Over the last two decades, Hispanic literatures of the twentieth century and their canons have been reframed to understand how they contribute to the twenty-first century context. This panel critically reconsiders one of Latin America’s most influential authors, Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986), and explores how his literary corpus has shaped, and continues to shape, global, Hispanic literatures of both Latin America and Spain. While there exists a vast amount of scholarship that analyzes Borges’s impact on fellow Latin American authors of the mid- to late-twentieth century, there is a noticeable dearth of scholars that consider Borges’s vestiges in contemporary, global Hispanic literature. This scarcity is surprising given the global nature of Borges’s literature that values distinct cultures and traditions over regional ones and prioritizes philosophical explorations of the universe and the human’s place within it. In this way, Borges anticipates twenty-first century World literature’s shift away from national themes in favor of universal, global ones that seek to understand how humans understand their place in the universe and how they relate to each other in contemporary society.

To begin the discussion of Borges’s influence on contemporary, global Hispanic literature, Rachel West contends a new theoretical approach to Borgesian studies, the Borgesian Archive, that establishes how Borges’s literature functions in the twenty-first century. By looking to both Latin American and Spanish literature as well as distinct genres – metafictional narratives, detective fiction, and feminist women writers –, she argues that the two literary traditions share many elements in common in their creation and use of contemporary Borgesian literature. This theory relies on several fundamental factors: 1) a post-modern, global context, where regions and borders become less important than a global literature and culture in search of existential meaning; 2) a re-contextualization of fundamental works, authors, and literature that form the basis of Hispanic literary identity; 3) a reframing of Borgesian narratives as not only metafictional and metaphysical, but also political; 4) an epistemological doubt of absolute knowledge of the universe and the human being’s place in it; and 5) the construction of self, identity, and reality through literature. Together, these elements allow current Hispanic authors to confront the existential crises created by global society and ultimately define themselves as both Hispanic and global authors.

Dr. Yuting Jia presents a case study of how Borges manifests in contemporary Spanish literature. Her presentation traces the presence of some of Borges’s most salient themes – language, truth, and objectivity – in José Ovejero’s La invención del amor (Spain, 2013). In her presentation, Dr. Jia highlights the similarities between Borges’s ideas on language and knowledge and the novel’s protagonist, Samuel, who grapples with creating a new language that accurately conveys the nuances of human emotion and reality. She also considers Borges’s theories on the challenges of expressing language across contemporary linguistic and cultural contexts, thereby situating her paper within World literature of the twenty-first century.

Finally, Dr. Héctor Hoyos presents work from his new project that investigates the critical reception of Borges in contemporary Latin American literature. He examines the saga of Borges’s apocrypha in Colombian authors Héctor Abad Faciolince and Harold Alvarado Tenorio alongside its re-fictionalization in the Argentine writer Jaime Correas to demonstrate how a residual Cold War antagonism persists in the creative reception of Borges’s literature. Moreover, Dr. Hoyos’s presentation analyzes how the opposition between leftist and rightist readings of Borges’s literature lends itself to discussions of authentic versus inauthentic personal politics that combines celebrity cultures with debates on the autonomy of art. Ultimately, the presentation features a new group of Latin American authors that rely on Borges’s global standing to generate a new Latin American parochialism that depoliticizes and re-contextualizes Borges in the process.

Each twenty-minute presentation centers on previously undiscussed Hispanic works and authors that contemplate and create literature, language, politics, identity, and the universe through Borges. Rachel West’s presentation proposes a new theory of how Borgesian themes and tropes construct simultaneous Hispanic and global self and literary identity in contemporary society. Afterwards, Dr. Jia's presentation highlights the salience of philosophical Borgesian themes like epistemological doubt of language and reality in Spanish literature through her case study of La invención del amor. Dr. Hoyos's final presentation contends that Borges's political aspects continue to manifest in current Latin American literature through a combination of Cold War and contemporary politics. Together, these presentations illustrate the lasting influence of one of Latin American literature’s most relevant authors to contemporary Hispanic global literature, Jorge Luis Borges.