This compilation of essays takes a fresh look at Borges’s work. A wide variety of topics, ranging from the European avant-garde to the impact of European science upon Argentine literature, is discussed from a mutiplicity of angles – the only unifying factor being the year 1996, when nearly all the essays were written. Most of them were presented as papers at a one-day conference held at the Institute of Romance Studies, in conjunction with the Institute of Latin American Studies. The purpose was to re-examine the work of Borges in the wake of the great changes in reading that ‘theory’ had brought about and which Borges had somehow foreshadowed, though of course not systematised.
Contributors Include: Daniel Balderston, University of Iowa; Malcolm Bowie, University of Oxford; Gabriel Josipovici, University of Sussex; Bernard McGuirk, University of Nottingham; Sylvia Molloy, New York University; Eduardo L. Ortiz, Imperial College; William Rowe, Birkbeck College, London; Jason Wilson, University College, London.