Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Borges, Jorge Luis - Paolo Bartoloni (essay date 1997)

Paolo Bartoloni (essay date 1997)

SOURCE: “Spatialised Time and Circular Time: A Note on Time in the Work of Gerald Murnane and Jorge-Luis Borges,” in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, October, 1997, pp. 185-90.

[In the following essay, Bartoloni compares the use of time and travel in the fictions of Borges and the Australian writer, Gerald Murane.]

The image of the journey in time characterises much of twentieth-century fiction—Joyce, Mann, Proust, Svevo and Woolf bear witness—and finds in Australian writing a fertile ground. In fact, the interplay between past and present appears to be one of the recurrent motifs among Australian poets and writers either by virtue of a preoccupation with the inner and outer landscape (White, Jolly, Wallace-Crabbe, Dessaix to name only a few) or with cultural biography and ethnicity (Castro, Mudrooroo, Lazaroo, Cappiello, for instance). The representation of time is not only the object...

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