Abstract

This dissertation presents a broad diachronic overview of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Unlike most critical approaches, which have tended to focus primarily on 'content', this work is concerned with the stylistic, rhetorical, and philosophical strategies that govern the operation of his texts as a whole. It attempts to describe the emergence, predominance, and eventual exhaustion of these principles within the operation of Borges' texts. ;Borges' oeuvre is characterized as a machine, in the sense in which Systems Theory speaks of non-trivial, unreliable machines. This mechanism is described as unstable, complex, and autopoietic. It is unstable because the rules of its operation, its generative principles, do not remain constant, but are fluid and unpredictable, thus justifying a diachronic approach. The machine dismantles and reassembles itself, generating textual fluidity in a manner akin to deconstruction. Its complexity is described in part in terms of a quantitative accumulation of materials, and in terms of surprise generating devices such as emergence and paradox. As an autopoietic entity, it has operative closure, which accounts for the assimilation to a Borgesian 'logic' of numerous and diverse materials, as well as the operations of self-observation, or re-entry, that define its instability. ;The diachronical description of the main 'generative principles' governing the operation of Borges' work is organized in three main periods: 1923--30, 1931--55, and 1955--86. Some of these principles include: minor literature, fragmentation, baroque style, humor, distinctions, identity, stylistic tension, compression, exponential literature, quoting and assimilation, 'enactive' thought, paradox, abduction, blindness, orality, understatement, and ethics. The analysis operates in an interface between content and style. Borges' style is described, in a manner close to Aristotelian rhetoric, as having philosophical implications. ;In its conclusions, this work discards the possibility of a Borgesian teleology. There is no end to the instability of the machine's operation. Nevertheless, it is possible to allude to a productive and not merely deconstructive component in his texts. In spite of its fluidity, the accumulation generates a somewhat ghostly configuration, which is described in terms of residues, gaps, and imminence