Reading Borges After Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History Book

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     xi
Abbreviations     xix
Origins and Orillas: History, City, and Death in the Early Poems     1
Family Trees     2
A Journey of No Return     4
Borges and His (Own) Precursors     6
Sepulchral Rhetoric     8
Life Possessions     13
Melancholic Fervor     17
The Orillas     28
Acts of Life     31
Bios-Graphus: Evaristo Carriego and the Limits of the Written Subject     35
The Fallible God of the "I"     37
Life and Death     38
The Other American Poet     41
The Paradoxes of Biography     46
Carriego Is (Not) Carriego     50
Violence, Life, and Law     57
"Generous" Duels     62
Allegory, Ideology, Infamy: Allegories of History in Historia Universal de la Infamia     67
"National" Allegory     68
Ideology     70
Two Moments of Allegory     72
Infamy     78
Magical Endings Et Cetera     92
Reading History's Secrets in Benjamin and Borges     99
Historical Idealism and the Materiality of Writing     100
The Conquests of Time     104
History's Secrets     107
Possession or the "Weak Force" of Redemption     108
Refuting Time     117
Ego Sum     125
Terrible Infinity     130
Recurrent Imminence     131
Reading, Writing, Mourning History     135
Notes     139
Works Cited     155
Index     163