T107 | Selected Stories of Jorge Luis Borges |
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Borges is one of the foundational figures in late 20th century fiction. Breaking with realism, he focused on the fantastical - texts-within-texts, time-travel, dreams, and Doppelgängers- as central to narrative.In the process, he created new shortstory forms. He also broke new ground in detective fiction and combined bookishness with parody and humor. His innovations made possible the subsequent “Boom” of the Latin American novel, and influenced “post-modern” U.S. fiction (Pynchon, Barthelme, Barth) as well. We will read and discuss selected stories from the Borges anthology Labyrinths, which participants are asked to bring to the first class.
Gene Bell-Villada is the Harry C. Payne Professor of Romance Languages at Williams College. He earned his MA at the University of California at Berkeley and his PhD at Harvard. Bell-Villada is author of general-interest books on Borges and García Márquez (both now in expanded second editions, the latter the winner of a 1991 Latin American Studies prize). His Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life: How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism, 1790-1990, was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award, and was translated to Chinese and Serbian. He is also author of two books of fiction plus a memoir, Overseas American: Growing up Gringo in the Tropics (2006). He is editor of several collections of essays on overseas childhoods and on Gabriel García Márquez. His latest authored book is On Nabokov, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Mind: What the Russian-American Odd Pair Can Tell Us about Some Values, Myths and Manias Widely Held Most Dear (2013). |
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