We’re hitting Borges’ The Aleph tomorrow in CF. Borges’ fiction will bring a thread to the rest of the course, a sort of color to a quilt of readings that share time, space, aesthetic, and voice. As a whole, they be an image, a glance into an interpretation of “the infinite” in the context of sets, numbers, story, and form.

Any number of stories would work in this regard from the work of Borges. The Library of Babel, The Circular Ruins, and The Garden of Forking Paths. The Aleph as an example of structuring mise en abyme carries the story, in my view, as a story within a story, an image within an image, and an example of all kinds of interesting paradoxes. I.e., how can the contain itself as well as reflect itself at the same time. Simultaneity, repetition, interiority, points. Rational numbers form one infinite set. If this is so, there must be a set of infinite sets. Can the result be represented by a single number or by a symbol? Then what?