BEOIBERISTIKA - Časopis za iberijske, latinoameričke i komparativne studije (ISSN: 2560-4163 Online)
Beoiberistika je naučni časopis koji su u februaru 2016. godine osnovali nastavnici i saradnici Katedre za iberijske studije, a koji objavljuje Filološki fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu. Reč je o časopisu elektronskog formata, koji izlazi jednom godišnje i otvoren je za sve zainteresovane autore, saradnike i čitaoce. Beoiberistika objavljuje radove iz različitih oblasti istraživanja iberijskih, latinoameričkih i komparativnih studija lingvističkog, književnog ili kulturološkog karaktera. Časopis donosi originalne i naučne priloge o svim relevantnim i aktuelnim temama u oblasti modernih studija filologije. Poslednja sekcija svakog broja namenjena je recenzijama i prikazima novih publikacija posvećenih svim iberijskim, latinoameričkim i komparativnim temama. Časopis objavljuje radove napisane na španskom, engleskom, katalonskom, portugalskom i srpskom jeziku. Beoiberistika je indeksirana/pohranjena u sledećim bazama podataka: ERIH PLUS (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences), DOAJ (The Directory of Open Access Journals), Latindex (Online Regional Information System for Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal), MLA (International Bibliography, Directory of Periodicals), CEEOL (Central and Eastern European Online Library), EBSCO host, PKP Index, REDIB (Red Iberoamericana de Innovación y Conocimiento Científico), MIAR (Information Matrix for the Analysis of Journals), Index Islamicus Online, Portal del Hispanismo (Instituto Cervantes), Dialnet.
Facultad de Filología, Universidad de Belgrado
Autori koji objavljuju u ovom časopisu pristaju na sledeće uslove: Autori zadržavaju autorska prava i pružaju časopisu pravo prvog objavljivanja rada i licenciraju ga pod okriljem Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License koja omogućuje drugima da dele rad uz uslov navođenja autorstva i izvornog objavljivanja u ovom časopisu. Autori mogu da izrade zasebne, ugovorne aranžmane za ne-ekskluzivnu distribuciju rada objavljenog u časopisu (npr. postavljanje u institucionalni repozitorij ili objavljivanje u knjizi), uz navođenje da je rad izvorno objavljen u ovom časopisu. Autorima je dozvoljeno i podstiču se da postave objavljeni rad on-line (npr. u institucionalnom repozitoriju ili na svojim mrežnim stranicama) pre i tokom postupka prijave, s obzirom na to da takav postupak može voditi produktivnoj razmeni ideja, te ranijoj i većoj citiranosti objavljenog rada (up. The Effect of Open Access).
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Los 150 años del Congreso Internacional de Americanistas: una hazaña balcánica
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 Bojana Kovačević Petrović http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
«Mi escritura es un mundo donde caben muchos mundos.» Entrevista con Mayra Santos Febres
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 Radwa Elsdeek http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Use of the Ghetto Metaphor in the Memory Culture of the Sephardic Community in Belgrade between the Two World Wars
This paper examines the presence of the ghetto metaphor in the discourse of remembrance of the Sephardim in Belgrade regarding the past of their community. The corpus consists of texts from Jewish publications from the interwar period, in which the historical term «ghetto» is metaphorically projected onto the Jewish quarter of Belgrade (Jalija). The research is based on the theoretical and methodological framework of critical sociolinguistics and (historical) discourse analysis, and also includes terminology and some postulates from memory studies and metaphor studies in cognitive linguistics. This approach aims to examine the role and meaning of the ghetto metaphor in narrative discourse and relate it to the dominant ideologies of the Sephardic community in Belgrade. The qualitative analysis of the corpus shows that this metaphor takes the form Jalija is a ghetto and that, in the examined utterances, it serves to designate the traditional Jewish quarter as a physical and spiritual obstacle to the modernization of the community. The frequent and uncritical representation of the Jewish quarter reflects an orientalist discourse through which the authors expressed negative attitudes toward the patriarchal past of the community and beliefs in the superiority of modern society over traditional. However, although the use of this metaphor predominates in the corpus, in certain utterances the metaphorical projection is absent. In these cases, the Sephardic quarter of Belgrade is compared to the ghetto only in spatial terms, and while the authors distance themselves from it by characterizing it as “primitive” and “backward,” they nonetheless assign a positive value to its symbolic nature.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 Ivana Vučina Simović http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Clash of Cultures in Roberto Arlt’s “Los hombres fieras”
In the story “Los hombres fieras” by Roberto Arlt (Argentina, 1900–1942), the cultural clash between Liberian indigenous people and African American descendants is highlighted, addressing themes such as barbarism, the questioning of Western culture, and integration into foreign worlds. The aim is to explore how the narrative reconsiders moral values, their violation in specific circumstances, and the inherent impulses of human nature, treated in a turbulent and complex manner. From an existentialist and structuralist perspective, the characters' concerns are analyzed as they face ethical and cultural dilemmas that compel them to redefine their identity. The African jungle, more than a physical space, becomes a symbolic setting where tensions between civilization and barbarism take center stage. The story raises questions about the human condition, imperialism, and migratory processes, transcending temporal and geographical boundaries. In this context, Arlt examines the relationships between power, justice, and belonging, exposing the contradictions of human nature. At the same time, the author encourages reflection on the values underpinning societies and the tensions between the individual and the collective, offering a critical perspective that transcends his time.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 Kalliopi Lappa http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Unamuno and Eichenbaum: The Possibilities of a Formal-Poetic Approach to Cómo se hace una novela and “Y va de cuento”
This paper analyses two prosaic texts by Miguel de Unamuno, “Y va de cuento...” and Cómo se hace una novela. As special attention to the formal aspects of the prosaic text first emerged in Russian poetics in the literary theory of the early 20th century, we chose to analyse Unamuno’s two texts with recourse to Boris Eichenbaum’s theory. We take as point of reference of this paper his essay entitled “The Structure of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’”, in which he highlights aspects and narrative techniques that can be related to those we can find in “Y va de cuento...” and Cómo se hace una novela. Thus, in this paper we analyse how the author’s ‘personal tone’, the role or lack of plot and the relevance of the ‘acoustic characteristics’ appear in “Y va de cuento...” and Cómo se hace una novela. Based on the results of criticism, we conclude that Unamuno, by playing with the ‘author’s personal tone’ and reducing the plot, intentionally transfers the emphasis on the traditional plot to the procedure of writing. In the same way, it is demonstrated that the linguistic configuration is of primary importance in the analysed texts and that some parts sometimes seem to have an oral character similar to the ‘articulated play’ that Eichenbaum pointed out about Gogol’s narrative. Both findings, besides showing a similarity between the narrative techniques of Unamuno and Gogol, also reinforce the observations of the critics: for Unamuno (in “Y va de cuento...” and Cómo se hace una novela) the way of creating and telling will be more relevant than the plot itself.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 Levente Horváth http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Prevodna recepcija brazilske književnosti u Srbiji
Usled geografske udaljenosti i brojnih drugih činilaca, brazilska književnost dugo je u Srbiji bila gotovo potpuno nepoznata. I danas je njeno prisustvo kod nas manje u odnosu na prisustvo mnogih drugih nacionalnih književnosti, ali i u odnosu na prisustvo brazilske književnosti u nekim drugim sredinama. Pa ipak, više desetina brazilskih književnih dela prevedeno je i objavljeno u Jugoslaviji i Srbij počev od prve polovine dvadesetog veka do danas. Ovo istraživanje ima za cilj da ponudi pregled prevoda dela brazilske književnosti objavljenih u bivšoj Jugoslaviji do njenog raspada, a potom i u Srbiji, zaključno sa 2022. godinom. Korpus za istraživanje čine prethodni radovi koji se dotiču recepcije brazilske književnosti u Jugoslaviji odnosno Srbiji, katalog Narodne biblioteke Srbije, kao i arhivska i bibliotečka građa Ambasade Brazila u Beogradu. U radu identifikujemo tri perioda objavljivanja brazilskih književnih dela u našoj sredini, koji se razlikuju po broju publikacija, preovlađujućim autorima i drugim odlikama. Prvi period odgovara vremenu Jugoslavije, tokom kojeg je postojao zajednički književni jezik i izdavačko tržište, te se u obzir uzimaju i prevodi objavljeni u Hrvatskoj, kao i prevodi hrvatskih prevodilaca. Drugi period odnosi se na vreme od raspada Jugoslavije, na sužavanje izdavačkog tržišta na Srbiju i Crnu Goru, i pokriva poslednju deceniju XX i prvu deceniju XXI veka. Treći period počinje događajem koji je presudno uticao na tok recepcije brazilske književnosti u Srbiji i znatno pomerio horizont očekivanja srpske čitalačke publike u odnosu na recepciju luzofonih književnosti – 56. Međunarodnim sajmom knjiga u Beogradu, održanim 2011. godine, na kome je počasni gost bilo čitavo portugalsko govorno područje.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 Mladen Ćirić http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Artificial Intelligence through the Eyes of Juan José Saer, a Counterfactual Reading
This article suggests a “counterfactual” reading of the works of Juan José Saer (1937-2005), inspired by the analysis of the works of Jorge Luís Borges (1899-1986) and Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) conducted by Vraneš (2024). Given that the year 2025 has been declared in Argentina as the year of Saer, this article has a twofold goal: paying tribute to Juan José Saer and sketching an answer to the following question: How would Saer regard the current practice of using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate literary texts?
Juan José Saer’s poetics–Post-Borges age
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 Cecilia Policsek http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
From Colonial Spanish to Modern Nahuatl: A Study of Neologisms and Lexical Exchange
The article examines the linguistic interaction between Spanish and Nahuatl over several centuries, with particular emphasis on mutual lexical influence. The first part analyzes how Nahuatl enriched the Spanish spoken in Mexico since the beginning of colonization, focusing on the incorporation of Nahuatl loanwords into Castilian and the lexical strategies used by conquistadors, colonizers, and missionaries to name aspects of the Mesoamerican world previously unknown to Europeans. The second part shifts focus to contemporary Nahuatl, highlighting the influence of Spanish and the mechanisms Nahuatl speakers employ to create neologisms in response to the demands of modern life, especially in the fields of technology and computing. The study emphasizes the creativity of Nahuatl speakers and their ability to adapt their language to new contexts, which serves as both an expression of cultural resilience and a means of ensuring the vitality and continuity of Nahuatl in the present.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 Juan Luis Gabriel Ramírez, Ingrid Petkova http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Maternal Archive of Racialized Trauma in Esta herida llena de peces
This article reads Lorena Salazar Masso’s Esta herida llena de peces (2021) as the construction of a maternal archive of racialized trauma in Colombia’s Chocó region. Centering on the river journey along the Atrato undertaken by a white woman and the Black boy she has raised, a journey concluding with the boy’s death and the passing of his biological mother, the essay argues that the novel frames violence not as an exceptional event but a structural condition which differentially distributes precarity, displacement, and loss. The theoretical framework brings together critiques of contemporary warfare as inscription on noncombatant bodies, the unequal production of grievability, the ongoingness of racial harm, and an expanded concept of the archive attentive to embodied memory and testimonial residues. Through close reading, the article shows how the novel binds body and territory within an affective geography of fear, where mobility does not deliver safety but intensifies vulnerability. In this context, motherhood is seen as a way of dealing with trauma through daily acts of care and preparing for survival. It also highlights that true closure is impossible when the situations that cause loss are still affecting us today. Ultimately, the novel unsettles normative imaginaries of motherhood and intervenes in debates on memory, war, and racialization in Colombia by rendering legible an archive that does not heal the wound but insists on its persistence.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 Catalina Revelo http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Mujica, the Uruguayan Quixote (or Sanchijote)
This study explores the construction of the link between the figure of former Uruguayan president José “Pepe” Mujica and the archetypes of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The research unravels how Mujica has become intertwined with the quixotic myth, reflecting a particular idealism, and simultaneously, with the more pragmatic and popular characteristics of Sancho. To understand this association, it examines the mentions and connections established by leading figures in the Uruguayan political and cultural sphere. It analyzes not only how third parties associate Mujica with these literary characters, but also the strategic use that Mujica himself and his political force have made of these references. A key aspect of the study is the exploration of the representations and re-readings that the Uruguayan carnival, a space of popular expression par excellence, has made of this symbiosis. The research reveals that the social construct derived from these associations has established a space of the utopian in a transcendental sense. That is to say, the amalgamation of the construct linked to Mujica, with quixotic and Sanchopancesque myths transcends mere representation to become a symbol of aspirations and possibilities. This study offers insights into the patterns that influence the edification of charismatic political figures and their powerful resonance with the literary imaginary.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 Carolina Condado http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Literature and Melancholy in the Renaissance
This article examines the transformation of the concept of melancholy during the Renaissance, aiming to trace its transition from a medieval perspective—associated with sin and illness—to a modern conception linked to introspection, creativity, and individual consciousness. Through an interdisciplinary approach centered on the analysis of literary and philosophical texts, along with some artistic references, the study explores the main lines of symbolic evolution of melancholy across different European cultural traditions. The article concludes that Renaissance melancholy becomes a hallmark of the modern subject: an affective state that reveals both human fragility and spiritual depth, expressed in literature and art as a path to knowledge and existential inquiry.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2025 Ainhoa Segura Zariquiegui http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Artificial Intelligence and the Challenge to Human Literature: Revisiting Borges and Cortázar
When the popularity of cinema and the emergence of mass culture shook the foundations of art as it was known and recognized until the early 20th century, Walter Benjamin wrote his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduction” in an attempt to highlight the irreplaceability and authenticity of the artwork embodied in its aura and to confront the challenges posed by the new era. Almost a century later, it seems that we are facing an even greater challenge to the traditional conception of art as an authentic and unique human activity, we are facing literature created by artificial intelligence. And while many reject categorically the possibility that this “humanoid literature” could ever be considered equal to “human literature,” it cannot be denied that artificial intelligence and its creative achievements in the field of literature question the very foundations of human art. Somewhat unexpectedly, writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar and their conceptions of literature can provide possible answers to the questions of the new era. Their works show that the issue of the author and their biography should be revisited after more than a century of rejection of the 19th-century biographism in literary theory. On the other hand, the theory of reception and the relation between author and reader acquire a new dimension when seen through the lens of these authors’ oeuvre.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Ksenija Vraneš http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Images of Julio Cortázar: An Approach to the Critical Reception of His Work
Julio Cortázar's work is generally understood as a turn from an autonomous to a politically engaged literature. This change affected the reception of his work, critics distinguishing between a first apolitical Cortázar, and a second, highly politicized. This article traces the Argentinian critical reception of Cortázar's work in order to reconstruct the local history of polemical debates and negotiations of meaning his writings gave rise to. This led to a productive tension between a recurrent mythologised image of Cortázar as a committed writer and intellectual, and a series of recent critical and methodological approaches that distance themselves from the former by investigating unexplored aspects of his work and make possible new ways of reading for the current century.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Lisandro Relva http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
An Ongoing Response to a Work in Progress: Cortázar’s Aesthetics of Perplexity
Cortazar's writings from the 1960s show a preoccupation with form: new semiotic events as a work in progress. His miscellaneous books composed of minor texts – “minor” because of their brevity – can pass for notebooks, being a window into Cortazar's creative process. Working with such unstable forms requires a critical reader, even though even professional readers can experience the same perplexity. Cortázar´s innovation comes from using what’s been cast aside. The perplexity of the texts comes from the work in progress effect of their object rather than of the writing itself. The object is seen or thought from a place that barely puts an end to the process of writing in order to leave it in a stable place. Through a series of close readings from The Final Round and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, we will look into the effect of perplexity that defines their creative process.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Susana Gómez http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Borges is an exemplary Argentine writer and also a great cosmopolitan belonging to the whole world. He dismissed narrow-minded nationalism and wrote with a free spirit that embraced the world without artificial divisions. Michel Foucault misread Borges’s invented “Chinese encyclopedia” as a symbol of the absolute Other, but Borges never saw China as an alien culture. Encyclopedia is a conceptual metaphor Borges used to describe the ambitious and heroic human effort at regulating and classifying all knowledge and things in the world, even though that effort eventually necessarily fails. Like the other failed classification systems in the West, that “Chinese encyclopedia” is part of the courageous human effort Borges described in several of his works. Instead of being obsessed with cultural differences, Borges put emphasis on affinities that would lead to a better and more peaceful future for humanity. Given the tension, conflict and regional wars we see in our world today, Borges’s advice to focus on our affinities and points of contact with all other human beings is particularly important.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Longxi Zhang http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
A curious feature of Jorge Luis Borges’s body of work is its inclusion of numerous books he didn’t write but spoke aloud during an interaction. Into this category fall the many volumes of interviews, as well as Borges Profesor (2000), transcribed from tapes recorded by Borges’s students. By far the most crucial item is Adolfo Bioy Casares’ Borges (Ediciones Destino, 2006), 1,600 pages of diary entries spanning half a century of conversation, perhaps the single most intimate, detailed, insightful, and sustained record of one writer’s life and thought ever made by another. Though sometimes called Bioy’s autobiography, Borges is about Borges and also, in large measure, is by Borges, the oral Borges. The relationship between Bioy’s book and the writer whose name it takes as title problematizes and undermines legal concepts of originality, authorship, ownership, and selfhood. Copyright in the written Borges is held by a single entity, the Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges, whose longtime director, María Kodama, did what she could to suppress the use of Bioy’s book in scholarship on Borges. Copyright in the spoken part of Borges’s obra, however, is far more widely dispersed, held by numerous publishers, interviewers, and, in the case of Borges, the Bioy Casares estate. Intellectual property issues are rarely the focus of literary scholarship, but as Bellos and Montagu have recently argued, they are fundamental to any real understanding of how literature circulates globally, particularly during the decades since Borges’s passing. The ever-expanding legal framework that makes literature a heritable asset to be monopolized for nearly a century after a writer’s death has, in the case of the Borges estate, had “severe human costs” and severe creative costs (Chacoff). It has also placed a distance between Borges’s work, Bioy’s work, and Borges that is a disservice to scholarship and literary history.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Esther Allen http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
That Admirable Lack of Orientalism: Jorge Luis Borges’s Translations into Japanese as Self-Orientalizing Acts in The Song Scroll of the Mansion of Fictions (Denkiteiginsō 傳奇亭吟草)
This article delves into Jorge Luis Borges’s approach to translation and its implications within the context of Orientalism and literary authenticity. A point of departure is Borges’s prologue to “El incivil maestro de ceremonias Kotsuké no Suké,” wherein he praises A.B. Mitford’s narrative for avoiding the embellishments of local color, suggesting a more authentic rendition of the original Japanese tale. Borges’s preference for a domesticating translation—eschewing Orientalist tropes—can be seen within the context of Lawrence Venuti’s concepts of domestication and foreignization in translation. Venuti posits translation as an interpretive act, transferring networks of meaning rather than seeking strict equivalence. This perspective frames Borges’s adaptations of Japanese poetic forms, like haikus and tankas, as inherently translational, composed in Spanish but reflecting an imagined Japanese source. The article examines Borges’s seventeen Spanish-language haikus, originally published in La cifra (1981) and later translated back into Japanese by the esteemed Japanese poet Takahashi Mutsuo for the 1999 centennial of Borges’s birth. Takahashi’s adaptations, published in the prestigious literary magazine Subaru, exemplify a playful and intertextual approach, transforming Borges’s work into “The Song Scroll of the Mansion of Fictions.” Takahashi’s translation, more than a mere linguistic conversion, situates Borges within the Japanese poetic tradition, highlighting the kind of interplay between adaptation and cultural recontextualization that Borges himself made into one of the themes of his literature. This article further contextualizes the translated haikus against the background of commemorative events in Japan, including symposia and poetry readings celebrating Borges. Takahashi’s translations, appearing alongside traditional translations and other paratextual essays, underscore the dynamic interaction between Borges’s work and Japanese literature. The article posits that Borges’s haikus, through Takahashi's adaptations, achieve a new dimension of fidelity—not to the original text but to the aesthetic and cultural ethos of Japanese poetry, illustrating a profound cross-cultural literary dialogue.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Manuel Azuaje-Alamo http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Kafka and Borges in the “The Secret Miracle”
The centerpiece of this essay is an analysis of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Secret Miracle,” set in Prague during the first few days of Czechoslovakia’s occupation by the Nazis. I argue that the protagonist of the story is a fictional amalgam of Kafka’s biography and Borges’ own; and that Borges’ creative process draws on his literary engagements with Kafka, including his assimilation of the Book of Job through the prism of Kafka. The essay begins with a synopsis of Borges’s views on Kafka, which changed over the years; and it explores the historical circumstances in Europe and Argentina that inspired the story. Notwithstanding the astute borrowings from Kafka’s writings and biography, Borges’s story ends with a decisively Borgesian turn: his own denouement to a literary theme he shares with Kafka, namely, the punishment of the guiltless.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Efraín Kristal http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Garden of Intersecting Paths: Jorge Luis Borges and His Visionary Intertexts
Jorge Luis Borges’s Aleph, a tiny point in space that reflects the whole universe, has a truly global lineage, a fact acknowledged by the author himself at the end of his story. Claiming that he quotes from one of Captain Richard Burton’s manuscripts, he lists a whole series of similar optical devices, which appear in texts as different as One Thousand and One Nights, Lucian of Samosata’s Vera Historia, and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. In this paper, I propose to complicate this intertextual network by adding a medieval source that has been overlooked in scholarship on Borges: the allegorical poem Le Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, which tells the story of a Lover who enters a wonderful garden in his sleep and starts the quest for his Rose, allegory of the beloved. Perhaps the main reason why critics have ignored Le Roman lies in Borges’s essay “De las alegorías a las novelas” (1949), where he calls it “laberíntico” and dismisses the whole allegorical art as stupid, frivolous, and intolerable for a contemporary reader. My argument is that, in fact, he owes it much more than he would like to admit. In both Borges’s poetry and fiction, his lifelong obsession with rose symbolism is tied to de Lorris and de Meun’s poem as well. I will pay particular attention to the episode of Narcissus’s pool, which prefigures the workings of his Aleph. To mediate this medieval connection, I will bring up two other sources that had a great influence on Borges’s thinking: T.S. Eliot’s cycle of poems Four Quartets and H.G. Wells’s short story “The Door in the Wall,” both with a vision of a magical garden at heart. The (re)discovery of this literary tradition should provide new insight into Borges’s attitude towards allegorical method, questions of memory, and the nature of the visionary experience itself.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Maria Dabija http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Precursors and Their Borges: Premodern Sculpting in Modern Time
Borges is boundless: his texts leave no uncrossed boundaries between distant and close, early and late, medieval and modern. However, such boundlessness is by no means a result of his supposedly morally weightless playfulness, which many postmodernists were glad to see as a worthy harbinger. As I intend to show in this essay, Borges’s main intellectual, literary, and ethical strategy is what might be called time condensation: using his astonishing erudition, Borges shows that our modern and secularized world, where each generation perceives itself as new, unique and unprecedented, is composed of countless strata created by the collective experience of past generations. Borges’s enterprise is consistent with the intellectual and artistic projects of modernism (including the works of Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka) as it strives to provide an alternative to the linear, irreversible, and secularised time of the modern world; an alternative constructed as a matter of interpretive choice and at the same time a moral and existential choice: to recognize or deny the ethical dimension of time. Jewish ideas played an important, though not the only, role in shaping Borges’s vision of condensed time, as did, more generally, his lifelong sympathetic observation of the unique historical destiny of the Jewish people. Hence, I argue, the formalist tendency in recent scholarship to ‘translate’ Borges’s Jewish theme into a dehistoricized and essentialized language of literary tropes, a sophisticated mind game that bears no relation to actual (Jewish) history, often comes at the cost of turning a blind eye to the ethical dimension of Borges’s intellectual project.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Michael Makarovsky http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Historias sobre historias: Una visión borgesiana de la circulación premoderna
Along with other goods, texts, ideas and stories traveled along the Silk Road. One famous case of East-West circulation was the 1001 Nights. Another story, the Great Renunciation (the best-known version being the story of the Buddha) traveled across space and time, transforming, adapting and generating scores of versions. Scholars from the nineteenth century on have reflected on the global migration of stories, whether to point out the universal elements that account for the stories' transcultural adaptability, or to focus on the modular units that generate an exponential multiplicity of variants, in the wake of Goethean morphology. However, most often, premodern stories do not fold themselves neatly into the major contemporary theories of literary circulation, whether Franco Moretti’s model of imported form and local content, or Pascale Casanova’s Meridian model with its centripetal trajectory of texts through translations and literary prizes. David Damrosch’s definition of world literature as a “mode of reading and of circulation” does apply, but only in a broad and general sense. In this way, the East-West circulation of premodern tales offer a good point of entry into the current anxieties about the “presentism” of contemporary world literature theories. In this context, Borges's writings prove to be especially rewarding, offering us, not only a powerful re-reading of premodern literature, but also pathways for conceptualizing premodern circulation. The present essay looks at the ways in which these complicate, and also build on, an iconic master trope of literary circulation which is widely recognized as foundational to our discipline: the trope of the marketplace. Several of Borges’s stories and essays (“La busca de Averroes”, the essays on the circulation of the Buddha legend, and the texts about the 1001 Nights), offer both a metatextually productive illustration of current, often aporetical debates about global literary circulation, and creative strategies for a renewal of literary practice by returning to minor and/or archaic forms.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Dominique Jullien http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
An Author Born in Exile: Julio Cortázar between Rayuela and Libro de Manuel
Among the writers of the Latin American Boom, Julio Cortázar is generally thought as one who breaks with tradition, imagines a new reader, and creates a new concept of author and the writing process. Against this view, my essay looks into what’s become the commonplace of Cortázar’s figure by reconstructing his career as a writer. Using cultural studies as my framework, I show how he became a writer while in exile, especially thanks to Hopscotch and its major influence on other writers. Since the Argentinian literature of the 1970s requires both an autonomous and a heteronomous perspective, Cortázar's work emerges at a paradigm shift: from an avant-garde time when he still trusts in the possibility of action through words to a time when he turns skeptically to postmodernity. His creation lives at the threshold of confidence and painful skepticism. Cortázar's work is the result of a vast melancholic encyclopedia that emerges at a paradigm shift, a shift that is still ongoing.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Adriana A. Bocchino http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Literaturnost and Anti-Nationalism in the Poetics of J.L. Borges and D. Kiš
Jorge Luis Borges and Danilo Kiš’s anti-nationalist positions – Kiš's rejection of Sartre’s art engagé and Borges' defense of an apolitical conservatism in the prologue to El informe de Brodie (1970) – are closely related to their poetics. Kiš references Borges's work constantly, adopting some of his devices, strategies, and positions. Despite these similarities, their poetics differ, as do the sociopolitical contexts of their works: Kiš often starts from Borgesian premises but uses them to construct an argument that validates his own poetics. I will begin by highlighting some central aspects of their different poetics and then analyze Kiš’s essayistic references to Borges that legitimize his own work.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Eugenio López Arriazu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Is Being Argentinean Being Far Away? Julio Cortázar’s Sides and Futures
In the 1970s, Cortázar underwent a series of ideological and aesthetical transformations, following his participation in the Latin American emancipation movements, but also in the context of a general world paradigm shift. Writing and conceptualizing his Latin Americanism from France, where he was living, Cortázar's work offers us interesting ways to understand a changing world. In turn, this approach offers us an equally suggestive way to rethink Cortázar. This article examines critically several of these mirroring aspects and effects.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Olga Lobo http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
“We Have a Right to This Tradition”: The Cosmopolitan Writer and Liberal Right
The vast critical bibliography that has dealt with “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” overlooked a crucial detail for the conceptualization of Borges’ cosmopolitanism: the essay characterizes the relationship of the marginal/interstitial writer to Western/universal culture in terms of a cosmopolitan right that must be read in relation to the liberal philosophical and political tradition that extends from John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” (1859) to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958). Based on this new interpretation and historicization of Borges’ cosmopolitanism, this article presents a re-reading of “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” but also of the relationship between literature and justice and of the rough edges that connect and pull apart the notion of right at stake in Borges’ essay and the civil rights that Perón’s government sanctioned and curtailed.
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Mariano Siskind http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Argentine Writers, Tradition, and World Literature: Borges and Cortázar
Sva prava zadržana (c) 2024 Delia Ungureanu, Ksenija Vraneš http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Escritores argentinos, tradición y literatura mundial: Borges y Cortázar