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    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The Circular Ruins"
    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The Circular Ruins"
    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The Circular Ruins"
    Ebook41 pages39 minutes

    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The Circular Ruins"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The Circular Ruins," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535835800
    A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The Circular Ruins"

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      A Study Guide for Jorge Luis Borges's "The Circular Ruins" - Gale

      08

      The Circular Ruins

      Jorge Luis Borges

      1940

      Introduction

      Jorge Luis Borges wrote The Circular Ruins in 1939, and the story was first published as Las ruinas circulares in the journal Sur in December 1940. The following year it was included in Borges's short fiction collection El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), and in 1944, it was published again in Ficciones. Anthony Kerrigan first translated the story into English for the American publication of Ficciones in 1962.

      The Circular Ruins encapsulates many themes important to Borges, including labyrinths, infinite regression (the idea of a thing reflected upon itself endlessly—like two mirrors facing each other), and the intersection between dreams and reality. The story tells of a gray man whose boat washes ashore near the ruins of a circular temple. His self-appointed task is to create a man by dreaming him into existence, a process that requires ascetic solitude and concentration. In the end the man realizes that he is the product of someone else's dream. The plot contains elements of magical realism (a literary style in which psychological truths are depicted through elements of supernatural fantasy) and narrative traditions ranging from the Golem of Jewish folklore, in which a simple being created from clay is controlled by his creator, to the Buddhist philosophy of enlightenment, which states that a person has awakened from the sleep of ignorance. Many critics consider the story a meditation on the creative process and the idea of causa sui—an object being the cause of itself. The story also illustrates the concept of the transformation of things as outlined by the butterfly paradox of fourth-century B.C.E. Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi: A man dreams he is a butterfly and awakes, but then wonders if he is really a butterfly dreaming he is a man. The Circular Ruins has been widely reprinted and can be found in the 1999 Penguin edition of Borges's Collected Fictions.

      Author Biography

      Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and was educated at home in his early years by his parents and his grandmother, who spoke and taught English. During a family trip to Europe in 1914, Borges was stranded in Geneva, Switzerland, by the outbreak of World War I; he attended secondary school there for several years. By 1919, he was already intent on being a writer, and when his family moved to Spain, he became part of the Ultraist literary movement, a group

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