This book explores the relationship between time, life, and history in the work of Jorge Luis Borges and examines his work in relation to his contemporary, Walter Benjamin. By focusing on texts from the margins of the Borges canon—including the early poems on Buenos Aires, his biography of Argentina's minstrel poet Evaristo Carriego, the stories and translations from A Universal History of Infamy, as well as some of his renowned stories and essays—Kate Jenckes argues that Borges's writing performs an allegorical representation of history. Interspersed among the readings of Borges are careful and original readings of some of Benjamin's finest essays on the relationship between life, language, and history. Reading Borges in relationship to Benjamin draws out ethical and political implications from Borges's works that have been largely overlooked by his critics.

Finalist for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Religion category A Seminary Co-op Notable Book of 2016 In this volume, award-winning cultural critic and controversial public intellectual Ilan Stavans focuses his attention on Jorge Luis Borges's fascination with Jewish culture. Despite not being Jewish himself, Borges wrote essays, poems, and stories dealing with various aspects of Jewish history and culture—from the Holocaust to Kabbalah and from Franz Kafka to the creation of the State of Israel. In periods when anti-Semitism in Argentina was on the rise, Borges was clear in his refutation of such xenophobia, and when Jewish writers were hardly available in Spanish, he was among the first to translate them. Throughout Stavans's discussion of these topics he weaves in personal anecdotes on reading Borges for the first time, hearing him read in Mexico, and looking for him in Buenos Aires. No fan of Borges's classic oeuvre will ever see his legacy in the same way after reading this book.

A Readers Guide to ten of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges' best-known and most widely studied short stories.

The Afterlife of Texts in Translation: Understanding the Messianic in Literature reads Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Derrida’s writings on translation as suggesting that texts exist within a process of continual translation. Understanding Benjamin’s and Derrida’s concept of ‘afterlife’ as ‘overliving’, this book proposes that reading Benjamin’s and Derrida’s writings on translation in terms of their wider thought on language and history suggests that textuality itself possesses a ‘messianic’ quality. Developing this idea in relation to the many rewritings and translations of Don Quijote, particularly the multiple rewritings by Jorge Luis Borges, Edmund Chapman asserts that texts consist of a structure of potential for endless translation that continually promises the overcoming of language, history and textuality itself.

Provides an innovative and theoretically rigorous approach to the subject of testimony in Latin America. This book rethinks the nature of testimony beyond the ground of the human in works produced in Chile and Argentina from the 1970s to the present. Focusing on literature by Juan Gelman, Sergio Chejfec, and Roberto Bolaño, as well as art by Eugenio Dittborn, Kate Jenckes argues that these works represent life, death, and the relation between self and other “beyond the human,” that is beyond the sense that we can know and represent ourselves and others, with powerful implications for our understanding of history, community, and politics. Jenckes engages with the work of Jacques Derrida together with the intellectually rigorous field of Chilean aesthetic theory to explore issues related to the nature of testimony.

A provocative examination of the artistic interpretation of twelve of Borges’s most famous stories.

This book gathers eleven scholarly contributions dedicated to the work of Mexican director Arturo Ripstein. The collection, the first of its kind, constitutes a sustained critical engagement with the twenty-nine films made by this highly acclaimed yet under-studied filmmaker. The eleven essays included come from scholars whose work stands at the intersection of the fields of Latin American and Mexican Film Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Cultural Studies, History and Literary studies. Ripstein’s films, often scripted by his long-time collaborator, Paz Alicia Garciadiego, represent an unprecedented achievement in Mexican and Latin American film. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Ripstein has successfully maintained a prolific output unmatched by any director in the region. Though several book-length studies have been published in Spanish, French, German, and Greek, to date no analogue exists in English. This volume provides a much-needed contribution to the field.