Borges, Buddhism and World Literature

Borges, Buddhism and World Literature PDF Author: Dominique Jullien
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030047172
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
This book follows the renunciation story in Borges and beyond, arguing for its centrality as a Borgesian compositional trope and as a Borgesian prism for reading a global constellation of texts. The renunciation story at the heart of Buddhism, that of a king who leaves his palace to become an ascetic, fascinated Borges because of its cross-cultural adaptability and metamorphic nature, and because it resonated so powerfully across philosophy, politics and aesthetics. From the story and its many variants, Borges’s essays formulated a 'morphological' conception of literature (borrowing the idea from Goethe), whereby a potentially infinite number of stories were generated by transformation of a finite number of 'archetypes'. The king-and-ascetic encounter also tells a powerful political story, setting up a confrontation between power and authority; Borges’s own political predicament is explored against the rich background of truth-telling renouncers. In its poetic variant, the renunciation archetype morphs into stories about art and artists, with renunciation a key requirement of the creative process: the discussion weaves in and out of Borges to highlight modern writers’ debt to asceticism. Ultimately, the enigmatic appeal of the renunciation story aligns it with the open-endedness of modern parables.

Borges, Buddhism and World Literature

Borges, Buddhism and World Literature PDF Author: Dominique Jullien
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030047172
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book follows the renunciation story in Borges and beyond, arguing for its centrality as a Borgesian compositional trope and as a Borgesian prism for reading a global constellation of texts. The renunciation story at the heart of Buddhism, that of a king who leaves his palace to become an ascetic, fascinated Borges because of its cross-cultural adaptability and metamorphic nature, and because it resonated so powerfully across philosophy, politics and aesthetics. From the story and its many variants, Borges’s essays formulated a 'morphological' conception of literature (borrowing the idea from Goethe), whereby a potentially infinite number of stories were generated by transformation of a finite number of 'archetypes'. The king-and-ascetic encounter also tells a powerful political story, setting up a confrontation between power and authority; Borges’s own political predicament is explored against the rich background of truth-telling renouncers. In its poetic variant, the renunciation archetype morphs into stories about art and artists, with renunciation a key requirement of the creative process: the discussion weaves in and out of Borges to highlight modern writers’ debt to asceticism. Ultimately, the enigmatic appeal of the renunciation story aligns it with the open-endedness of modern parables.

Seven Nights

Seven Nights PDF Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811218382
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
The incomparable Borges delivered these seven lectures in Buenos Aires in 1977; attendees were treated to Borges' erudition on the following topics: Dante's The Divine Comedy, Nightmares, Thousand and One Dreams, Buddhism, Poetry, The Kabbalah, and Blindness.

Conversations

Conversations PDF Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780857421883
Category : Authors, Argentine
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina s master fabulist, was also an extraordinary conversationalist. There s not a subject he doesn t throw surprising new light on, whether it s to do with Kipling or tango. In fact, there s an impish element in his thinking. In these dialogues with a receptive Osvaldo Ferrari, he covers Buddhism, love, Henry James, Dante and much more as he circles round and digresses at whim. One cannot be sure where the 84-year-old blind man s wit will lead him, except that it s his form of freedom. Even if he s covered the subject before, this time round there s a new flash of insight. He s an optimist. There s always more to say. As with his written work as a whole, these dialogues configure a loose autobiography of a subtle, teasing mind. Looking back on his long life, it s no surprise that time and dreaming become topics, but these dialogues are not a memoir for all time is now. As in his tale The Other, where two Borges meet up on a bench beside the river Charles, we have a dialogue between a young poet and the elder teller of tales where all experience floats in a frightening miracle that defies linear time."

Jorge Luis Borges in Context

Jorge Luis Borges in Context PDF Author: Robin Fiddian
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108470445
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is Argentina's most celebrated author. This volume brings together for the first time the numerous contexts in which he lived and worked; from the history of the Borges family and that of modern Argentina, through two world wars, to events including the Cuban Revolution, military dictatorship, and the Falklands War. Borges' distinctive responses to the Western tradition, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Kafka, and the European avant garde are explored, along with his appraisals of Sarmiento, gauchesque literature and other strands of the Argentine cultural tradition. Borges' polemical stance on Catholic integralism in early twentieth-century Argentina is accounted for, whilst chapters on Buddhism, Judaism and landmarks of Persian literature illustrate Borges's engagement with the East. Finally, his legacy is visible in the literatures of the Americas, in European countries such as Italy and Portugal, and in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, representing the Global South.

The Book of Sand

The Book of Sand PDF Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Dutton Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Thirteen new stories by the celebrated writer, including two which he considers his greatest achievements to date, artfully blend elements from many literary geares.

The Face

The Face PDF Author: Ruth Ozeki
Publisher: Restless Books
ISBN: 1632060159
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
In Time Code of a Face, bestselling author Ruth Ozeki recounts, in moment-to-moment detail, a profound encounter with memory and the mirror. The author challenges herself to spend three hours staring into her own reflection, recording her thoughts, and noticing every possible detail. Those solitary hours open up a lifetime's worth of meditations on race, age, family, death, the body, self doubt and, finally, acceptance. In a lyrical essay suffused with her Zen Buddhist practice and thoroughly unlike anything in the author's celebrated novels, Ozeki shows us just how rich and intimate the terrain of one's own face can be. Praise for Ruth Ozeki “Ozeki is one of my favorite novelists....bewitching, intelligent, hilarious, and heartbreaking, often on the same page.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of This Is How You Lose Her “Ozeki joins the constellation of such environmentally aware writers as Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx, and Margaret Atwood.” —Chicago Tribune “A careful, considerate writer.” —Booklist Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. Her first two novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), have been translated into eleven languages and published in fourteen countries. Her most recent work, A Tale for the Time-Being (2013), won the LA Times book prize, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critic's Circle Award, and has been published in over thirty countries. Ruth's documentary and dramatic independent films, including Halving the Bones, have been shown on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and at colleges and universities across the country. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth was ordained in 2010 and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She lives in British Columbia and New York City, and is currently the Elizabeth Drew Professor of Creative Writing at Smith College.

Collected Fictions

Collected Fictions PDF Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140286802
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in a single volume “An event, and cause for celebration.”—The New York Times A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books. Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Labyrinths

Labyrinths PDF Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
ISBN: 9780141184845
Category : Classical fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays showcasing one of Latin America's most influential and imaginative writers. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, with an introduction by James E. Irby and a preface by André Maurois. Jorge Luis Borges was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his stories, including the celebrated 'Library of Babel', whose infinite shelves contain every book that could ever exist, 'Funes the Memorious' the tale of a man fated never to forget a single detail of his life, and 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', in which a French poet makes it his life's work to create an identical copy of Don Quixote. In later life, dogged by increasing blindness, Borges used essays and brief tantalising parables to explore the enigma of time, identity and imagination. Playful and disturbing, scholarly and seductive, his is a haunting and utterly distinctive voice. Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A poet, critic and short story writer, he received numerous awards for his work including the 1961 International Publisher's Prize (shared with Samuel Beckett). He has a reasonable claim, along with Kafka and Joyce, to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. If you enjoyed Labyrinths, you might like Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis and Other Stories, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'His is the literature of eternity'Peter Ackroyd, The Times 'One of the towering figures of literature in Spanish'James Woodall, Guardian 'Probably the greatest twentieth-century author never to win the Nobel Prize'Economist

An End to Suffering

An End to Suffering PDF Author: Pankaj Mishra
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429933631
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
An End to Suffering is a deeply original and provocative book about the Buddha's life and his influence throughout history, told in the form of the author's search to understand the Buddha's relevance in a world where class oppression and religious violence are rife, and where poverty and terrorism cast a long, constant shadow. Mishra describes his restless journeys into India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, among Islamists and the emerging Hindu middle class, looking for this most enigmatic of religious figures, exploring the myths and places of the Buddha's life, and discussing Western explorers' "discovery" of Buddhism in the nineteenth century. He also considers the impact of Buddhist ideas on such modern politicians as Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. As he reflects on his travels and on his own past, Mishra shows how the Buddha wrestled with problems of personal identity, alienation, and suffering in his own, no less bewildering, times. In the process Mishra discovers the living meaning of the Buddha's teaching, in the world and for himself. The result is the most three-dimensional, convincing book on the Buddha that we have.

The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love

The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love PDF Author: Humberto Maturana Romesín
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1845403762
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The central concern of this book is us human beings. The authors' basic question is: ‘How is it that we can live in mutual care, have ethical concerns, and at the same time deny all that through the rational justification of aggression?' The authors answer this basic question indirectly by providing a look into the fundaments of our biological constitution, concentrating on what they term emotioning, that is the flow of emotions in daily life that guides the flow of the systemic conservation of a manner of living. Maturana and Verden-Zöller claim that the fundamental emotion that gave rise to humans as sapient languaging beings was love, and that this remains our fundament even when other emotions become socially prevalent.