Dictionaries are works of literature: they have an author, a plot, and a narrative. They have also been the object of fascination of writers–poets, novelists, and essayists– from diverse languages, from Ambrose Bierce, Jorge Luis Borges, Denis Diderot, and Gustave Flaubert, to Czeslaw, George Orwell, George Perec, William Thackery, and Voltaire. At times, the structure of a lexicon is emulated in a work of fiction; in others, it is at the heart of a storyline. This meditation explores the wide range of tributes dictionaries have occasioned as well as volumes about the making of specific lexicons, such as the Oxford English Dictionary.

Borges is an Argentine writer whose work has deserved extensive and brilliant critical analyses. Reviewing the canonical interpretations (Ricardo Piglia, Sylvia Molloy, Daniel Balderston, Beatriz Sarlo, among others), this chapter seeks to rethink Borges’ work in the twenty-first century usiing two main approaches. The first will review the idea of “work” in Borges. As Annick Louis has studied, the unstable nature of his work demands a reconceptualization of the processes of construction of literature that expands the limits of the book, the author, and the text, and that circulates in different media (books, magazines, lectures, interviews, chats). A second way is to expand the dialogues and conversations that his textuality offers. Focused on the obvious literary bonds, most of his critics have read his work emphasizing the different forms of intertextuality. But Borges’ universe includes much more aesthetics and cultural practices, as Alan Pauls has shown. If Borges strongly questioned the ideas of the author and work, he also questioned the ideas of literature, art, culture, and media. The chapter also analyzes the place of Borges in the context of national culture and its relationship with world literature.

By sheer transgression, Roberto Bolano remapped the Latin American literary canon. Through novels, stories, essays, poems, and interviews, he did it by establishing a dialogue – often rapturous, seldom terse – with the major figures of 20th-century literature. Borges was his center of gravity. He admired Nicanor Parra and Cesar Vallejo. He found Isabel Allende kitschy. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a merchant of stereotypes and Mario Vargas Llosa, while obviously talented, was in his eyes too professional. He ridiculed Diamela Eltit and plotted to kidnap Octavio Paz. Beyond his affinities, though, Bolano’s oeuvre reads like a who’s who of the continent’s literati. He wasn’t afraid to use fiction to do criticism and vice versa. His spontaneity is a lesson against academic posturing and lazy thinking.

Bolaño may justifiably be considered among the least religious writers in the Spanish language, although not necessarily an antireligious one. Simultaneously, his areligious stance made it possible, even necesssary, for him to write works in which links between religion, literature, and Latin American culture are exposed and subjected to scathing critique. His narrative foregoes the use of religion as an artifice, as a “partial magic” to sacralize both the novel and the nation and endow them with a transcendent aura. However, Bolaño’s “romantic anarchism,” with its cynicism about politics and society in general, is counterbalanced by ethics. Bolaño’s reflections on religion and politics explore the worldly aspect of religion and the role of belief and credulity in politics, but also reflect on the dual religiopolitical aspect of literature itself, which is made particularly visible in and by the profession of literary criticism. In our postmodern age, Bolaño suggests, even as art and religion merge in their discourses, there is a further merger of both art and religion with politics. Contemporary art (including literature, of course) is for Bolaño a potentially perverse fusion of religion’s invocation of belief, politics’s thirst for power, and art’s own inherent powers of deceit and manipulation.

This essay examines Borges’ engagement with the structure of totality in the context of the two world wars in “Deutsches Requiem” and “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.” In both stories Borges depicts the ideal of a single totalizing order that underlies the world wars. This ideal is associated with long-standing epistemological and technological apparatuses, including history, philosophy, philology, and literature, but it is also refigured and reinforced in twentieth-century modernity through new forms of telecommunication, warfare, and transportation. Although these war stories seem to demonstrate the imminence of a global sovereignty, both epistemological and political, they also probe the limits of the drive to totality, stressing points of fissure and excess that represent the condition of possibility for a different experience of reality, relationality, and, ultimately, world.

This essay examines Borges’ engagement with the structure of totality in the context of the two world wars in “Deutsches Requiem” and “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.” In both stories Borges depicts the ideal of a single totalizing order that underlies the world wars. This ideal is associated with long-standing epistemological and technological apparatuses, including history, philosophy, philology, and literature, but it is also refigured and reinforced in twentieth-century modernity through new forms of telecommunication, warfare, and transportation. Although these war stories seem to demonstrate the imminence of a global sovereignty, both epistemological and political, they also probe the limits of the drive to totality, stressing points of fissure and excess that represent the condition of possibility for a different experience of reality, relationality, and, ultimately, world.

The second chapter examines heretical re-readings of Borges by Roberto Bolaño and Marcos Peres. Bolaño’s La literatura nazi en América, 2666 and, in particular, Peres’ O Evangelho Segundo Hitler can be read as a function of Harold Bloom’s categories of the ‘anxiety of influence’ amongst poets. Once the authors successfully escape the creative bind of this anxiety, in writing about Nazism, they encounter other challenges to explore such as the dialectical relationship between friend and enemy, and the perceived bind between fascism and resistance to it. In Bolaño’s analysed works, there are two attempted strategies to overcome these binds – the first rhetorical, and the second ethical. The first is explored with reference to Judith Butler’s essay ‘Competing Universals’ from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left and the second in relation to aspects of her reading of Levinas in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence.

The epilogue surveys contemporary global fiction and alternate conceptions of world literature to stress the political, historical contingency of the Anglophone ambition to give formal literary expression to totality. Unlike their late modern predecessors, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delegate the task of crafting literary totalities to their readers, suggesting that one’s best chance of assimilating the world through text lies not in devouring a splendiferous Gesamtkunstwerk but in grazing across many national literatures. Recent trends suggest a privatization of world-making responsibilities; authors no longer claim the public function of rendering the world legible for their readerships, at least not within single works. I proceed from self-reflexive meditations on world literature in Calvino, Borges, and Adichie to explore the literary market in South Korea, where publishing houses have stayed solvent thanks to the evergreen demand for collectible sets of foreign literature in translation. Unlike the writers I examine in previous chapters, non-Anglophone writers frequently assume that the world is an entity to be read rather than written.

The collective nature of character is a defining aspect of magical realism in the Americas and arguably the mode’s most notable departure from the conventions of literary realism. Magical realist authors aim to express communal realities, whether political, historical and/or cultural. To this end, they create 'insubstantial' characters who are not individualized or given complex interior lives. Rather, their identity is relational and based in collective structures, whether family, class, culture and/or ideology. Given magical realism’s greater investment in political and cultural selfhood, characters tend toward archetype and their lives toward allegory. The magical realist strategy of minimizing individuality in favor of collective experience allows authors to foreground politics over personality. As readers, we are asked to focus not on single selves, but on the political arc of entire continents and cultures. The authors discussed are García Márquez, Carpentier, Allende, Borges, Donoso and Erdrich.