Description
Book SynopsisAvailable for the first time in English, Signs of Borges is widely regarded as the best single book on the work of Jorge Luis Borges. With a critical sensibility informed by Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Blanchot, and the entire body of Borges scholarship, Sylvia Molloy explores the problem of meaning in Borges''s work by remaining true to the uncanniness that is its foundation.
Borges''s sustained practice of the uncanny gives rise in his texts to endless tensions between illusion and meaning, and to the competing desires for fragmentation, dispersal, and stability. Molloy traces the movement of Borges''s own writing by repeatedly spanning the boundaries of genre and cutting across the conventional separations of narrative, lyric and essay, fact and fiction. Rather than seeking to resolve the tensions and conflicts, she preserves and develops them, thereby maintaining the potential of these texts to disturb. At the site of these tensions, Molloy locates the play between me
Trade Review
"I can think of no other scholar of Latin American literature who enjoys and amply deserves the reputation of Sylvia Molloy. She is a brilliant reader and an elegant writer, the one scholar who makes Borges accessible without making him simple."—Doris Sommer, Amherst College
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
1. Shadow Plays 5
2. Textual Rubrications 26
3. Fragments and Greeks 40
4. Postulating a Reality, Selecting a Reality 58
5. Converting the Simulacrum 77
6. Pleasure and Perplexity 95
7. The Buried Foundation 112
Abbreviations 131
Notes 133
Index 139
