Event Date
Borges as a Public Speaker:
Toward the Reconstruction of His "Oral Phase"
Public Lecture by Daniel Balderston
In the last ten years we have begun to understand the importance of Borges's activities as a public speaker. In March 1949 he gave the first of more than a hundred talks that year, and between 1949 and 1955 more than four hundred. When he was preparing to speak in public about a topic for the first time he conducted extensive research, as can be seen in his notebooks, a selection of which we published last year in the volume Cuadernos & Conferencias. In this talk Balderston will discuss the new light these materials cast on his "oral phase," which begins in 1949 and continues after his partial blindness in 1955.
Daniel Balderston is Mellon Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. He co-directs the Borges Center and its journal Variaciones Borges. Recent books include: Leído primero y escrito después: Aproximaciones a las obras de Roa Bastos, Piglia y Saer (Eduvim, 2020), El método Borges (Ampersand, 2021), Lo marginal es lo más bello (Eudeba, 2022). He is co-editor of the critical editions of Luxuria, la vida nocturna de Buenos Aires de Otto Miguel Cione (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 2022) and of Pasión y muerte del cura Deusto de Augusto D'Halmar (Biblioteca Chilena, 2023), as well as of Vidas escandalosas: antología de la diversidad sexual en la literatura latinoamericana de 1850 a 1950 (Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2022) and of Cuadernos & Conferencias de Jorge Luis Borges (Borges Center, 2024).
