Abstract:

The article offers a discussion of two Latin American fictional historiographies: the short story “Guayaquil,” by Jorge Luis Borges (1970), and The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2011). Both these fictional historiographies are intertextually related to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), and both may be read as inscriptions of a Postmodernist sensibility, but their respective engagements with the earlier fictional historiography offer very different versions of the relations of story, history, and historiography, highlighting some significant, albeit often-overlooked aspect of their hetero-text.

May 2019: Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan is Professor of English, currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of Haifa University Press and Academic Head of the Haifa University Library. She is the author of Graham Greene's Childless Fathers (Macmillan 1988) Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (OUP 1991), The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad (1999), Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject (Stanford University Press, 2013), and numerous articles on literary modernism and continental philosophy. Her recent research project is provisionally titled "Hetero-biographies."

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