Mirror of Time: Temporality and Contemporaneity in the work of Jorge Luis Borges

• Main Author: Jennifer Donnelly
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University Library System, University of Pittsburgh 2012-04-01
• Series: Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture
• Subjects: Borges; contemporaneity; theories of time
• Online Access: http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/contemporaneity/article/view/38

<p>Borges recognized the cracking facade of modernity and the fragility of its monist absolutisms, its commitment to linearity, and its faith in historical progress.  By disavowing the ability of time to be contained within any collective structure of representation, Borges both refutes modernist conceptions of time and offers insight into recent theories of contemporaneity.  A contemporaneous reading of Borges opens lucid temporal relationships, challenges assumptions about the affinities between the self and time, allows for the existence of multiple temporal antimonies, and ultimately reveals the contemporaneous relationship between individual sensations of time of the collective structural composition of temporality.</p>