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Full-Text Articles in Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature
The Oldest Trick In The Book: Borges And The "Rhetoric Of Immediacy'', James Winchell
The Oldest Trick In The Book: Borges And The "Rhetoric Of Immediacy'', James Winchell
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In his most "philosophical'' texts, Jorge Luis Borges paradoxically posits the act of reading as the scene of affectively "immediate" experience: his reader reads a reader reading (ad infinitum). This sort of hyper-meditated, specular imitation actually comes to mirror the substantive preoccupation of the "philosophical" text itself. Borges thereby breaks down what Theodor Adorno calls "concept fetishism'' by making mimesis his textual concept. Given Italo Calvino's claim for the novelty of "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" in relation to modern genres, I propose a two-fold thesis: first, that this typically Borgesian narrative juxtaposes concept and mimesis (a traditional …