Title:
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Borges and Joyce : a comparative study
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My thesis examines the literary relationship between Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce. It
demonstrates that Borges's conflictual relation with Joyce produces complex intersections
that centre upon issues such as the reception of Joyce in Spain and Latin America; translation
as an act of recreation across linguistic, historical and cultural boundaries; fictional projects
concerned with the notion of infinity and total recollection; the clash of literary genres in
contrasting narrative expressions (epic magnitude vs. compressed ficciones); and the
ubiquitous presence of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare in their literary productions.
The thesis comprises two parts. Part I consists of two chapters which examine the
relationship between the two writers from a historical viewpoint that offers a comprehensive
survey of Borges's reception of Joyce from 1925 to 1946 in various Buenos Aires periodicals.
It suggests that Borges played a decisive role in the dissemination of Joyce's work in the
Hispanic world with his pioneering reviews of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and fragmentary
translation of 'Penelope'. Part II consists of four chapters. Principally, it is concerned with the
practice and methodology of comparative literature as a pluralistic forum that negotiates the
complex relations between Borges and Joyce and inscribes them within a larger corpus of
writings and theoretical perspectives. The first chapter develops Borges's suggested 1941
analogy between 'Funes the Memorious' and Ulysses and discusses it through a network of
scientific, theological and philosophical discourses in conjunction with the ancient tradition
known as the art of memory. The final chapters investigate Borges and Joyce's triadic
conversation with Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. These foreground the crucial fact that
their intersections with the Western tradition are mediated by a long-standing English critical
heritage that informs and infuses Borges's and Joyce's twentieth-century conceptions of the
three canonical writers, and equally contributes to their mutual endeavors to generate new
versions or afterlives of their works, as they shift Homer, Dante and Shakespeare into new
cultures, languages and ideologies
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