The Secret Sharer: Borges as Reader

Abstract

It is di􀁽cult to think of Borges without thinking of “Borges the Reader”: his readings cover the entirety of his work, like the map of empire covers territory. Borges turned reading into a 􀁿eld of discussion for the theoretical, critical, and ideological issues of his day, and he systematically used reading as a writing method. The recent discovery of new materials utilized by Borges throughout his career, including books, manuscripts, notebooks, conferences, and courses, and which no longer depend on his personal editing and curating, allows scholars of Jorge Luis Borges to examine his compositional processes and thus opens promising lines of research for critics in the future.