Jorge Luis Borges
1899–1986
Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges exerted a strong influence
on the direction of literary fiction through his genre-bending
metafictions, essays, and poetry. Borges was a founder, and principal
practitioner, of postmodernist literature, a movement in which
literature distances itself from life situations in favor of reflection
on the creative process and critical self-examination. Widely read and
profoundly erudite, Borges was a polymath who could discourse on the
great literature of Europe and America and who assisted his translators
as they brought his work into different languages. He was influenced by
the work of such fantasists as
Edgar Allan Poe
and Franz Kafka, but his own fiction "combines literary and
extraliterary genres in order to create a dynamic, electric genre," to
quote Alberto Julián Pérez in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography.
Pérez also noted that Borges's work "constitutes, through his extreme
linguistic conscience and a formal synthesis capable of representing the
most varied ideas, an instance of supreme development in and renovation
of narrative techniques. With his exemplary literary advances and the
reflective sharpness of his metaliterature, he has effectively
influenced the destiny of literature."
The Poetry Foundation
