Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

Mark O'Connell (Trinity College Dublin)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 5.1.1: Hispanic Writing and Culture of South America.
Vol. editors: Kate Averis (Universidad de Antioquia), Ben Bollig (University of Oxford), Ceire Broderick (University College Cork), Nuala Finnegan (University College Cork), Anna Forné (Gothenburg University), Cara Levey (University College Cork), Carolina Orloff (Independent Scholar - Europe), Lori Oxford (Western Carolina University), Ailsa Peate (University of Westminster)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1949

Places

Argentina (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Story Collection

Resources

The Aleph, published in Spanish as El Aleph in 1949, is a collection of short fiction by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Published eight years after Fictions, its seventeen stories consolidate Borges’ move away from the thematic terrain of his early stories (published in English in A Universal History of Infamy (1935)), which displayed a preoccupation with Argentina’s criminal underworld. The Aleph, like the stories in Fictions, is overwhelmingly concerned with the themes of time, infinity and identity, and further establishes labyrinths and mirrors as the quintessentially Borgesian motifs. (After Borges, it would be difficult for any author to incorporate these elements into their …

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2681 words

Citation: O'Connell, Mark. "The Aleph". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 July 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14414, accessed 25 November 2024.]

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