Jorge Luis Borges and (Western) Tradition

Abstract

Jorge Luis Borges has achieved a central position in the Western canon. Not only have his celebrated ficciones influenced writers as different as John Barth and Umberto Eco, but also have his stories and, to a lesser degree, his essays been central to the development of the critical theories of Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom, among others. It is not surprising that in the introduction to the English-language translation of Ficciones, a text written in 1962, when Borges was only beginning to be known outside Argentina, Anthony Kerrigan argues, “The work of Jorge Luis Borges is a species of international literary meta phor” (9). However, as the distinct, though not incompatible, works of Beatriz Sarlo and Edna Aizenberg have demonstrated, this “international meta phor” was also rooted in the specific Argentine and South American locations from which he wrote.