Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernández, Selected Stories

Roberto Arlt, “The Cooked Cat” (“El gato cocido”) (1926)
Public domain version: Trans. Jon Beasley-Murray

Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Stories (1930s-1970s)
Edition used: Penguin

Felisberto Hernández, “The Daisy Dolls” (“Las hortensias”) (1949)
Edition used: Marsilio

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Faculty: Jon Beasley-Murray
Lecture date: March 4, 2013
Theme: Monster in the Mirror

• Browse Video Segments
• Lost in the Labyrinth
  7:17
• Milieu
  8:56
• The River Plate
  27:24
• Bios
  40:35
• Detail
  53:21
• Pierre Menard
  1:06:31
• The Daisy Dolls
  1:13:46
• The South
  1:28:47
• Violence
  1:33:52
• Mazes
  1:35:56
• Mirrors
  1:37:36
• Monsters
  1:40:01
• Affect
  1:40:37

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• Frankenstein and “The Daisy Dolls”
• Civilization and Its Discontents and Borges

1. Consider the portrayal of masculinity and violence in any two stories by Borges.
2. Analyze how Levi and Borges use ideas from books and/or about books in their own works.
3. Discuss the role of (or lack of a role for) women in Borges and/or Hernández.
4. Discuss the image of the animal in Levi and Borges and/or Arlt and/or Hernández.
5. Take any one of Borges’s short stories and offer a close reading of it, attending to the importance of detail.
6. Does Borges’s “Deutsches Requiem” illuminate our understanding of the Holocaust? If so, how? If not, why not?
7. Investigate the depiction of the machine in Levi and/or Hernández.

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