Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

I will be spending some time this afternoon browsing what is on the Borgesian site.

We put up our project for Readers, Writers, and Books today. Our project is on books which have been adapted to films. Here is my piece of the project. I argued for a seperate section on Shakespeare alone and was granted it. I decided on Akira Kurosawa’s Ran & Roman Polanski’s Macbeth. The skull was there from the previous exhibit but we used it to hold up the cases (the DVD especially was sliding all over the place)..and hey there is a skull in Hamlet after all right?

Here is what my blurb says:

The Bard on Screen

The works of William Shakespeare help to define our culture and world. Like Homer before him, the writing of Shakespeare encompasses all that we do. Jorge Luis Borges wrote that after death we shall gather all of our memories and combine them: “God, our friends, and Shakespeare will collaborate with us” (Maurois XI). To read Shakespeare well is to become Shakespeare. His influence runs deep in our culture, especially in literature, cinema, and even advertising.

Shakespeare plays have been made into scores of movies, many of them very good. Narrowing the selection to the two presented here was difficult. Roman Polanski’s Macbeth and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, based on King Lear, demonstrate the encompassing power of Shakespeare. Polanski turns Macbeth into a cathartic masterpiece, painting the darkness of the human condition. Legendary Japanese filmmaker Kurosawa reinvents King Lear as he transfers the play to feudal Japan.

The movie covers of Ran and Macbeth show heavy use. Excellent adaptations of Shakespeare are very popular and Stockton’s copies are no exception.

Elmajdoub, Aburawi A., and Mary K. Miller. “The ‘Eternal Now’ in Borges’ ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ and ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’ .” Durham University Journal 2 (1991): 249-251.

Good stuff in this article. The concept of the endless present tense and created forms of certainty (ex-calendars) are discussed in full in this short article in relation to Borges’ Pierre Menard and The Garden of Forking Paths. Both of these stories are excellent and were used for my senior thesis this past semester. I would have also included a discussion of The Immortal here. When I edit my thesis for online placement I will certainly look at this article again.

Balderston, Daniel. “Historical Situations In Borges.” MLN 105 (1990): 331-350.

Balderston argues that Borges’ references to various “politics, history, and everyday life” have been shrunken into some sort of literary game (Balderston 331). The article focuses on various origins for the Madden character in The Garden of Forking Paths.

Christensen, Maggie. “Teaching Borges’ ‘Garden’: A Three-Tiered Approach.”
Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 2 2 (2002): 76-82.

This is an excellent article I came across recently. Prof Christensen discusses three ways to teach and discuss Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths with students. This is an excellent source for secondary or college level students. I hope when I have my own classroom this article can be useful.

There is a new biography on Borges here.

One of the more interesting things in my senior thesis was Zeno’s paradox of the tortoise and Achilles. It was just a footnote discussing one of the things Borges’ father taught him as a child, but still pretty neat.