La Peinture De La PensÉE

As Borges became popular in the United States and France during the sixties, more critical analyses of his writings began to appear. An aspect of Borges's work that received a great deal of attention then was his extremely original style of writing. Both James Irby in The Structure of the Stories of Jorge Luis Borges (1962) and Jaime Alazraki in La prosa narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges (1968), among others, dedi cate entire sections of their studies to an analysis of Borges's prose style. ¹ The stylistic studies that appeared during the sixties did not obey the logic of the old stylistics of Spitzer, Alonso, and Auerbach. The latter always understood style as somehow related to the psychology of an author or to a specific historical situation. ² By the 1960s, however, New Criticism had already been institutionalized in the United States and was generally considered the equivalent of “criticism.” That ex plains why for both Alazraki and Irby, “style” is merely another component of the organically structured literary work, whose function is to reflect, at a microscopic level, the main topics of the text (Alazraki, La prosa 6, ll). ³