Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

  My research paper on “Time and the Observer in Jorge Luis Borges” has been published in the 2020 edition of the Literature & Aesthetics journal released a few days back. Abstract: Jorge Luis Borges is ambivalent in his views of time and is unwilling to completely accept a denial of the reality of time. I argue that this is because a view that refutes time denies the observer too along with it.  Borges tries therefore to identify a reconciliation between a refutation of time and its reality.  (Image: Edwaert Collier - Vanitas Still Life with a Statuette of an Antique Athlete and a Print of Michelangelo (1675) - Public Domain)

My research paper on “Literature and the construction of reality” has been published in the 2018 edition of the Literature & Aesthetics Journal released in March. Peregrine falcons (Artwork: NY State Museum 1912, Public Domain) In this paper, I consider the idea that Ernst von Glasersfeld’s “radical constructivism” offers an ideal framework for putting in place a reality of the best fit for us. Along with this, I examine also the fundamental biological and epistemological limitations that we are faced with when trying to fathom objective reality and, secondly, the inescapable gap between language – which we use as a primary cognitive tool in our attempt to comprehend the world. The paper then show that literature – especially fiction – best meets the criteria for addressing these gaps and constructing such a model of reality in line with what radical constructivism proposes.

Jorge Luis Borges, 1968 (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) My research paper on “Jorge Luis Borges and the Nothingness of the Self” has been published in the 2016 edition of the Literature & Aesthetics journal released a few days back. In this paper, I discuss how Borges uses his ideas on selfhood to explore the “central problem of literature” that Andre Maurois highlighted and how in the process projects to the reader his idea of reality. I argue also that the self that Borges tries to present in his work may nevertheless not be always congruent with the self he may have wanted to convey. This is because his quest is influenced by a number of factors, not least the fact that the self-creation process is affected by our interplay with the external world.