TALK “Jorge Luis Borges: works and thinking” at Instituto Cervantes, 48, Hanuman Road, Connaught Place (CP) > 11:30am on 27th August 2016

Jorge Luis Borges

Time : 11:30 am Add to Calendar 27/08/2016 11:30 27/08/2016 01:00 Asia/Kolkata TALK “Jorge Luis Borges: works and thinking” Event Page : http://www.delhievents.com/2016/08/talk-jorge-luis-borges-works-and.html Instituto Cervantes, 48, Hanuman Road, Connaught Place (CP), New Delhi - 110001 DD/MM/YYYY

Entry : Free

Venue : Instituto Cervantes, 48, Hanuman Road, Connaught Place (CP), New Delhi - 110001
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Metro : Nearest Metro Station - 'Rajiv Chowk' (Yellow Line and Blue Line)
Area : Connaught Place (CP)

Event Description : TALK  “Jorge Luis Borges: works and thinking” by Deepika Teckchandani, Indrani Mukherjee, Malabika Bhattacharya, Rama Paul, Sonya Gupta, Carlos Varona.
LITERATURE AND THINKING 

On this seminar the audience will know more about Jorge Luis Borges and his works. 

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion.

Borges' works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century,[2] considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges' A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia).[2][3] However, some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist.

“Looking through the Borgesian Garden of Forking Paths at Sujoy Ghosh’s film Kahani” by Indrani Mukherjee.

If the physical world is a projection of the mind in Borges, then this paper argues that analogously his “Garden of forking paths” (1941) can be read as the pre-text of Kahani (by Sujoy Ghosh, 2012). Both texts articulate liminal heterotopias of contesting spatiality which subvert time-space grammars in order to politicise the most banal issues of subjectivity and agency of sub-national lesser/gendered identities. In Garden of …, Irish and Chinese identities compete and clash with British and German nationalisms in a recreated imagined space of a world war. Similarly in Kahani a women has to play with her docile body to outsmart structural gender dynamics of a misogynist society and the Kolkata police. The questions of simultaneity of time and spaces, mirrors and labyrinths and outlandish intelligence and jigsaw puzzles of the texts themselves serve as such, that is as mirrors and labyrinths to the readership before which this game plays out. A new pedagogy is enabled, charged with libidinal anxieties full of intrigue and suspense which draw from the entanglements of the detective genre. However, they won’t finally resolve all problems as they leave out the intelligent lesser being even more alienated and alone. Yet in the end, the ‘lesser’ subjects are able to break the codes of unbelonging/accommodation of urban labyrinths even at the cost of despair and death.

“Reading, Rereading and Borges” by Rama Paul

As far as literature can be traced, one finds that the Aristotelian plot has by and large foregrounded most of the literary writing that establishes itself upon the set-up (the beginning), the confrontation (constituting the middle) and the resolution (the climax, the finale or the happily ever after). Thus, even the reading of this literature, predominantly, complies with the quasi-Cartesian perspective of narrative model that equates any literary work with one that is having a beginning, the middle, and consequently an end. This model has persevered even through the generic evolution of writing itself: from Greek tragedies to English comedies, from epics to romances, and novels and stories. (In my mind the only clear exception to this may be the poetry that seems to have transcended this Aristotelian plot.) However, this narrative model becomes sketchy and falls short when we read prose of Jorge Luis Borges. The comfortable departure that the reader takes in reading narratives in the ‘traditional’ way leaves her stranded within the text in Borges’ fictional writings. As Peter Brooks states in Reading for the Plot that “all narrative posits, if not the Sovereign Judge, at least a Sherlock Holmes capable of going back over the ground, and thereby realising the meaning of the cipher left by a life” (p. 34). But in Borges’ works the reader fails in her attempt to cipher the text for she always is within the text that she reads, and thus, finally comes the realisation that this text cannot be wholly mastered/deciphered. Nonetheless, this realisation is attained through a process of reading and rereading the  text. And the very act of reading and subsequent re-readings lead the reader to get further embroiled in the
text itself until the reader recognises the very model of reading that she has followed till now becomes obsolete in Borges’ works. So then how does one go about reading Borges? What new models to subscribe and what new methods to follow to unravel the text? If reading is an intersubjective concept that underscores the relation between text and a reader, in Borges, this exercise takes a more complex turn that urges the reader to forge that relation with the text wherein she participates in its artistic creativity. Therefore, in this paper, using some of the fictions of Borges I will try to attempt to examine the very act of reading and
rereading.

“Enlightenment in Borges: Endless quest for salvation and truth” by Deepika Teckchandani
The objective of this paper is to show how the story “The approach to Al-Mu’tasim” lays the groundwork for a new genre called philosophical short story and how quest for salvation becomes a dominant theme in many of his later works like “The Zahir”. Why does obsession with perfection cause desperation? Why does obsession with the absolute truth result in madness and death? These are some of the questions that I will try to answer in this paper through Borges’ understanding of Buddhism.

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