Gombrowicz, Borges, and the Fictional Cosmos

Max Ubelaker Andrade

2026
212 pages
$39.95
ISBN 9781684486144
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Polish author Witold Gombrowicz's famously chaotic masterpiece, Cosmos, was profoundly influenced by Jorge Luis Borges - particularly by three key stories from Ficciones. Drawing on evidence that Gombrowicz read Ficciones in 1960, as well as handwritten marginalia in Gombrowicz's copy of Adolfo Bioy Casares's La invención de Morel, this groundbreaking study argues that Cosmos responded to Borges's literary transformations of cartography, mathematical combinatorics, and Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quijote. Along the way, it introduces the concept of "immaterial bibliography" to analyze imaginary texts appearing in literary works. Finally, it examines the tension between Borges's explicit racism and the ethical and aesthetic vision suggested by his fiction, revealing how rumor, rebellion, and literary inheritance shaped Gombrowicz's reading of Borges, which in turn influenced the composition of his prizewinning last novel.

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About the author:

MAX UBELAKER ANDRADE is an associate teaching professor in Latin American studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is the author of Borges Beyond the Visible and the translator of two books by Néstor Ponce: Desapariencia no engaña (Disappearance without Absence) and Vos es (boy says).

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Cloth: $150, 9781684486151; Ebook: $39.95, 9781684486168