Keywords
Borges, Aleph
Abstract
Faced with the need to represent Jorge Luis Borges’s classic tale “The Aleph,” which also gives name to his 1949 collection of stories, for decades publishers have resorted to a variety of dependable images, including works by Borges’s friend Xul Solar. Yet the argument of the tale is that no human language, either verbal or visual, is capable of summing up the fullness of the object Borges’s narrator discovers in a dark Buenos Aires basement. That object—the universe itself—is unrepresentable.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Stavans, Ilan
(2017)
"Against Representation: A Note on Jorge Luis Borges’ Aleph,"
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature:
Vol. 42:
Iss.
1, Article 8.
https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1995
Included in
Latin American Literature Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Spanish Literature Commons
