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Chapter 28 - Borges and the ‘Boom’

from Part II - The Western Canon, the East, Contexts of Reception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2020

By
Dominic Moran
Edited by
Robin Fiddian
Robin Fiddian
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Borges’s impact on the ’Boom’ writers of Spanish American narrative consists of several factors, beginning with his unapologetic universalism. His translations of authors including Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner broadened literary horizons. He provided the Boom novelists with a model of style and verbal artifice that broke with previous practices. His laconic humour and playfulness enliven the works of García Márquez, Cabrera Infante, Donoso, and Cortázar, who all acknowledge a debt. Borges also equipped them with a set of narrative tehcniques and devices which allowed them to represent the worlds around them with previously unimagined sophistication and sweep. His insistence on reader-involvement in the construction of the literary work is another item of his legacy.

Keywords

universalismtranslatorstylehumourtechniquesreader-involvement
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Chapter
Information
Jorge Luis Borges in Context , pp. 228 - 235
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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