Daniel Balderston

Most known for his creative fictions that tackle literary questions of authorship as well as more philosophical notions such as multiverse theory, Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has captivated scholars from a variety of disciplines since his emergence on the international scene. However, much of the scholarship surrounding Borges does not focus on the reception of Borges's works in the fields of philosophy, the visual arts, film, political science, media theory, mathematics, and law, nor does it consider how his affiliations and interests changed over the course of his long life. In The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges, editors Daniel Balderston and Nora Benedict, along with a team of international scholars, contextualize Jorge Luis Borges's work for a new generation of twenty-first-century readers and critics. This volume shifts the emphasis to Borges's working life, his writing processes, his collaborations and networks, and the political and cultural background of his production. The Handbook also evaluates his impact on a variety of other fields ranging from political science and philosophy to media studies and mathematics. The volume highlights current debates among Borges scholars, reevaluating how the physical forms and socio-political contexts of Borges's writings both shaped and determined specific readerships around the world. Incorporating such broader perspectives into the Handbook brings out tensions, continuities, and discontinuities in Borges's work, allowing for a much more nuanced understanding of it.

En 1924 el novelista chileno Augusto D’Halmar publicó una audaz novela que cuenta el amor entre un cura vasco y un joven andaluz en Sevilla en la época anterior a la Primera Guerra Mundial. Un clásico de la literatura queer latinoamericana, esta edición crítica presenta por primera vez un texto corregido (a base del cotejo de varias ediciones) con un abundante aparato crítico, que da cuenta de la complejidad cultural de la novela: el uso del latin eclesiástico, el orientalismo, las referencias a la música española de la época, a la historia y la arquitectura de Sevilla, y al uso de una lengua forjada a base del castellano peninsular con mucha atención al vocabulario hispano-árabe y de dialectos regionales españoles. A la vez, se anotan las referencias implícitas a la vida y obras de D’Halmar y de algunos de sus contemporáneos chilenos. Este tomo inaugura la nueva Serie S del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, a cargo de Daniel Balderston. ~ In 1924 the Chilean novelist Augusto D'Halmar published a daring novel that tells the story of the love between a Basque priest and a young Andalusian in Seville in the days before the First World War. A classic of Latin American queer literature, this critical edition presents for the first time a corrected text (based on the comparison of several editions) with abundant critical commentary which accounts for the cultural complexity of the novel: the use of ecclesiastical Latin, Orientalism, references to the Spanish music of the time, to the history and architecture of Seville, and to the use of a language forged from peninsular Castilian with great attention to the Hispano-Arabic vocabulary and regional Spanish dialects. At the same time, implicit references to the life and works of D'Halmar and some of his Chilean contemporaries are noted. This volume inaugurates the new Series S of the International Institute of Ibero-American Literature, by Daniel Balderston.

A distinguished poet and essayist and one of the finest writers of short stories in world letters, Jorge Luis Borges deliberately and regularly altered his work by extensive revision. In this volume, renowned Borges scholar Daniel Balderston undertakes to piece together Borges's creative process through the marks he left on paper. Balderston has consulted over 170 manuscripts and primary documents to reconstruct the creative process by which Borges arrived at his final published texts. How Borges Wrote is organized around the stages of the his writing process, from notes on his reading and brainstorming sessions to his compositional notebooks, revisions to various drafts, and even corrections in already-published works. The book includes hundreds of reproductions of Borges’s manuscripts, allowing the reader to see clearly how he revised and ""thought"" on paper. The manuscripts studied include many of Borges’s most celebrated stories and essays-""The Aleph,"" ""Kafka and His Precursors,"" ""The Cult of the Phoenix,"" ""The Garden of Forking Paths,"" ""Emma Zunz,"" and many others-as well as lesser known but important works such as his 1930 biography of the poet Evaristo Carriego. As the first and only attempt at a systematic and comprehensive study of the trajectory of Borges's creative process, this will become a definitive work for all scholars who wish to trace how Borges wrote.

An NYRB Classics Original Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious. Italo Calvino has written that no other writer "better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us." Jorge Luis Borges flatly declared, "Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature." Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world's most individual and finest.

Despite the explosion of critical writing on gender and sexuality, relatively little work has focused on Latin America. Sex and Sexuality in Latin America: An Interdisciplinary Readerfills in this gap. Daniel Balderston and Donna J. Guy assert that the study of sexuality in Latin America requires a break with the dominant Anglo-European model of gender. To this end, the essays in the collection focus on the uncertain and contingent nature of sexual identity. Organized around three central themes--control and repression; the politics and culture of resistance; and sexual transgression as affirmation of marginalized identities--this intriguing collection will challenge and inform conceptions of Latin American gender and sexuality. Covering topics ranging from transvestism to the world of tango, and countries as diverse as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, this volume takes an accessible, dynamic, and interdisciplinary approach to a highly theoretical topic. "Opens up new conceptual horizons for exploring gender and sexuality. . . . In stimulating readers to think 'outside the box' of established academic notions of sexuality and gender, Sex and Sexuality in Latin America illustrates the sometimes mind-boggling mission of iconoclastic scholarship. The well-written essays are thought-provoking analyses on the cutting edge of gender scholarship." ? Latin American Research Review, vol. 36, no. 3, 2001

In Jorge Luis Borges's finely wrought, fantastic stories, so filigreed with strange allusions, critics have consistently found little to relate to the external world, to history--in short, to reality. Out of Context corrects this shortsighted view and reveals the very real basis of the Argentine master's purported "irreality." By providing the historical context for some of the writer's best-loved and least understood works, this study also gives us a new sense of Borges's place within the context of contemporary literature. Through a detailed examination of seven stories, Daniel Balderston shows how Borges's historical and political references, so often misread as part of a literary game, actually open up a much more complex reality than the one made explicit to the reader. Working in tension with the fantastic aspects of Borges' work, these precise references to realities outside the text illuminate relations between literature and history as well as the author's particular understanding of both. In Borges's perspective as it is revealed here, history emerges as an "other" only partially recoverable in narrative form. From what can be recovered, Balderston is able to clarify Borges's position on historical episodes and trends such as colonialism, the Peronist movement, "Western culture," militarism, and the Spanish invasion of the Americas. Informed by a wide reading of history, a sympathetic use of critical theory, and a deep understanding of Borges's work, this iconoclastic study provides a radical new approach to one of the most celebrated and-until now-hermetic authors of our time.

In Jorge Luis Borges's finely wrought, fantastic stories, so filigreed with strange allusions, critics have consistently found little to relate to the external world, to history--in short, to reality. Out of Context corrects this shortsighted view and reveals the very real basis of the Argentine master's purported "irreality." By providing the historical context for some of the writer's best-loved and least understood works, this study also gives us a new sense of Borges's place within the context of contemporary literature. Through a detailed examination of seven stories, Daniel Balderston shows how Borges's historical and political references, so often misread as part of a literary game, actually open up a much more complex reality than the one made explicit to the reader. Working in tension with the fantastic aspects of Borges' work, these precise references to realities outside the text illuminate relations between literature and history as well as the author's particular understanding of both. In Borges's perspective as it is revealed here, history emerges as an "other" only partially recoverable in narrative form. From what can be recovered, Balderston is able to clarify Borges's position on historical episodes and trends such as colonialism, the Peronist movement, "Western culture," militarism, and the Spanish invasion of the Americas. Informed by a wide reading of history, a sympathetic use of critical theory, and a deep understanding of Borges's work, this iconoclastic study provides a radical new approach to one of the most celebrated and-until now-hermetic authors of our time.

The enormous body of short story anthologies from the nineteen countries of Spanish America and Brazil testifies to their importance for writers, editors, readers, and, especially, for schools and universities, teachers and students. The study of anthologies and their contents can be particularly revealing for many of the questions looming large in critical discourse, particularly those on canon formation and the relations between literature and cultural institutions; but researching this corpus is difficult because it varies greatly in quality, distribution, and format. The present volume for the first time gathers this mass of material and organizes it for systematic study. The main section comprises annotated listings of 1302 short story anthologies: those with stories from all or most of the countries grouped together, including a section of English-language anthologies; those from countries of a region; and those from individual nations. For most entries a full listing of contents is provided along with brief commentary. A second section comprises annotated bibliographies of criticism of the short story, similarly arranged with materials for Latin America as a whole as well as regionally and nationally. The volume ends with four indexes: of authors of the stories; of authors of essays, introductions, and other critical materials; of titles of the critical works; and of themes. An essential tool for scholars working on Latin American narrative, this bibliography will also serve as a practical finding aid for individual writers and stories.

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