Dec 17, 2009

The Aleph | Critical Overview

Borges is universally regarded as a major and powerful figure in twentieth-century literature; indeed, it is as difficult to find a negative critique of Borges’s work as it is to find an essay on the failures of Shakespeare as a dramatist. Most critics agree with James E. Irby, who boldly states in his preface to the 1962 collection Labyrinths that Borges’s work is ‘‘one of the most extraordinary expressions in all Western literature of modern man’s anguish of time, of space, of the infinite.’’

‘‘The Aleph’’ is conventionally praised as one of...