Borges'' Classics - Global Encounters With the Graeco-Roman Past

In Borges' Classics, Laura Jansen reads the oeuvre of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges as a radically globalized model for reimagining our relationship with the classical past. This major study reveals how Borges constructs a new 'physics of reading' the classics, which privileges a paradoxical vision of the canon as universal yet centreless, and eschews fixed ideas about the cultural history of the West. Borges' unique approach transforms classical antiquity into a simultaneously familiar and remote world, whose legacy is both urgent and unstable. In the process, Borges repositions the classical tradition at the intersection of the traditional Western canon and modernist literature of the peripheral West. Jansen's study traces Borges' encounters with the classics through appeal to themes central to Borges' thought, such as history and fiction, memory and forgetfulness, the data of the senses, and the vectors that connect cultures and countries.

List of contents

1. Borges' classical revisions; 2. The flow of Heraclitus; 3. The idea of Homer; 4. Virgil's Touch; 5. Antiquity in the poetic cosmos; 6. Interlude - Borges and global classics; 7. Successors of Borges' classicism.

About the author

Laura Jansen is Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature at the University of Bristol. Her publications include The Roman Paratext: Texts, Frames, Readers (edited; Cambridge, 2014), articles on paratextuality in classical literature and essays on the theory and methods of classical reception.

Summary

Reads the oeuvre of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges as a radically globalized model for reimagining our relationship with the classical past. The first in-depth exploration of Borges' engagement with classical antiquity in any language and a major contribution to the field of global classics and to Borges studies.

Product details

• Authors: Laura Jansen, Laura (University of Bristol) Jansen, Jansen Laura
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.06.2018
• EAN: 9781108418409
• ISBN: 978-1-108-41840-9
• No. of pages: 196
• Series: Classics After Antiquity; Classics after Antiquity
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Antiquity; HISTORY / Ancient / General, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Ancient History, Classical history / classical civilisation, Latin-American Spanish, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: poetry and poets