Kate Jenckes

I work primarily on Latin American literature from Borges to the present, and contemporary theory from Benjamin to the present, or what I would prefer to call an amorphous and permeable “now” of thinking and writing. My work is motivated by the relationship between politics and aesthetics, especially the ways that language and other modes of inscription—particularly as staged by literature and other forms of culture—resist totalizing structures, from words and concepts to complete systems. In my first book, Reading Borges After Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History (SUNY Press, 2007), I examine some of the ways that life and history exceed and unsettle representation in the work of Benjamin and Borges, with a special focus on Borges’s early work. In my second book, Witnessing Beyond the Human: Addressing the Alterity of the Other in Post-coup Chile and Argentina (SUNY Press, 2017), I consider the question of how to think of the nature of testimony beyond pre-conceived ideas of self and other, including the most basic sense of a shared humanity, during a time in which both sides of the violent political spectrum justified themselves as acting in the name of humanity. This book brings together some of Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on life (survival) and testimony in relation to the work of three writers and a visual artist—Juan Gelman, Sergio Chejfec, Roberto Bolaño, and Eugenio Dittborn—whose works explore the nature of life, relation, and representation, and point to the possibility of a witnessing “beyond the human.”

A version of Witnessing Beyond the Human was published in Chile under the title Testificar allende lo humano (Ediciones Macul, 2023). This version replaces the chapters on literature with two new chapters on Chilean critical thought and art, including the works of Lotty Rosenfeld and Catalina Parra.

A new monograph on Borges, titled Borges Between Singularity and Sovereignty, is forthcoming with SUNY Press.  

Selected Publications:

“Borges and I, et alia,” Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jorge Luis Borges, edited by José Eduardo González. MLA Press, 2025.  

“Jorge Luis Borges: Probing the Limits of World War,” in Latin American Literature in Transition, 1930-1980, edited by Amanda Holmes and Par Kumaraswami. Cambridge University Press, 2023.  

“Generation,” Diacritics (dossier “Women in Theory,” edited by Erin Graff Zivin) 49.2 (2021).

“Intersections of Politics, Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Life in Contemporary Chilean Thought,” The New Centennial Review 20.1 (2020).

“Walls, Towers, Books: Borges, Kafka, and the Limits of the Proper,” also co-edited dossier titled “Kafka, Borges, and their Literary Legacies,” Yearbook of Comparative Literature 63 (2017).

Recent graduate courses taught: 

Thinking the Visual (2018)
Borges and Theory (2015)
Ideology, Aesthetics, and the Human (2013)

Recent undergraduate courses taught: 

The Changing Role of Culture in Latin America
Borges y sus mundos
Magical Realism
Roberto Bolaño, Life Between Literature and Politics

Research Areas:

• Contemporary Latin American literature, Southern Cone, literary and cultural theory, visual arts, cultural studies, poetry, testimony

Affiliations:

• Romance Languages & Literatures
• Comparative Literature