Borges, Benjamin, and the allegorical writing of history

This dissertation examines the concept of history present in the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Walter Benjamin as a powerful alternative to the models of history that govern modernity. Against the recent critical trend to polarize the realms of literature and history, Borges's and Benjamin's writings require us to read history through what is considered to be literary uses of language: specifically, through an allegorical or 'other-writing,' which opens representation up to a historicity that can be indicated only by representation's limits. History is not something that can be counted and told, like beads on a rosary, but always escapes its telling. Allegory tells the story of this escape, opening the possibility of a different relationship with history, including the past, present, and future.;Borges is known for his representations of a non-linear, non-progressive time, although they tend to be considered as games that lead nowhere but their own fanciful interiority. As is particularly evident in his earliest writings, however, his non-linear conception of time concerns a concept of history in which the past does not remain neatly contained in the past, but is capable of disrupting the apparent autonomy of the present. Benjamin similarly rejects a linear and progressive model of history, along with the idea of a certain kind of transmission of historical knowledge: the idea that we really know what we think we know. It is only when we acknowledge that we do not have control over our sense of what has happened in the world that we can begin to understand what history is.;The first three chapters explore the limits of different figures that seek to contain history, including the figure of the modern city in Chapter One, the biographical subject in Chapter Two, and regionalist identity in Chapter Three. The final chapter considers what Borges and Benjamin describe as a concept of history that would resist all idealist conceptions of the universe and universal history: one that seeks to open history to what it cannot know, including among other things the absolute unknowability of the future.