Macedonio Fernández: Between Literature, Philosophy, and the Avant-Garde

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Argentine writer
Attala
avant-garde
Borges's mentor
Buenos Aires
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Category=DSK
Category=DSM
critical theory
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essays
Garth
Monica Bueno
Ricardo Piglia
River Plate region
Spanish American
Vecchio

Product details

  • ISBN 9781501384264
  • Weight: 360g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
  • Publication Date: 27 Jul 2023
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
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At Macedonio Fernández’s funeral in 1952, Jorge Luis Borges delivered the following elegy: “In those years I imitated him to the point of transcription, to the point of devout and passionate plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, Macedonio is literature.” This is the first book available in English that collects essays by the world’s leading scholars on Macedonio Fernández, one of Borges’s most important mentors and a still enigmatic thinker of the early 20th century. Macedonio's philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and experimental writing laid the foundations for Borges’s own theoretical and literary matrix. Nonetheless, Borges helped shape a myth of Macedonio as a thinker who could not translate his oratorial geniality into written intelligibility. So, despite the centrality of Macedonio to Borges’s thought, his work has remained almost unknown to English-speaking readers.

Contributors to this volume demonstrate, however, that this myth reduces the complexities of Macedonio’s life and creative process, as each chapter shines new light on his texts. Conceived as both a companion for new readers of Macedonio’s writings and an invitation for specialists to revisit his work through new perspectives, essays in this volume provide extensive background and bibliographical references, as well as English translations of Macedonio’s original texts. This collection seeks to serve as a catalyst for the continued discovery and rediscovery of Macedonio Fernández’s texts and the ways they might help us to rediscover the singularities of our own present moment.

Federico Fridman is Lecturer of Spanish at the University of Michigan, USA.