Borges and His Followers

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In this course we will read a selection of Borges’s works including essays, fiction and poetry, with special attention to how essayssuddenly become fiction. . In Borges’s work we discover special literary worlds that debilitate or destroy many accepted conventions: our personal identity, the singularity of our world and our time, and the idea of originality. We will explore the idea of reading as creation, the “nothingness” of personality and his persistence in rewriting and altering his own works. Borges is considered a universal writer because he experiments with ideas like space and time that belong to all cultures. Nevertheless, we will see that there is a special emphasis in much of his work on Argentine and Latin American culture. Numerous authors have been influenced by Borges. Of those in Spanish we will read selecciones of writings by Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Bolaño, Alejandro Zambra and others in English.