Borges and Bioy Casares: Literary Imagination, Knowledge and Technology

The lecture will focus on the curious or unexpected literary differences between these two closely related writers, who nevertheless are led by their imaginations along remarkably different paths. Borges was consistently interested in imagining problems related to knowledge, solved by means of a poetics which concentrates in the dualities of language, its contradictory nature. In Bioy Casares' case, his narrative imagination, his novels and stories, do not aim toward intellectual or theoretical problems but rather to those sensible phenomena conditioned by mechanical and technological procedures which both facilitate and question the capture, record and conservation of images. Both authors, from opposing perspectives, should question and impugn, each in his own way, the limitations of temporality and space, resorting to a fantasy that assimilated eternity in an instant and the vastness of space in a single point, in one case, or the invention of devices or machines which overcome the very same limitations, in the other. Regardless of these oppositions, both writers coincide in associating knowledge, words, invention and destruction in a single foundational regim.

Lisa Block de Behar (Montevideo)
Seit 2001 Professorin für ‚Analyse der Kommunikation’ an der Universidad de la República, Montevideo. 1976–1989 Professorin für Literaturtheorie am Instituto de Profesores de Montevideo, 1985–1999 Professorin für Semiotik und Theorie der Interpretation an der Universidad de la República, Montevideo, 1996–1999 Direktorin für Kommunikationswissenschaften an der Universidad de la República. 2001 Humboldt-Forschungspreisträgerin in Berlin. Fellowships u.a. als Guggenheim-Fellow, in Yale, Princeton, Bloomington.

Arbeitsschwerpunkte:
Theorie der Intertextualität, Semiotik, Theorie der Interpretation, Zusammenspiel von Sprache und Bildern.

Publikationen (Auswahl):
Dos medios entre dos medios. Sobre la representación y sus dualidades (1987); Una palabra propriamente dicha (1994); Al margen de Borges (1997, it. 1987); Borges ou les gestes d’un voyant aveugle (1998); Borges. La pasión de una cita sin fin (1999)/Borges, The Passion of an Endless Quotation (2002).

Lisa Block de Behar ist in diesem Jahr Gastwissenschaftlerin am Zfl.