This public lecture centers on Cuadernos & Conferencias, a major new critical edition produced by the Borges Center (Colección Archivos, October 2024), which brings together Jorge Luis Borges’s handwritten notes for twenty-four courses and public lectures delivered between 1949 and 1954. By foregrounding Borges’s working pages—his notebooks, lecture drafts, and fragmentary outlines—the event invites a rethinking of Borges as a canonical writer and public intellectual whose thought took shape in classrooms, lecture halls, and the performative space of oral exposition. The talk focused on the material, intellectual, and methodological stakes of Cuadernos & Conferencias. The volume presents Borges’s handwritten notes on an extraordinarily wide range of authors and traditions—among them Francis Bacon, Voltaire, David Hume, William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka, Ricardo Güiraldes, and Bertrand Russell—alongside thematic clusters on fantastic literature, problems of the novel, and literary form. The edition also incorporates manuscript fragments related to Borges’s own fiction (“Funes el memorioso,” “El Sur”), and notes toward essays later collected in Otras inquisiciones. The discussion highlights how these materials illuminate Borges’s compositional habits, his modes of citation and condensation, and the porous boundary between private notes and public speech. More broadly, the event will reflect on how manuscript studies and genetic criticism transform our understanding of authorship, pedagogy, and literary authority, and how critical editions can recover the temporal, provisional, and dialogic dimensions of intellectual work. As a framing component, the lecture will also situate Cuadernos & Conferencias within the broader scholarly ecosystem mapped by The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges. Brief reference to the Handbook will underscore how Borges’s manuscripts and lectures resonate with current debates on world literature, translation, philosophy, and global modernism.
Discussant: Carlos Gustavo Halaburda
Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Guest Speaker:
Daniel Balderston
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages Director, Borges Center, University of Pittsburgh https://www.spanport.pitt.edu/people/daniel-balderston
Professor Daniel Balderston is one of the foremost international authorities on Jorge Luis Borges. He is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages (University of Pittsburgh) and Director of the Borges Center. His numerous books include How Borges Wrote (University of Virginia Press, 2018; winner of the Richard Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship), Lo marginal es lo más bello: Borges en sus manuscritos (Eudeba, 2022), Los caminos del afecto (Saraza, 2022), and El precursor velado: R. L. Stevenson en la obra de Borges (Eduvim, 2019). Balderston’s research combines rigorous philological inquiry with an acute sensitivity to the materiality of writing. His editorial and curatorial work at the Borges Center, including Cuadernos y Conferencias (Colección Archivos, 2024) and The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges (Oxford University Press, 2024), continues to redefine the study of Borges’s manuscripts, lectures, and global reception.
Food will be provided.
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