Sounding the Dream: Crosscultural Reverberations between Can Xue and Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

"Though her writing style is strikingly individual, critics often compare the work of Can Xue ... to that of Jorge Luis Borges ..., an author whose writing she has analyzed in detail in her monograph Interpreting Borges.... This volume is itself a textual chimera, posing as a work of criticism yet possessing a similar literary style and freedom to Can Xue’s creative writing. Borges approaches literary criticism and philosophical exegesis in a similar fashion in his works of non-fiction, many of which follow narrative patterns recognizable from his short stories.... Both authors, then, display a disinclination to separate practices of reading and writing. This article uses Gaston Bachelard’s aural metaphor of poetic reverberation to study how literary inspiration works in ways that are more complex than the causal relationship indicated by authorial inspiration or, in aural terms, by source and echo."