{"id":8424,"date":"2018-03-07T17:01:50","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T17:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/?p=8424"},"modified":"2018-03-08T10:16:36","modified_gmt":"2018-03-08T10:16:36","slug":"patricia-novillo-corvalan-on-borges-and-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/2018\/03\/07\/patricia-novillo-corvalan-on-borges-and-shakespeare\/","title":{"rendered":"Patricia Novillo-Corval\u00e1n on Borges and Shakespeare"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Patricia Novillo-Corval\u00e1n<\/a>, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature<\/a>, will be giving a talk entitled \u2018Borges\u2019s Shakespeare\u2019 at the Rose Theatre Kingston<\/a>, Kingston-upon-Thames, on Saturday 10 March 2018, as part of a day long event dedicated to the reception of the playwright, entitled \u2018Infinite Jest: Shakespearean Afterlives\u2019.<\/p>\n

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, and translator. With his usual irreverence and customary cheek, Borges grappled with Shakespeare\u2019s ubiquitous cultural influence by writing a series of essays and brief parables, including \u2018Everything and Nothing\u2019 (1960), \u2018A Page on Shakespeare\u2019 (1964), and \u2018Shakespeare\u2019s Memory\u2019 (1983), whose titles seem to imply that Shakespeare\u2019s \u2018greatness\u2019 can be negotiated through an exercise in \u2018lessness\u2019 and that the colossal magnitude of his works can be paradoxically summed up in a single page, thus expounding the aesthetics of brevity he had previously articulated in the foreword to The Garden of Forkings Paths <\/em>(1941).<\/p>\n

Patricia’s talk seeks to explore the major topoi and philosophical preoccupations that characterised Borges\u2019s lifelong fixation with the Bard, namely the negation of personal identity by conceiving Shakespeare as a ghost in life; a spectral, elusive figure whose \u2018nothingness\u2019, by extension, paradoxically implies \u2018everything\u2019 \u2013 following the pantheistic system proposed by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. On a metaphorical level, moreover, Shakespeare functions as a haunting cultural construct whose omnipresent shadow has exerted a pervasive influence across the centuries, a legacy that Borges seeks to negotiate from his irreverent standpoint as an Argentine writer. Therefore, Patricia will show that the canonical ghost of Shakespeare emerges as an intricate interweaving of critical sources and philosophical doctrines which, rather than solving \u2018The enigma de Shakespeare\u2019 (to borrow the title of a guest lecture Borges delivered in Buenos Aires in 1964), instead, plunge the reader into further uncertainty, inevitably eliciting more gaps and a sense of eeriness and mystery.<\/p>\n

The event is free to attend although booking is required. For further details, please see the event page here: www.rosetheatrekingston.org\/whats-on\/infinite-jest-shakespearean-afterlives\/about<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Patricia Novillo-Corval\u00e1n, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature, will be giving a talk entitled \u2018Borges\u2019s Shakespeare\u2019 at the Rose Theatre Kingston, Kingston-upon-Thames, on Saturday 10 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2458,"featured_media":4480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[135858,18583,124],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2458"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8424"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8433,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8424\/revisions\/8433"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}