You will write about the stories of “Garden of forking paths” AND “Circular Ruins” both by Luis Borges. This paper will address the following questions: What does it say? What does it mean? Why is its significance? Another way of asking this is what is the aim of the novel or story: What do we learn by attending not just what it says, but to the way it says it?
The prompt is asking you, in other words, how a particular formal aspect of the novel: narrative perspective, focalization, plot, or structure (to offer some examples) mediates or represents history. To answer these questions, you should use only the text — so no need to bring in outside criticism. The question of what a text means will be part of the argument you will make about the paper.
Finally, you are asked to discuss its significance. Here I mean you should argue why your reading of a text is important to our understanding of the relationship between art and the world. What do we learn – about the what the text says – if we accept your view of what a text means? Again, keep this claim local to the text by describing the logic of the text and how the text works. One way you might do this is to read to moments of the text in relation to one another — how does Albert’s descriiption of the Garden of Forking Paths differ from the plot of “The Garden of Forking Paths”?
The claim for why your reading of a text is important for this first paper will likely be a modest one: your reading teaches us something about the novel and, maybe, how the novel mediates history or expresses a particular view of art.
