UPC: 9783030047160 | Literatures of the Americas: Borges Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales (Hardcover)

UPC lookup results for: 9783030047160 | Literatures of the Americas: Borges Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales (Hardcover)

This book follows the renunciation story in Borges and beyond arguing for its centrality as a Borgesian compositional trope and as a Borgesian prism for reading a global constellation of texts. The renunciation story at the heart of Buddhism that of a king who leaves his palace to become an ascetic fascinated Borges because of its cross-cultural adaptability and metamorphic nature and because it resonated so powerfully across philosophy politics and aesthetics. From the story and its many variants Borges s essays formulated a morphological conception of literature (borrowing the idea from Goethe) whereby a potentially infinite number of stories were generated by transformation of a finite number of archetypes . The king-and-ascetic encounter also tells a powerful political story setting up a confrontation between power and authority; Borges s own political predicament is explored against the rich background of truth-telling renouncers. In its poetic variant the renunciation archetype morphs into stories about art and artists with renunciation a key requirement of the creative process: the discussion weaves in and out of Borges to highlight modern writers debt to asceticism. Ultimately the enigmatic appeal of the renunciation story aligns it with the open-endedness of modern parables.