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Borges And The Basques: Notes On Reading An Invisible Literature, David Laraway

BOGA: Basque Studies Consortium Journal

Critics and readers sometimes unnecessarily limit the scope of what is to be counted as “Basque literature” to texts originally composed in Euskera. In the present study I argue for a hermeneutics of Basque literature that does not seek to identify Basque literature by means of the language of composition, theme, or any particular biographical information about the author. Taking the work of Jorge Luis Borges as a touchstone—and , in particular, his canonical short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”—I sketch a strategy for reading Basque literature from a minimalist perspective that takes the identity of a …