On the margins of fiction: the role of footnotes in Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories
Abstract
One of the most remarkable features of Jorge Luis Borges’s narrative is his peculiar use of paratextuality, footnotes in particular. These usually relate to Borges’s fictionalization process — alternating real and fictional cultural referents — or to the aim of reinforcing the verisimilitude of the essay-like texts which the author recreates in his short stories. The analysis of these and other roles — seldom studied in literary theory and criticism —, such as the creation of semantic and syntactic isotopies as well as of hints, shows Jorge Luis Borges’s narrative prowess, which makes good use of the liminal character of these paratexts and develops through them resources that necessarily contribute to the shaping of the stories.
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