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Short Story Elements Go to the discussion tab, post your initial response and then respond to others. Thank you Alex for being the first respondent.

Tlon Questions

Discussion -- Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Who is the narrator? What is his probable job?


 * WHAT IS BORGES SAYING ABOUT MEMORY? Find examples from the beginning of the story, middle, and end.

Explain one way citation of sources is important inthis story and what does this tell us about the character and theme?

“Hume noted for all time that Berkeley’s arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest convictoion.” Allusions in this are thrown out with the seeming expectation that you “get” them or that you are not the intended reader. What is the effect, the intended effect and how does the world of Tlon subvert the habit of allusions?

“mere simultaneity” what’s this mean? Discuss this line.

How has language shaped the culture?

Coordinate with other groups. Be able to explain one part of the system: language, geology. . . Be able to give an analogy that wasn’t mentioned in the book. How does this idea relate to the larger philosophy that Borges is communicating?

Share vocab words. Choose one and explain how it relates to the larger theme. How does it communicate the style of Borges?

The narrator refers to 1001 Nights at least twice. Why? How does it relate to his sadness or anger over his what in the discoveries? OR how does the allusion relate to the larger themes?

Where is history mentioned? How is the history related and for what purpose? How does history relate to memory? What is being said philosophically about history?

“Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order -- dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Naziem -- was suffiecient to entrance the minds of men.” How does this line further the main theme of the story? What other lines in the story does it relate to?

Object creates reality -- reality creates object -- Discuss.

Why the change in type of narration? What emotion is communicated in this change?

How could this entire story be a scripted response for the media?

IL-Min Ahn- The first paragraph talks about the setting and mood of the story. The house is a worn-out and desolate place with a ominous mood. The words such as stale, nobody, and withered all signify a mood of darkness and poverty. From just this, the reader and guess that there will be a unfortunate event in the story. Usually, happy things don't happen in the middle of a dirty and worn out shack. Also, the visitor's unfortunate encounter with drunk customers foreshadows a horrible outcome. Because the widow made the visitor suffer for her sake, the widow will get payed back in some way or another. The whole story is filled with a dark mood. Even the romantic scenes are one-sided and forced. This mood lets the reader estimate that the story will take a fall.

Howard, Jean E. The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England.
 * Cultural Poetics**

"How a literary text relates to a context, whether verbal or social, is one of the many issues rethought in the last several decades of literary study. In the past, contextualizing a literary work often meant turning it into an illustration of something assumed to be prior to the text, whether that something were an idea, a political event, or a phenomenon such as social mobility. This reading strategy had several problematic consequences. First, it seemed to suggest that texts had one primary determining context and that textual meaning could be stabilized by aligning a text with its "proper" context. Second, it seemed to suggest that literary texts were always responses to, reflections, of something prior to and more privileged than themselves by which they could be explained. This denied literature an initiatory role in cultural transformations or social struggles, and it seemed to foreclose the possibility that literature could have an effect on other aspects of the social formation, as well as being altered by them. Third, using literature as illustraiton of a context invited a flattening of that text, a denial of its plurality and contradictions in favour of a univocal reading of its relations to a particular contextual ground.