thus encapsulating the colossal magnitude of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake within the confines of a nutshell. Separate chapters triangulate Borges and Joyce with the canonical legacy of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare using as a point of departure Walter Benjamin's notion of the afterlife of a text. This ambitious, interdisciplinary study offers a model for Comparative Literature in the twenty-first century."

This book studies how Borges constructs a theory of translation that plays a fundamental role in the development of Argentine literature, and which, in turn, expands the potential for writers in Latin America to create new and innovative literatures through processes of re-reading, rewriting, and mis-translation. The book analyzes Borges's texts in both an Argentine and a transnational context, thus incorporating Borges's ideas into contemporary debates about translation and its relationship to language and aesthetics, Latin American culture and identity, tradition and originality, and center-periphery dichotomies. Furthermore, a central objective of this book is to show that the study of the importance of translation in Borges and of the importance of Borges for translation studies need not be separated. Furthermore, translation studies has much to gain by the inclusion of Latin American thinkers such as Borges, while literary studies has much to gain by in-depth considerations of the role of translation in Latin American literatures. Sergio Waisman is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at The George Washington University.

This book presents for the first time a collective examination of the issue of audience in relation to Joyce’s work and the cultural moments of its reception. While many of the essays gathered in this volume are concerned with particular readers and readings of Joyce’s work, they all, individually and generally, gesture at something broader than a specific act of reception. Joyce’s Audiences is an important narrative of the cultural receptions of Joyce but it is also an exploration of the author’s own fascination with audiences, reflecting a wider concern with reading and interpretation in general. Twelve essays by an international cast of Joyce critics deal with: the censorship and promotion of Ulysses; the ‘plain reader’ in modernism; Richard Ellmann’s influence on Joyce’s reputation; the implied audiences of Stephen Hero and Portrait; Borges’s relation with Joyce; the study of Joyce in Taiwan; the promotion of Joyce in the U.S.; the complaint that there is insufficient time to read Joyce’s work; the revisions to “Work in Progress” that respond to specific reviews; strategies of critical interpretation; Joyce and feminism; and the ‘belated’ readings of post-structuralism.

(Post)colonial modernity in Ulysses and Accra / Ato Quayson -- Joyce and race in the twenty-first century / Malcolm Sen -- Dubliners and French naturalism / Catherine Flynn -- Joyce and Latin American literature : transperipherality and modernist form / José Luis Venegas -- The multiplication of translation / Sam Slote -- Copyright, freedom, and the fragmented public domain / Robert Spoo -- Ulysses in the world / Sean Latham -- The intertextual condition / Dirk Van Hulle -- The macrogenesis of Ulysses and Finnegans wake / Ronan Crowley -- After the Little review : Joyce in transition / Scarlett Baron -- Popular Joyce, for better or worse / David Earle -- Joyce's nonhuman ecologies / Katherine Ebury -- Medical humanities / Vike Plock -- Joyce's queer possessions / Patrick Mullen -- The wake, ideology and literary institutions / Finn Fordham -- Joyce as a generator of new critical history / Jean-Michel Rabaté.

Borges once stated that he had never created a character: 'It's always me, subtly disguised'. This book focuses on the ways in which Borges uses events and experiences from his own life, in order to demonstrate how they become the principal structuring motifs of his work. It aims to show how these experiences, despite being 'heavily disguised', are crucial components of some of Borges's most canonical short stories, particularly from the famous collections Ficciones and El Aleph. Exploring the rich tapestry of symmetries, doubles and allusions and the roles played by translation and the figure of the creator, the book provides new readings of these stories, revealing their hidden personal, emotional and spiritual dimensions. These insights shed fresh light on Borges's supreme literary craftsmanship and the intimate puzzles of his fictions.