Lord Georgie: Borges, Conrad and the versions of the universal

This article explores the material conditions that allow critics to inscribe a given text in transcultural networks of signification. Concretely, I study the case of Borges by focusing, on the one hand, on the historical processes that inform his articulations of the universal as an aesthetic construct. On the other, I rethink the idea of rewriting as a practice of aesthetic and cultural affiliation, each capable of creating new, contingent worlds. To illustrate this, I discuss Borges’ rewriting of Lord Jim and of Nostromo by Joseph Conrad.