Borges and Joyce : a comparative study

• Main Author: Novillo-Corvalan, Patricia
• Published: Birkbeck (University of London) 2007
• Subjects: 800
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.499074

My thesis examines the literary relationship between Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce. It demonstrates that Borges's conflictual relation with Joyce produces complex intersections that centre upon issues such as the reception of Joyce in Spain and Latin America; translation as an act of recreation across linguistic, historical and cultural boundaries; fictional projects concerned with the notion of infinity and total recollection; the clash of literary genres in contrasting narrative expressions (epic magnitude vs. compressed ficciones); and the ubiquitous presence of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare in their literary productions. The thesis comprises two parts. Part I consists of two chapters which examine the relationship between the two writers from a historical viewpoint that offers a comprehensive survey of Borges's reception of Joyce from 1925 to 1946 in various Buenos Aires periodicals. It suggests that Borges played a decisive role in the dissemination of Joyce's work in the Hispanic world with his pioneering reviews of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and fragmentary translation of 'Penelope'. Part II consists of four chapters. Principally, it is concerned with the practice and methodology of comparative literature as a pluralistic forum that negotiates the complex relations between Borges and Joyce and inscribes them within a larger corpus of writings and theoretical perspectives. The first chapter develops Borges's suggested 1941 analogy between 'Funes the Memorious' and Ulysses and discusses it through a network of scientific, theological and philosophical discourses in conjunction with the ancient tradition known as the art of memory. The final chapters investigate Borges and Joyce's triadic conversation with Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. These foreground the crucial fact that their intersections with the Western tradition are mediated by a long-standing English critical heritage that informs and infuses Borges's and Joyce's twentieth-century conceptions of the three canonical writers, and equally contributes to their mutual endeavors to generate new versions or afterlives of their works, as they shift Homer, Dante and Shakespeare into new cultures, languages and ideologies