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Tar for Mortar offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature’s greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story “The Library of Babel” is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges’s narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator’s claims of the library’s universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing. Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library — is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion? While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges’s imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.

Literature and the Internet. --- Borges, Jorge Luis, --- Criticism. --- Internet and literature --- Internet --- Borges, Jorge Luis --- Bustos Domecq, Honorio --- Borges, J. L. --- Borhes, Horhe Luis --- Borkhes, Khorkhe Luyis --- Borches, Chorche Louis --- Bustos Domecq, H. --- Domecq, H. Bustos --- Борхес, Хорхе Луис --- ‏ בארכעס, כארכע לויס --- בארכעס, כארכע לויס, --- בורחס, חורחה לואיס --- 博尔赫斯, --- ホルヘ・ルイス・ボルヘス, --- Literary studies: from c 1900 --- -Library of Babel --- Jorge Luis Borges --- technology --- librarianship --- digital humanities --- literary studies --- -Literary studies: from c 1900 --- Library of Babel

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In Borges' Classics, Laura Jansen reads the oeuvre of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges as a radically globalized model for reimagining our relationship with the classical past. This major study reveals how Borges constructs a new 'physics of reading' the classics, which privileges a paradoxical vision of the canon as universal yet centreless, and eschews fixed ideas about the cultural history of the West. Borges' unique approach transforms classical antiquity into a simultaneously familiar and remote world, whose legacy is both urgent and unstable. In the process, Borges repositions the classical tradition at the intersection of the traditional Western canon and modernist literature of the peripheral West. Jansen's study traces Borges' encounters with the classics through appeal to themes central to Borges' thought, such as history and fiction, memory and forgetfulness, the data of the senses, and the vectors that connect cultures and countries.

Civilization, Classical, in literature. --- Borges, Jorge Luis, --- Borges, Jorge Luis --- Bustos Domecq, Honorio --- Borges, J. L. --- Borhes, Horhe Luis --- Borkhes, Khorkhe Luyis --- Borches, Chorche Louis --- Bustos Domecq, H. --- Domecq, H. Bustos --- Борхес, Хорхе Луис --- ‏ בארכעס, כארכע לויס --- בארכעס, כארכע לויס, --- בורחס, חורחה לואיס --- 博尔赫斯, --- ホルヘ・ルイス・ボルヘス, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Criticism and interpretations. --- Knowledge --- Civilization, Classical. --- Borhes, Horhe Luis, --- Borkhes, Khorkhe Luyis, --- Borches, Chorche Louis, --- Борхес, Хорхе Луис, --- בארכעס, כארכע לויס --- Borges Acevedo, Jorge Luis, --- Hao'erhe Luyisi Bo'erhesi, --- 豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯, --- Būrkhīs, Khūrkhī Lūwis, --- بورخيس, خورخي لويس, --- Suárez Lynch, B.