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(2019) Borges, Buddhism and world literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Drawing primarily on Borges's essays on Buddhism written in the critical decade of the Fifties, this chapter sets up the Borgesian paradigm for Renunciation stories. Borges emphasizes their transcultural and transhistorical circulation—an idea that interfaces with his anti-nationalist aesthetics in "The Argentine Writer and Tradition"—and suggests a theory of literature as "morphology" (a notion borrowed from Goethe): a potentially infinite number of poems and stories generated by transformation of a finite number of "archetypes". Alongside this morphological conception of literature, the theme of apolitical withdrawal and the figure of Buddha as Renouncer also assume a heightened significance in the context of Argentina's postwar political history.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04717-7_1
Full citation:
Jullien, D. (2019). A Borgesian morphology: renunciation, morphology, and world literature, in Borges, Buddhism and world literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-21.
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