Tag Archives: Jorge Luis Borges

An Infinity of Doppelgängers: The Jaw Dropping NYT Science News Story You May Have Missed

The most nightmarish news bringing in 2013 isn’t coming from Iran or the Republican Party, but physicists and cosmologists: you–yes, you–may have a twin, a doppelgänger. Seriously. Lots and lots and lots of them. As may all of us. Written by science … Continue reading

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Does Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Total Library” Spell the Death of God?

Of the notion of “the Total Library” (a library containing all possible combinations of letters, punctuation, and spacing), Jorge Luis Borges (in the first paragraph of his 1939 essay “The Total Library”) writes the following: It’s a wonder how long … Continue reading

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Blogging Brian Greene: Parallel Universes in Literature, Television, and Film

In the introductory chapter to physicist Brian Greene’s new book, The Hidden Reality, he offers a very brief list of parallel worlds from literature, television, and film: The Wizard of Oz. It’s a Wonderful Life. “The City on the Edge of Forever” … Continue reading

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Close Literary Reading 101: Stories and Style

I thought it might be fun (at least for me) to lay out, in a series of short blog posts, some of the basic terms and ideas that I present to my students when talking about the “close reading” of literary texts. Maybe … Continue reading

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