The transformational journey archetype begins long before literature in rites of initiation when a child undergoes a journey full of tests and temptations, perilous encounters in an underworld, and visions that transf...The transformational journey archetype begins long before literature in rites of initiation when a child undergoes a journey full of tests and temptations, perilous encounters in an underworld, and visions that transform the child into a member of a tribe. Before this archetype is translated by the written word into literature, the telling of the story is not just the account of something that happened long ago in the past, but an actual reenactment of the events for the audience. The journey archetype appears in the earliest example of literature, Homer＇s Odyssey, where Homer makes the readers both an observer and participant in the transformation. The journey does not always, as in rites of initiation, involve a child and occur only once in life. Instead, the journey may begin in death and trauma and involve a person who must resume that journey over again as an adult. Such is the fate of Aeneas in Virgil＇s Aeneid whose transformative journey begins with the burning towers of Troy. In these two early epics the heroes suffer the loss of an older world and must resume their pursuit of new identities in a new world after descending to a land of death or underworld to consult ancestor figures who prepare them for the transition to a new life, identity, and destiny. The reader of these works participates in the journeys the heroes undertake and learns to renew contact with the sources of life and consciousness in myth, magic, and vision. Dante＇s journey through the Inferno to his vision of God in Paradiso is a culmination of this transformative experience and vision, whose intent is to transform us as well through imaginative and intellectual participation in the journey. In Jorge Luis Borges＇s parody of Dante in his story, ＂El Aleph＂, Borges goes beyond Dante in making the reader, not only a participant in the journey and vision, but a ＂writer＂ whom Borges evokes to transform the impossible vision of the Aleph into an illusion of reality. Unlike Dante＇s positive transformational vision of the universe as a harmonious cosmos embraced within the vision of God as if it were a book uniting its multiple pages in one binding, the vision of the Aleph confronts the protagonist and readers with a universe that is random and chaotic, a vision that is disillusioning rather than transformational.展开更多
An observer at Iguazu Falls tries to make sense of the inexpressible natural wonder through the texts of Jorge Luis Borges＇s essays and poems. Borges＇s paradoxes of time, immortality, and eternity give meaning to th...An observer at Iguazu Falls tries to make sense of the inexpressible natural wonder through the texts of Jorge Luis Borges＇s essays and poems. Borges＇s paradoxes of time, immortality, and eternity give meaning to the vision, while the natural wonder gives substance to those idealist concepts derived from Berkeley. As a reader of Borges＇s fictions, I yield up my personal identity to an impersonal dreaming consciousness that resembles Berkeley＇s mind as a consciousness sustaining the reality I perceive. Borges writes in his poem ＂Dawning＂ that ＂ideas are not like marble, everlasting, but ever-renewing like a forest or a river＂. The cataracts of Iguazu are both eternal and immortal, eternal in the sense of removing our consciousness of time and confusing past, present, and future in constant repetition, and immortal in the sense of only existing in individual drops of water constantly disappearing and renewing in infinite repetition. The cataracts are perfect emblems of this immortality. The cataracts are time, infinite moments of immortality, moving forward, accelerating, repeating themselves identically, until they achieve a certain eternity, no motion, suspended in time. I am Berkeley＇s Eternal Spirit, the consciousness evoked by Borges in his essay, ＂A New Refutation of Time＂. Distance from the immediate impact of the Falls helps transform fear and horror into sublimity. The closer to the Falls, the more the observer feels fear and anguish at his own insignificance, a fear of annihilation. Aesthetic distance requires an image or word, something that exempts us from immediate contact, and allows us to descend into the whirlpool and come back to the calm surface. The vision evoked in writing and reading fiction is both prior and subsequent to the reading. Our vision of the universe is always inexpressible, a problem of accommodating something overwhelming to the limited schemata we use to grasp existence.展开更多
The concept of chaos is present in man from the origins of mankind.Philosophy is alien to this concept and proceeds to speculate about its reality.Both Kant and Borges were not indifferent to this speculation and in t...The concept of chaos is present in man from the origins of mankind.Philosophy is alien to this concept and proceeds to speculate about its reality.Both Kant and Borges were not indifferent to this speculation and in their works,we can find“the effort to explain or to approach”the concept of chaos.Our first aim is to demonstrate in Kant’s The Critique of Judgement,and more precisely in The Analytic of the Sublime,what Kant understands as“chaos.”Our second aim is to establish a relationship between Kant and Borges in some of Borges’tales.Finally,we aim at establishing whether this“language of chaos”can refer to a sort of communication which exceeds logic language,i.e.,a sort of“mute logos.”展开更多
This article reviews famous monsters in Western literature that reveal a hidden humanity or affinity with the hero that elicits compassion or emphasizes their bestiality in surprising ways. Their monstrosity is often ...This article reviews famous monsters in Western literature that reveal a hidden humanity or affinity with the hero that elicits compassion or emphasizes their bestiality in surprising ways. Their monstrosity is often a distorted mirror image of the hero＇s humanity. Shakespeare＇s Caliban is a famous example of the affinity between monster and protagonist. Homer＇s Polyphemus, the first monster in Western tradition establishes certain traits that persist through later literature： lawless, barbarian, cannibal, and giant. Polyphemus hates men, but loves his old ram. Grendel, Grendel＇s mother, and the dragon in Beowulf are giants, lawless, cannibals. The dragon Beowulf dies fighting anticipates the identity between hero and monster that Borges makes explicit in Asterion, the Minotaur. Dante＇s Satan in the Inferno fails to leave later successors. In Borges＇s ＂The House of Asterion＂ the Minotaur is both monster and hero. Asterion＇s affinities with other protagonists in Borges＇ stories suggest that the monster in the labyrinth is not the Minotaur, but the concept of infinity.展开更多
Close reading and inter-textual analysis of Borges＇ essays, fiction, and poetry suggest a poetics of visible unrealities, a fiction that calls attention to its own artifice. Borges＇s poetics of reading and dreaming ...Close reading and inter-textual analysis of Borges＇ essays, fiction, and poetry suggest a poetics of visible unrealities, a fiction that calls attention to its own artifice. Borges＇s poetics of reading and dreaming require another poetics of the work as a text that calls attention to its own artifice. In reading Borges＇ fiction, the separate roles and identities of reader, writer, and work of fiction merge and exchange roles, powers, and identities and are transformed into a single act of dreaming, which assumes cosmogonic and apocalyptic risks. In the dominant role given to the reader, the work of fiction as an object or work of art does not exist unless it is read. There is no determinate text, only a version of our own we re-write and invent every time we read the text. The author＇s reading is not a spontaneous evocation of vision, but an artifice, as artificial as the writing of the fiction. As writers and readers we are composed of texts and schemata, alphabets and artifacts, not merely mental perceptions and ideas. The reader requires a prior text to copy, translate, and recreate, and that text only exists as a fictional microcosm in so far as it is being read by a Reader who is able to actualize the revelation only imminent within it.展开更多
Borges wants his reader to use imagination to participate in his fiction, to imagine the vision of the universe as anAleph. The vision of the Aleph is paradoxical, impossible, inexpressible--a point in space, in the b...Borges wants his reader to use imagination to participate in his fiction, to imagine the vision of the universe as anAleph. The vision of the Aleph is paradoxical, impossible, inexpressible--a point in space, in the basement of ahouse in Buenos Aires, where all other points in the universe are simultaneously present. The reader sees theAleph--or the illusion of the Aleph, watching it emerge as if through Borges＇ own eyes, as an unrequited lover andfrustrated poet gradually accommodating the infinite vision to the limitations of actual perception. The illusion ofactual presence the reader evokes seems to include the reader as both a subject reading and an object in the vision.The reader mirrors himself in the enumeration as the reader imaginatively projects associations and expectationsinto the images in order to make sense of them. The reader tries to avoid involving himself in the vision, but theimages the writer presents the reader with are ambiguous, schematic, demanding intervention to try to resolveapparently unresolved contradictions by trying out the different interpretations that may make sense of them. Overand over again in reading the enumeration the reader encounters images that allow him to convert sequence intosimultaneity, part into whole. Other images suggest the presence of infinite, multiple, perspectives on each objectconverging in the Aleph and reveal insights into hidden designs and into secret interiors of structures. The visionthe reader reads must seem to exceed the limits of language and perception. Opposed to images of disintegrationand chaotic dispersal are microcosmic images that suggest a whole reflected or contained in its parts, worldsreflected within worlds by infinite regress. Infinite regress undermines the assumption of a subject and objectdichotomy in the act of reading and enhances the illusion of participation in the vision. Infinite regress, imagewithin image, world within world, is a symmetry that asserts itself against the illusion of the enumeration asapparently random and chaotic and reinforces the illusion of infinite convergence on one point in space. Thesuccess of this illusion depends partly on Borges＇ success in finding a stylistic formula that encourages the reader toevoke a total, simultaneous vision from a partial, sequential listing of images. The I saw...l saw...l saw formulaprovides a minimal formal order for referring each separate image to the concept of a total vision withoutinterfering with the illusion of actual participation by calling attention too much to the artifice that holds the visiontogether. Just as the separate images of the enumeration threaten to break loose from their minimal syntacticalframe and assume autonomy of their own, so the enumeration itself seems to assume autonomy from its narrativecontext. Within the context of a story of failed mediation in which every attempt at communication is interrupted,aborted, or comically transformed into unanticipated consequences, the reader seems to have resolved the problemof poetics Borges the writer poses to him as a reader. The reader＇s reading of Borges＇ fiction is a kind of hypothesisthe reader projects into his words in response to a problem of inexpressibility the writer poses for the reader justbefore he attempts to describe the Aleph. Similarly this fiction requires a certain kind of reader and reading--areader who intervenes in the fiction to complete with our imagination what the writer only hints at or denies, and areader who seeks out those contradictions or refutations in our interpretation that indicates our reading is onlypartial and falsifying, a hypothesis we propose in response to a problem of inexpressibility the writer has posed.展开更多
This paper attempts to focus on Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Gospel according To Mark. Borges, an Argentina short storywriter and translator, whose motherland is under long-term western colonization, identifi e...This paper attempts to focus on Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Gospel according To Mark. Borges, an Argentina short storywriter and translator, whose motherland is under long-term western colonization, identifi es himself unconsciously with the western culture. Hisworks mostly touch upon the themes of religion and philosophy. Along with post-colonialism theory’s springing up, critics began to analyze hisworks from the post-colonial perspective. The author thinks that this short story with religious implication parallels to the cultural invasion in theperiod of colonization, from powerful culture to weaker one. The author, thus, aims to use Michael Foucault’s viewpoints concerning power andknowledge to probe into the western cultural hegemony and ideological invasion refl ected in this story. Besides, the loss and construction of theethnic identity of the colonized will be discussed in details.展开更多
This paper attempts to trace the influence of Jorge Luis Borges on Ge Fei. It shows that Ge Fei＇s stories share Borges＇s narrative form though they do not have the same philosophical premises as Borges＇s to support...This paper attempts to trace the influence of Jorge Luis Borges on Ge Fei. It shows that Ge Fei＇s stories share Borges＇s narrative form though they do not have the same philosophical premises as Borges＇s to support them. What underlies Borges＇s narrative complexity is his notion of the inaccessibility of reality or divinity and his understanding of the human intellectual history as epistemological metaphors. While Borges＇s creation of narrative gap coincides with his intention of demonstrating the impossibility of the pursuit of knowledge and order, Ge Fei borrows this narrative technique from Borges to facilitate the inclusion of multiple motives and subject matters in one single story, which denotes various possible directions in which history, as well as story, may go. Borges prefers the Jungian concept of archetypal human actions and deeds, whereas Ge Fei tends to use the Freudian psychoanalysis to explore the laws governing human behaviors. But there is a perceivable connection between Ge Fei＇s rejection of linear history and traditional storyline with Borges＇ explication of epistemological uncertainty, hence the former＇s tremendous debt to the latter. Both writers have found the conventional narrative mode, which emphasizes the telling of a coherent story having a beginning, a middle, and an end, inadequate to convey their respective ideational intents.展开更多
文摘The transformational journey archetype begins long before literature in rites of initiation when a child undergoes a journey full of tests and temptations, perilous encounters in an underworld, and visions that transform the child into a member of a tribe. Before this archetype is translated by the written word into literature, the telling of the story is not just the account of something that happened long ago in the past, but an actual reenactment of the events for the audience. The journey archetype appears in the earliest example of literature, Homer＇s Odyssey, where Homer makes the readers both an observer and participant in the transformation. The journey does not always, as in rites of initiation, involve a child and occur only once in life. Instead, the journey may begin in death and trauma and involve a person who must resume that journey over again as an adult. Such is the fate of Aeneas in Virgil＇s Aeneid whose transformative journey begins with the burning towers of Troy. In these two early epics the heroes suffer the loss of an older world and must resume their pursuit of new identities in a new world after descending to a land of death or underworld to consult ancestor figures who prepare them for the transition to a new life, identity, and destiny. The reader of these works participates in the journeys the heroes undertake and learns to renew contact with the sources of life and consciousness in myth, magic, and vision. Dante＇s journey through the Inferno to his vision of God in Paradiso is a culmination of this transformative experience and vision, whose intent is to transform us as well through imaginative and intellectual participation in the journey. In Jorge Luis Borges＇s parody of Dante in his story, ＂El Aleph＂, Borges goes beyond Dante in making the reader, not only a participant in the journey and vision, but a ＂writer＂ whom Borges evokes to transform the impossible vision of the Aleph into an illusion of reality. Unlike Dante＇s positive transformational vision of the universe as a harmonious cosmos embraced within the vision of God as if it were a book uniting its multiple pages in one binding, the vision of the Aleph confronts the protagonist and readers with a universe that is random and chaotic, a vision that is disillusioning rather than transformational.
文摘An observer at Iguazu Falls tries to make sense of the inexpressible natural wonder through the texts of Jorge Luis Borges＇s essays and poems. Borges＇s paradoxes of time, immortality, and eternity give meaning to the vision, while the natural wonder gives substance to those idealist concepts derived from Berkeley. As a reader of Borges＇s fictions, I yield up my personal identity to an impersonal dreaming consciousness that resembles Berkeley＇s mind as a consciousness sustaining the reality I perceive. Borges writes in his poem ＂Dawning＂ that ＂ideas are not like marble, everlasting, but ever-renewing like a forest or a river＂. The cataracts of Iguazu are both eternal and immortal, eternal in the sense of removing our consciousness of time and confusing past, present, and future in constant repetition, and immortal in the sense of only existing in individual drops of water constantly disappearing and renewing in infinite repetition. The cataracts are perfect emblems of this immortality. The cataracts are time, infinite moments of immortality, moving forward, accelerating, repeating themselves identically, until they achieve a certain eternity, no motion, suspended in time. I am Berkeley＇s Eternal Spirit, the consciousness evoked by Borges in his essay, ＂A New Refutation of Time＂. Distance from the immediate impact of the Falls helps transform fear and horror into sublimity. The closer to the Falls, the more the observer feels fear and anguish at his own insignificance, a fear of annihilation. Aesthetic distance requires an image or word, something that exempts us from immediate contact, and allows us to descend into the whirlpool and come back to the calm surface. The vision evoked in writing and reading fiction is both prior and subsequent to the reading. Our vision of the universe is always inexpressible, a problem of accommodating something overwhelming to the limited schemata we use to grasp existence.
文摘The concept of chaos is present in man from the origins of mankind.Philosophy is alien to this concept and proceeds to speculate about its reality.Both Kant and Borges were not indifferent to this speculation and in their works,we can find“the effort to explain or to approach”the concept of chaos.Our first aim is to demonstrate in Kant’s The Critique of Judgement,and more precisely in The Analytic of the Sublime,what Kant understands as“chaos.”Our second aim is to establish a relationship between Kant and Borges in some of Borges’tales.Finally,we aim at establishing whether this“language of chaos”can refer to a sort of communication which exceeds logic language,i.e.,a sort of“mute logos.”
文摘This article reviews famous monsters in Western literature that reveal a hidden humanity or affinity with the hero that elicits compassion or emphasizes their bestiality in surprising ways. Their monstrosity is often a distorted mirror image of the hero＇s humanity. Shakespeare＇s Caliban is a famous example of the affinity between monster and protagonist. Homer＇s Polyphemus, the first monster in Western tradition establishes certain traits that persist through later literature： lawless, barbarian, cannibal, and giant. Polyphemus hates men, but loves his old ram. Grendel, Grendel＇s mother, and the dragon in Beowulf are giants, lawless, cannibals. The dragon Beowulf dies fighting anticipates the identity between hero and monster that Borges makes explicit in Asterion, the Minotaur. Dante＇s Satan in the Inferno fails to leave later successors. In Borges＇s ＂The House of Asterion＂ the Minotaur is both monster and hero. Asterion＇s affinities with other protagonists in Borges＇ stories suggest that the monster in the labyrinth is not the Minotaur, but the concept of infinity.
文摘Close reading and inter-textual analysis of Borges＇ essays, fiction, and poetry suggest a poetics of visible unrealities, a fiction that calls attention to its own artifice. Borges＇s poetics of reading and dreaming require another poetics of the work as a text that calls attention to its own artifice. In reading Borges＇ fiction, the separate roles and identities of reader, writer, and work of fiction merge and exchange roles, powers, and identities and are transformed into a single act of dreaming, which assumes cosmogonic and apocalyptic risks. In the dominant role given to the reader, the work of fiction as an object or work of art does not exist unless it is read. There is no determinate text, only a version of our own we re-write and invent every time we read the text. The author＇s reading is not a spontaneous evocation of vision, but an artifice, as artificial as the writing of the fiction. As writers and readers we are composed of texts and schemata, alphabets and artifacts, not merely mental perceptions and ideas. The reader requires a prior text to copy, translate, and recreate, and that text only exists as a fictional microcosm in so far as it is being read by a Reader who is able to actualize the revelation only imminent within it.
文摘Borges wants his reader to use imagination to participate in his fiction, to imagine the vision of the universe as anAleph. The vision of the Aleph is paradoxical, impossible, inexpressible--a point in space, in the basement of ahouse in Buenos Aires, where all other points in the universe are simultaneously present. The reader sees theAleph--or the illusion of the Aleph, watching it emerge as if through Borges＇ own eyes, as an unrequited lover andfrustrated poet gradually accommodating the infinite vision to the limitations of actual perception. The illusion ofactual presence the reader evokes seems to include the reader as both a subject reading and an object in the vision.The reader mirrors himself in the enumeration as the reader imaginatively projects associations and expectationsinto the images in order to make sense of them. The reader tries to avoid involving himself in the vision, but theimages the writer presents the reader with are ambiguous, schematic, demanding intervention to try to resolveapparently unresolved contradictions by trying out the different interpretations that may make sense of them. Overand over again in reading the enumeration the reader encounters images that allow him to convert sequence intosimultaneity, part into whole. Other images suggest the presence of infinite, multiple, perspectives on each objectconverging in the Aleph and reveal insights into hidden designs and into secret interiors of structures. The visionthe reader reads must seem to exceed the limits of language and perception. Opposed to images of disintegrationand chaotic dispersal are microcosmic images that suggest a whole reflected or contained in its parts, worldsreflected within worlds by infinite regress. Infinite regress undermines the assumption of a subject and objectdichotomy in the act of reading and enhances the illusion of participation in the vision. Infinite regress, imagewithin image, world within world, is a symmetry that asserts itself against the illusion of the enumeration asapparently random and chaotic and reinforces the illusion of infinite convergence on one point in space. Thesuccess of this illusion depends partly on Borges＇ success in finding a stylistic formula that encourages the reader toevoke a total, simultaneous vision from a partial, sequential listing of images. The I saw...l saw...l saw formulaprovides a minimal formal order for referring each separate image to the concept of a total vision withoutinterfering with the illusion of actual participation by calling attention too much to the artifice that holds the visiontogether. Just as the separate images of the enumeration threaten to break loose from their minimal syntacticalframe and assume autonomy of their own, so the enumeration itself seems to assume autonomy from its narrativecontext. Within the context of a story of failed mediation in which every attempt at communication is interrupted,aborted, or comically transformed into unanticipated consequences, the reader seems to have resolved the problemof poetics Borges the writer poses to him as a reader. The reader＇s reading of Borges＇ fiction is a kind of hypothesisthe reader projects into his words in response to a problem of inexpressibility the writer poses for the reader justbefore he attempts to describe the Aleph. Similarly this fiction requires a certain kind of reader and reading--areader who intervenes in the fiction to complete with our imagination what the writer only hints at or denies, and areader who seeks out those contradictions or refutations in our interpretation that indicates our reading is onlypartial and falsifying, a hypothesis we propose in response to a problem of inexpressibility the writer has posed.
文摘This paper attempts to focus on Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Gospel according To Mark. Borges, an Argentina short storywriter and translator, whose motherland is under long-term western colonization, identifi es himself unconsciously with the western culture. Hisworks mostly touch upon the themes of religion and philosophy. Along with post-colonialism theory’s springing up, critics began to analyze hisworks from the post-colonial perspective. The author thinks that this short story with religious implication parallels to the cultural invasion in theperiod of colonization, from powerful culture to weaker one. The author, thus, aims to use Michael Foucault’s viewpoints concerning power andknowledge to probe into the western cultural hegemony and ideological invasion refl ected in this story. Besides, the loss and construction of theethnic identity of the colonized will be discussed in details.
文摘This paper attempts to trace the influence of Jorge Luis Borges on Ge Fei. It shows that Ge Fei＇s stories share Borges＇s narrative form though they do not have the same philosophical premises as Borges＇s to support them. What underlies Borges＇s narrative complexity is his notion of the inaccessibility of reality or divinity and his understanding of the human intellectual history as epistemological metaphors. While Borges＇s creation of narrative gap coincides with his intention of demonstrating the impossibility of the pursuit of knowledge and order, Ge Fei borrows this narrative technique from Borges to facilitate the inclusion of multiple motives and subject matters in one single story, which denotes various possible directions in which history, as well as story, may go. Borges prefers the Jungian concept of archetypal human actions and deeds, whereas Ge Fei tends to use the Freudian psychoanalysis to explore the laws governing human behaviors. But there is a perceivable connection between Ge Fei＇s rejection of linear history and traditional storyline with Borges＇ explication of epistemological uncertainty, hence the former＇s tremendous debt to the latter. Both writers have found the conventional narrative mode, which emphasizes the telling of a coherent story having a beginning, a middle, and an end, inadequate to convey their respective ideational intents.
