From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Wed Dec 19 2001 - 22:17:12 MST
On Wednesday, December 19, 2001 2:37 PM Anders Sandberg asa@nada.kth.se
wrote:
>> I'm wondering if you know about Julio Cortazar. He's another South
>> American writer. I find his short stories very spooky, and very
>> unforgettable.
>
> Sounds a bit like something Borges would write.
Truly. Borges had a big impact on Cortazar, Marquez, and many other
Latin American writers.
> This kind of recursive storytelling seems to become more and more
> accessible as we move into a world of virtualities and multiple layers
> of implementation. I think they would be extremely disturbing or
> incomprehensible from the 19th century.
You mean the century that gaves us _Flatland_, _Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland_, and _Crime and Punishment_? The one that gave us
non-Euclidean geometries and set theory? The one in which Kafka,
Einstein, and Bohr were born?
Actually, I see recursiveness in many pre-19th works, such as in
Shakespeare's sonnets. (See Helen Vendler's recent analysis of them.)
Yet the recursiveness is one element among many. For a lot of more
recent works, it's the whole shebang or, at least, the central element.
I mean, you really can't get much more out of an Escher drawing or
etching after repeated viewings. In fact, it all seems extremely
gimmicky.
Even so, Borges remains among my favorite writers.:)
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:12:40 MST