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Publication details

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Place: Basingstoke

Year: 2017

Pages: 131-151

Series: Philosophers in Depth

ISBN (Hardback): 9783319409092

Full citation:

Shlomy Mualem, "Narrative aspect change and alternating systems of justice", in: Wittgenstein on aesthetic understanding, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Narrative aspect change and alternating systems of justice

a Wittgensteinian reading of Borges

Shlomy Mualem

pp. 131-151

in: Garry L. Hagberg (ed), Wittgenstein on aesthetic understanding, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

In his preface to the short story collection Doctor Brodie's Report (1970), Jorge Luis Borges remarks: "I want to make it quite clear that I am not, nor have I ever been, what used to be called a preacher of parables or a fabulist and is now known as a committed writer. I do not aspire to be Aesop." Borges denies here a moralistic or didactic dimension to his writing—a position which remains consistent throughout his writing and seems to be intimately linked with his view of poetic inspiration as an irrational event and of himself as a "dreamweaver." At the same time, he remarks that in his works he has been able to achieve a "modest and secret complexity." y aim in this essay is to unravel one of the dreamweaver's yarns, the short story "Emma Zunz" from the collection The Aleph (1949), and to present the narrative and ethical foundations of the "modest and secret complexity" of which Borges speaks.

Cited authors

Publication details

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Place: Basingstoke

Year: 2017

Pages: 131-151

Series: Philosophers in Depth

ISBN (Hardback): 9783319409092

Full citation:

Shlomy Mualem, "Narrative aspect change and alternating systems of justice", in: Wittgenstein on aesthetic understanding, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017