Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Borges, Jorge Luis - Beatriz Sarlo (essay date 1993)

Beatriz Sarlo (essay date 1993)

SOURCE: “Borges and Argentine Literature,” in Borges Studies on Line. J. L. Borges Center for Studies & Documentation. January 13, 1993, pp. 1–15.

[In the following essay, Sarlo examines the influence of Argentine literature on Borges's writing.]

Borges's work offers one of the paradigms—perhaps the paradigm—of Argentine literature. This is a literature constructed, like the nation itself, in a marginal country, out of different influences: European culture, the criollo tradition and the Spanish language spoken with a River Plate accent. The place which Borges inhabits, which he invented in his first three books of poetry published in the nineteen twenties¹, is what he called ‘las orillas’. From the outset, Borges rejected the kind of utopian ruralism that Ricardo Güiraldes had put forward in Don Segundo Sombra (1925), a classic novel which traces the education...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass