Borges Our Contemporary

Autori

  • Longxi Zhang Hunan Normal University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18485/beoiber.2024.8.2.11

Apstrakt

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.

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ZHANG Longxi has taught in the US and Hong Kong and is currently Xiaoxiang Chair Professor of Comparative Literature at Hunan Normal University in Changsha, China. He is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and also of Academia Europaea, and a former President of the International Comparative Literature Association (2016-19). He serves as an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of World Literature and has published more than 20 books and numerous articles in English or Chinese on East-West comparative studies. His books in English include The Tao and the Logos (Duke, 1992), Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, 1998), Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Cornell, 2005), Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (Toronto, 2007), From Comparison to World Literature (SUNY, 2015), A History of Chinese Literature (Routledge, 2023), and most recently, World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon (Routledge, 2024).

Reference

Borges, Jorge Luis. «The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.» Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952. Trans. Ruth Simmons. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964a. 101-105. Print.

—. «Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.» Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. Trans. James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964b. 3-18. Print.

—. «The Argentine Writer and Tradition.» Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. Trans. James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964c. 177-185. Print.

—. «The Wall and the Books.» Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. Trans. James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964d. 186-188. Print.

—. The Book of Sands. Trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973a. Print.

—. Borges on Writing. Ed. di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern, and Frank MacShane. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973b. Print.

—. «Facing the Year 1983.» Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems. Trans. Nicomedes Suárez Araúz et al. Housatonic, Mass.: Lascaux Publishers, 1984. 11-16. Print.

Brook, Timothy. Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. London: Profile Books, 2009. Print.

Díaz, Hernán. Borges, between History and Eternity. New York: Continuum, 2012. Print.

Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 1997. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. Print.

Hubert, Rosario. «Sinology on the Edge: Borges’s Reviews of Chinese Literature (1937-1942).» Variaciones Borges 39 (2015): 81-101. Print.

King, John. «Editor’s Preface.» Beatriz Sarlo. Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge. Ed. John King. London: Verso, 1993. vii-xviii. Print.

Ramsey, Rachel. «China and the Ideal of Order in John Webb’s An Historical Essay…» Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (July 2001): 483-503. Print.

Sarlo, Beatriz. Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge. Ed. John King. London: Verso, 1993. Print.

Shaw, Donald L. Borges’ Narrative Strategy. Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1992. Print.

Webb, John. An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language Of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language. London: Printed for Nath. Brook, 1669. Print.

Zhang Longxi. «The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West.» Critical Inquiry 15.1 (Autumn 1988): 108-31. Print.

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Objavljeno

2024-12-29

Kako citirati

Zhang, L. „Borges Our Contemporary“. BEOIBERISTIKA - Časopis Za Iberijske, latinoameričke I Komparativne Studije (ISSN: 2560-4163 Online), том 8, изд. 2, Децембар 2024., стр. 237-49, doi:10.18485/beoiber.2024.8.2.11.

Broj časopisa

God. 8 Br. 2 (2024): Argentinski pisci, tradicija i svetska književnost: Borhes i Kortasar

Sekcija

KNJIŽEVNOST

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