French Literature Reviews - 2026
Borges Facing Fascism (2 volumes)
Novel and Narrative Prose
Annick Louis
Borges face au fascisme, 2 . Les fictions du contemporain
Aux lieux d'être
Coll. « Le monde contemporain »
April 2007
ISBN : 978-2-916063-32-4 419 pages
28.50 €
Book Summary:
From the mid-1930s onwards, Jorge Luis Borges, hitherto known as a critic and poet, began publishing his first short fictions. Over the following decade, these would be collected into two volumes destined to become his most famous works: Fictions (1944) and The Aleph (1949).
Throughout this period, Borges continuously wrote against the totalitarian and univocal visions of reality, particularly that secreted by the Nazi regime. Yet his aesthetic wager ran counter to the choices made by his contemporaries, which helped foster the proverbial image of a writer uprooted from the realities of his time. However, while the major paradigms of the fascist years are never explicitly thematized in his fiction, they are nonetheless very much present—albeit in a fragmentary, oblique manner. Thus, the short stories in Fictions and The Aleph echo conspiracy theories, the themes of anti-fascist literature and Hollywood cinema (such as the notions of heroism and the dichotomy between allies and enemies), as well as contemporary discourses, ranging from those of Germanophiles and Argentine Peronists to those of Nazi executioners emerging during the Nuremberg trials.
Through his oblique aesthetics, Borges presents a singular conception of the role and status of fiction, as well as the relationship between literature and reality—framed in terms of competition and enigma. Going far beyond a mere re-reading of works as powerful as they are intriguing, revisiting the Borges of the war years today allows us to rethink the literary by transcending the opposition between two modes of representation: one referential, the other fictional.
Les fictions du contemporain is the second volume of Borges face au fascisme, an inquiry initiated with Les causes du présent (2006), which examined Borges’s critical production from the 1930s to the 1940s.The Author
Annick Louis is a researcher at the Centre for Research on Arts and Language. A specialist in Borges, she primarily studies his work through the lens of history. She has previously published Borges, œuvre et manœuvre (L’Harmattan, 1997).
Annick Louis
Borges face au fascisme, 1 Les causes du présent
Book Summary
Borges's hostile stance towards fascism is well known. However, the form taken by his condemnation of the phenomenon is much less so.
The Borges of the 1930s and 1940s made an aesthetic wager that ran counter to the choices made by his anti-fascist contemporaries: his writing of the present, in his essays and notes from this period, relied on a strategy of obliqueness. Fascism, Nazism, and anti-Semitism are rarely targeted head-on; rather, culture and the relationship to reality are continually interrogated and challenged through an interrogation of literature, which Borges claimed as his sole domain. This constitutes a paradoxical yet genuine militancy, intimately linked to the Borgesvian conception of literature’s status in relation to reality.
By showing how Borges ultimately constructed and inscribed his writing in opposition to the fascist worldview, Annick Louis sheds entirely new light on the uniqueness of one of the 20th century's most important bodies of work.
The first volume of this inquiry, Les causes du présent, examines Borges’s critical output from the 1920s to the 1940s, placing it in dialogue with the Argentine intellectual and political milieu of the era. The second volume, Les fictions du contemporain, focuses on the emergence of fiction in Borges's work during this same period.
The Author
Annick Louis is a researcher at the Centre for Research on Arts and Language. A specialist in Borges, she primarily studies his work through the lens of history. She has already published Borges, oeuvre et manoeuvre (L’Harmattan, 1997).
Published on June 21, 2006
ISBN : 291606303X
Format: 140x210, 272 pages, paperback
Price: 28.50 €
Researcher Annick Louis examines the relationship between the Argentine writer's literary output and the political climate of the 1930s and 1940s. The first volume investigates his critical production and essays within the intellectual milieu of the era, while the second volume turns to the emergence of short fictions such as Fictions and The Aleph. The study demonstrates how the author engaged with totalitarian ideologies, conspiracy theories, and contemporary public discourses via an oblique aesthetic strategy that continually interrogated culture and the status of literature itself.
This inquiry situates the writer's famous works within their historical context, highlighting a form of intellectual engagement that ran counter to the choices made by his anti-fascist contemporaries. By examining the interplay between literature and reality in these writings, the publication presents a perspective on how Fictions and The Aleph reflect the anxieties of the mid-twentieth century. Readers interested in twentieth-century literature and the intersection of politics and aesthetics may find this two-volume investigation relevant to their studies.