In the essay “Kafka and His Precursors,” Jorge Luis Borges shows how reading an author’s work can reveal qualities that are concealed in the writing of previous authors. He argues that influence is determined by the order in which readers read texts, rather than the order in which they were written—a view he demonstrates by pointing out ideas in Zeno of…
Sarah Roger
Sarah Roger, a native Torontonian, is a lecturer at the University of Oxford and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral dissertation was on Kafka’s influence on Borges.