Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations

1. Origins and Orillas: History, City, and Death in the Early Poems

Family Trees
A Journey of No Return
Borges and His (Own) Precursors
Sepulchral Rhetoric
Life Possessions
Melancholic Fervor
The Orillas
Acts of Life

2. Bios-Graphus: Evaristo Carriego and the Limits of the Written Subject

The Fallible God of the “I”
Life and Death 
The Other American Poet
The Paradoxes of Biography
Carriego Is (Not) Carriego
Violence, Life, and Law
“Generous” Duels

3. Allegory, Ideology, Infamy: Allegories of History in Historia

Universal de la Infamia
“National” Allegory
Ideology
Two Moments of Allegory
Infamy 
Magical Endings Et Cetera

4. Reading History’s Secrets in Benjamin and Borges

Historical Idealism and the Materiality of Writing
The Conquests of Time
History’s Secrets
Possession or the “Weak Force” of Redemption
Refuting Time  
Ego Sum
Terrible Infinity
Recurrent Imminence
Reading, Writing, Mourning History