SPANISH 194 - The Borges Machine

Between 1923 and 1970, Jorge Luis Borges wrote some of the most original poems, short stories, essays and film scripts in Latin America and anywhere in the world, and he redefined the meaning and scope of literature. In this course, we will examine the signifying power of Borges’ short stories, essays and poems, and we will consider his work as a literary machine whose output radically transforms aesthetic formations and imaginaries beyond Argentina and Latin America. Rather than thinking about what his literature means, we will concentrate on what it produces as a fictional-poetic machine: cities and worlds, love and treason, popular and high culture, politics and death, institutions of knowledge and traditions, and new ways of reading and thinking about aesthetic and social relations.