ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a very particular aspect of fruitful interaction, namely Jorge Luis Borges's critical response to James Joyce's use of parody and literary allusions. The textual mechanics of parody parallel in significant ways the complex relationship between his well-known notions of 'tradition' and 'individual talent'. The first use of parody fails to transcend the closed limits of system within which it operates, ultimately upholding its stability. The chapter also focuses on the ways in which Borges's literary allusions signal inherent displacement. His 'cosmopolitanism on the edge' constitutes a relevant example of the phenomenon that James Clifford has labelled 'discrepant cosmopolitanism' — a conception of cosmopolitanism imagined from the displaced perspective of colonial histories and peripheral spaces within modernity. These cosmopolitan affiliations, enabled by the 'history of colonization' and yet resistant to hegemonic grids of reference, provide a suitable frame to approach the literary dialogue between Joyce and Borges as an encounter on the margins of the Western canon.
