Global Borges: Patrimony, Identity, and the World in Contemporary Hispanic Literature

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) is one of the most prolific and recognized authors in Latin American and World literature. Many of his most salient themes and symbols are still consistently apparent throughout twenty-first century texts produced in the global Hispanophone, including metaphysics, metafiction, epistemology, mathematics, mirrors, and labyrinths, among others. Despite Borges’ continued influence, however, there is a noticeable dearth of research that explores the relationship between Borges’s famed advocacy of world and global traditions presented throughout his own narratives and in essays like “El escritor argentino y la tradición” and global Hispanophone literatures of the twenty-first century. This thesis therefore examines these cross-cultural and transnational connections across a variety of authors, genres, and spaces. It identifies the Borgesian Archive as a new literary motif that offers a theory of how to read and understand global Hispanophone literatures. The Borgesian Archive consists of four fundamental factors that mold and transform with each author and work: 1) a post-modern, global context; 2) a reframing of the Borgesian narrative as metafictional, metaphysical, and political; 3) an epistemological doubt of absolute knowledge of the universe and the human being’s place in it; and 4) the construction of self, identity, and reality through literature. I argue that a diverse group of twenty-first-century Latin American, Spanish, Caribbean, and Latinx authors mobilize Borgesian tropes to position their work within the context of World literature and therefore give it a global import. Ranging over feminist texts, metafiction, and detective novels, this dissertation employs a broad scope to analyze how Borges and Borgesian literature permits Hispanic authors to explore their identity and patrimony in contemporary, global society.