The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges

Most known for his creative fictions that tackle literary questions of authorship as well as more philosophical notions such as multiverse theory, Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has captivated scholars from a variety of disciplines since his emergence on the international scene. However, much of the scholarship surrounding Borges does not focus on the reception of Borges's works in the fields of philosophy, the visual arts, film, political science, media theory, mathematics, and law, nor does it consider how his affiliations and interests changed over the course of his long life.

In The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges, editors Daniel Balderston and Nora Benedict, along with a team of international scholars, contextualize Jorge Luis Borges's work for a new generation of twenty-first-century readers and critics. This volume shifts the emphasis to Borges's working life, his writing processes, his collaborations and networks, and the political and cultural background of his production. The Handbook also evaluates his impact on a variety of other fields ranging from political science and philosophy to media studies and mathematics. The volume highlights current debates among Borges scholars, reevaluating how the physical forms and socio-political contexts of Borges's writings both shaped and determined specific readerships around the world. Incorporating such broader perspectives into the Handbook brings out tensions, continuities, and discontinuities in Borges's work, allowing for a much more nuanced understanding of it.

Daniel Balderston is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs the Borges Center and its journal Variaciones Borges. He earned his B.A. in English from the University of California-Berkeley and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton. He has published or edited fifteen books on Borges, and has published widely on other writers including José Bianco, Silvina Ocampo, Augusto Roa Bastos, Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer and Juan Carlos Onetti, as well as on translation studies and sexuality studies. Much of his recent work focuses on Borges's manuscripts.

Nora Benedict is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Digital Humanities at the University of Georgia. She received her MA in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Virginia. Her research centers on Latin American literature, book history, and digital and print cultures. Her first monograph, Borges and the Literary Marketplace (Yale, 2021), explains how the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges's general involvement in the publishing industry influenced his formation as a writer and global book markets. Beyond her research on Borges, her second monograph in progress, Taking a Page from Their Books, examines how international publishing firms in the Global North capitalized on the economic, political, and cultural opportunities available to them in the book industry in Latin America. For her accomplishments in research at UGA, she recently was awarded the Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award.

Introduction
Daniel Balderston and Nora Benedict

Chronology

Part I: Borges: Family, Working Life

1. Borges: Biography and its Discontents
Daniel Balderston

2. The Secret Sharer: Borges as Reader
Magdalena Cámpora and Mariana Di Ció

3. From the Other Side of the Library: Borges in Newspapers and Magazines
Sylvia Saítta

4. Developing a Porteño Style in Form and Content: Borges and the Editorial Proa
Nora Benedict

5. Borges: Three Times a Translator
Patricia Willson

6. Borges's Lectures: Literature, Travels and Orality
Mariela Blanco

7. Jobs and Days: Jorge Luis Borges and the Library as a Scene for Literary Production
Laura Rosato and Germán Álvarez

Part II: Representative Works

8. Orality and Literacy in Borges: Two Manuscripts of "Del culto de los libros" [On the Cult of Books]
Daniel Balderston

9. The 1920s Poetry of Jorge Luis Borges: Remapping, Nostalgia and Mythification
Sebastián Hernaiz

10. The Art of Recapitulation: The Early Essays (1920-1936)
Nicolás Lucero

11. Inventing Authors, Imagining Books: An Invisible Literary History
Julio Premat

12. Knives, Vendettas, Bifurcations: Detective Fiction in Borges
Júlio Pimental Pinto

13. Borges, Anthologizer of the Fantastic
Emron Esplin

14. Anthologies of the Self: Borges's Self-Figuration Process between 1935 and 1960
Sebastián Urli

15. The Middle Essays and Reviews
Dardo Scavino

16. Virgil's Keepsakes: Memory and Oblivion Poetic Form
Silvio Mattoni

17. Borges's Self-Figuration Process in the Late Fiction (1970-1983)
Evelyn Fishburn

Part III: Collaboration

18. The Bustos Domecq Cycle: Going with and against the Flow
Mariano García

19. Jorge Luis Borges and the Interview as Theater
Cody C. Hanson

20. Borges and the Creative Economy of the Apocryphal
Alfredo Alonso Estenoz

Part IV: Reception

In Literature

21. A History of Borges's Reception in Argentina
Sergio Pastormerlo

22. Borges and the Crucible of Aesthetic Autonomy in Latin America
Héctor Hoyos

23. Borges's Reception in Europe and the USA
Edwin Williamson

24. Borges in the Eastern Bloc
László Scholz

25. Borges and the Formation of the Literary Global South
Jay Corwin

In Other Fields

26. "Nueva refutación del tiempo" [A New Refutation of Time] and the Portrayal of an Ironic Fate
Marina Martín

27. Borges and Postcolonial Studies: Toward the Universal and Back
Guido Herzovich

28. Borges in French Theory
Bruno Bosteels

29. Borges, Gender, and Sexuality
Amy Kaminsky

30. Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges in the Revista Multicolor de los Sábados
Patricia M. Artundo

31. Borges, Bewitched by Film
Gonzalo Aguilar

32. Political Theory and Borges's Work
Alejandra M. Salinas

33. Bird, Schedule, Name: On Some Media in Borges
John Durham Peters

34. Mirror. Lens. Puzzlebox. Metaphor
William Goldbloom Bloch

35. Faithfulness and Betrayal: Community, Legitimacy, and Identity in Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
Leonardo Pitlevnik