Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

The Strange Loop: Paradoxical Hierarchies In Borges's Fictions, Jessica Erin Beebe

Honors Projects

In Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter studies how three great minds created their own version of what he calls the “Strange Loop.” The Strange Loop is a paradoxical construction, a shift from one level of abstraction to another that somehow gives rise to a closed, eternal cycle. In other words, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. I argue that this paradoxical model is prevalent in Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories and that by applying Hofstadter’s model to Borges’s …