Nataly Tcherepashenets
Encounters
This review article oers a detailed analysis of Lisa Block de Behar's Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation (2003), an innovative and erudite study that bridges the passions of the semiotician and the literary critic. The Uruguayan scholar offers illuminating insights into Borges' oeuvre and takes a new step in delineating similarities between specific questions of semiotics and his imagination. Inspired by her perceptive observation that Borges has oered a new dimension in the use of quotations by demonstrating the impossibility of not quoting, I analyze his story ‘A Weary's Man Utopia,’ which enters into an implicit dialogue with such classical texts as Thomas More's Utopia, H. G. Wells' The Time Machine and Henry James' The Sense of the Past to comment on the notion of language as a system of quotes. Furthering Block de Behar's insight into the creative process of Borges as writer, in the course of which he uses his earlier written texts to fashion new works, I discuss Borges' creative version of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to suggest that Borges' translations are also informed by his own fiction and poetry.
Semiotica, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0037-1998
Volume: 2006, 06/2006
Pages: 345 - 355
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