Isabel Álvarez-Borland
Murray Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Spanish Department

Forking Paths: Reading and Imaging Borges
A Personal Account of a Joint Project

      In June 2010 at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Buenos Aires, Argentina a very exciting art exhibit and conference took place titled Painting Borges: A Pictorial Interpretation of His Fictions. The conference and exhibit were spearheaded by Jorge Gracia, Samuel P. Capen Chair in the Department of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo. Prof. Gracia, who was the main organizer of the conference and curator of the Painting Borges exhibit, had asked me to be part of this event but I had to decline due to my participation in the 2010 Ignatian Pilgrimage. As luck would have it, this schedule conflict proved fortuitous because it provided the opportunity to converse about the pedagogical possibilities of bringing the Painting Borges exhibit to the students at Holy Cross with Professor Cristi Rinklin (Visual Arts Department). It was during the Ignatian Pilgrimage that Prof. Rinklin and I decided to collaborate on the creation of individual, but related, courses in art and literature that could make the Borges exhibit come alive for our students. With this purpose in mind, we solicited the help of Roger Hankins, Director of the Cantor Art Gallery. With Roger's enthusiastic support plans to bring the Borges exhibit to Cantor came to fruition and it was agreed that the exhibition would visit our school during the Spring of 2012.

     During the summer of 2011, Professor Rinklin and I designed Forking Paths: Reading and Imaging Borges (Honors 299)^†, a sophomore-level team-taught seminar that closely paralleled the themes of the original Cantor exhibit. The latter is composed of 24 visual renditions inspired by some of Borges's best known stories. Prof. Rinklin segment consists of a studio-based drawing course that uses Borges's short stories as an inspiration to construct visual narratives using drawing, collage, and digital media. Professor Rinklin directly sources artworks from the Cantor exhibition as tangible examples of the wide range of ways that artists create narrative imagery based on literary works. My approach to Borges's stories seeks to illuminate the reasons behind Borges's fragmented representation of reality. Focusing on a close analysis of selected stories by Borges, I emphasize the use of experimental narrative techniques such as metafiction, fragmentation, temporal discontinuity, and the role of the reader as a participant in these fictions.

     As our Honors 299 students were reading and later imaging Borges, their activity resembled that of the artists whose images were part of the Painting Borges exhibit. The written and visual works of two students in our Honors seminar, Amanda Osowski, '14 and Natalia Krykova, '14 will provide fósforo readers with a sense of the many creative possibilities afforded by the stories of Jorge Luis Borges and the very tangible links between word and image. Their essays will also be presented at the Holy Cross Academic Conference on April 26, 2012.

^† Professor Rinklin and I thank Mat Schmaltz, Director of the Holy Cross Honors Program, for his enthusiasm regarding this curricular offering. We are also grateful to the Holy Cross Center for Teaching for funding our summer planning of this project.