Cosmopolitanism and Intertextuality. The Borges Factor in the Poetics of Enrique Vila-Matas

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative study of the narrative poetics of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges and the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas, applying the theoretical concepts of “cosmopolitanism” and “textual existentialism”. For this purpose, we assume as working hypothesis that the macrotext of literature occupies today, in certain poetics, the place that values ​​and metaphysical and ethical beliefs had occupied secularly, enabling the creation of a new “space of literature” capable of transcending geopolitical and economic borders, in favour of a transnational and intertextual community. Although establishing an explicit relationship between the literature of both authors is not new, we have tried to avoid the reductionist reading of sources, deepening in an unsaid and truly distinctive aspect: their cosmopolitan vocation –in a cultural sense– and the ways of reading that both writers develop as a creative strategy, whose maximum expression is the writing modality of “critical fiction”.