Literature and Borges

Don Quixote, written by Miguel de Cervantes, tells the story of Alonso Quixano, a middle-aged gentleman who, influenced by his extensive reading of chivalric romances, decides to become a knight-errant. He renames himself Don Quixote and, with his squire Sancho Panza, embarks on a series of adventures. These adventures often involve Don Quixote's misinterpretation of reality, such as mistaking windmills for giants and inns for castles. The novel explores themes of reality vs. imagination, the decline of chivalry, and the human condition. Eventually, Don Quixote returns home, regains his sanity, and renounces his chivalric ambitions before his death.

Ulysses is a groundbreaking and complex modernist novel that chronicles the experiences of three Dubliners over a single day. The novel is loosely based on Homer's epic poem 'The Odyssey', with Leopold Bloom paralleling Odysseus, Stephen Dedalus paralleling Telemachus, and Molly Bloom paralleling Penelope. It explores themes such as antisemitism, human sexuality, British rule in Ireland, Catholicism, and Irish nationalism. The novel is known for its innovative use of language and narrative techniques, including stream-of-consciousness and multiple literary styles. It captures the essence of early 20th-century Dublin, providing a detailed snapshot of the city's social, political, and cultural landscape.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of seven generations of the Buendía family, founders of the fictional town of Macondo. The novel spans a hundred years of turbulent Latin American history, from the postcolonial 1820s to the 1920s. It is a tale of love, loss, and the cyclical nature of history, filled with magical realism that blends the supernatural with the ordinary. The story follows the family's experiences, including civil war, marriages, births, and deaths, and explores themes such as solitude, fate, and the inevitability of repetition in history. The novel is renowned for its narrative style and its influence on the literary movement known as the Latin American Boom.

Published in 1973, 'Gravity's Rainbow' is a sprawling narrative that delves into the secret development and deployment of the V-2 rocket by the Nazis. The story follows a diverse cast of characters, including Lieut. Tyrone Slothrop, an American working for Allied Intelligence in London, who becomes embroiled in a mysterious connection between his erections and the targeting of incoming V-2 rockets. The novel is characterized by its complex and diverse prose, incorporating elements of history, philosophy, psychology, and science fiction. It explores themes of paranoia, the impact of technology, and the blurring of lines between reality and fiction. The novel won the National Book Award for fiction in 1974 and is widely regarded as a literary masterpiece.

Collected Fictions brings together all of Borges’s magical stories, newly translated into English by Andrew Hurley. The collection includes stories from various periods of Borges’s career, such as 'A Universal History of Iniquity', 'The Garden of Forking Paths', 'Artifices', 'The Aleph', 'Dreamtigers', 'In Praise of Darkness', 'Brodie’s Report', 'The Book of Sand', and 'Shakespeare’s Memory'. These stories are known for their philosophical and mind-warping themes, experimenting with genres like detective stories and fantasy to question and reinvent everyday reality.

In 'The Order of Things,' Michel Foucault examines the historical development of the human sciences, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. He introduces the concept of 'episteme,' which refers to the underlying structure of thought that defines what is considered true and acceptable in a given historical period. Foucault analyzes how these epistemes change over time, particularly from the Classical Age to Modernity, and how they influence the fields of language, biology, and economics. The book is known for its complex and detailed analysis, including a forensic examination of Diego Velázquez's painting 'Las Meninas' to illustrate the structural parallels in perception and representation.