Well I'm procrastinating my reading on Lyotard (no, I'm not quite sure how to pronounce that). But I thought I'd report on the forked road story by Borges. Last Thursday I taught my 2:30 class with Christian and Paul. We set up our powerpoint (which included a picture of the 1980's something Bowie from laberinth....the jardÃn (garden) in the story is after all a giant laberinth. ). Well, just as I hoped, someone related the short story to Star Trek. And a million other things. It became the discussion of "los senderos que se bifurcan". What we got out of it was that alternate universes, choose your own adventure stories, multiple dimensions and class discussions are all related. The interesting thing in the story is...well read the story El Jardin de los senderos que se bifurcan (The garden of the forking path's or something like that) to make more sense, there's some pretty good translations out there. It's found in a work called Ficciones maybe translated as Fictions in English.
So I came home feeling pretty good about our presentation. I even got an e-mail from my profe telling us we'd done a good job. But the story doesn't end there. As random as a thought it is that an Argentine Writer from the 1920's has a lot to do with Star Trek and Science Fiction, I was validated on Friday. Mike Wilson, former BYU Spanish Grad Student gave us a presentation on Science fiction in the Southern Cone. Lo and behold, the thesis of his presentation was that Science Fiction was not created as a seperate genre in Argentina, but was part of the national tradition of literature starting with none other than basically the god of argentine literature, Jorge Luis Borges.
So maybe not such a crazy thought after all.
Who knows. Maybe I can even get a paper/article out of it.
Studying Science Fiction as a Spanish Lit major? Isn't life great?
