Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 15 - Borges and Popular Culture

  • from Part I - Self, Family, and the Argentine Nation
  • Edited by Robin Fiddian, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Jorge Luis Borges in Context
    Published online:
    16 January 2020
    Print publication:
    23 January 2020, pp 123-129

  • Summary

    Against a certain perception of him as a cerebral writer with sophisticated philosophical tastes, the focus of much of Borges’s life and work is the popular or even the vulgar: the gaucho code; the hoodlums/compadritos of Buenos Aires; pirates and gangsters; tangos; classical Hollywood movies, and so forth. Following his biography of dissolute poet, Evaristo Carriego, ’Man on Pink Corner’ features criminal low-lifes and is Borges’s first real story published in a book. The figure of the gaucho appears in certain canonical stories of the 1940s - ’The South’, for example. A poem from the early 1960s, ’The Tango’, indulges an urban nostalgia and is elegiac. Detective stories had an abiding appeal for Borges. And the cinema inspired him to collaborate on a number of screenplays, author reviews, and translate aspects of cinematic style into his fictions. Borges’s influence on filmmakers was profound and extensive.