The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty -- a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.
And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroes. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference -- that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same. Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges's is really a mystical insight, and a profound one. It's also frightening, since the line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous, more to do with spirit than with mind per se. And, as an artistic program, this kind of collapse/transcendence of individual identity is also paradoxical, requiring a grotesque self-obsession combined with an almost total effacement of self and personality.
Alright, where did you steal this from?
>>7400460
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/books/review/07WALLACE.html?_r=0
its funny cus its by DFW
(Pynchon has also written some very good reviews to NYT)
>>7400462
>its funny cus its by DFW
guessed right at "pontine"
>>7400462
>its by DFW
Then why post it. He can't, sorry, couldn't, think.
>>7400518
It's not just thinking he fails at. He can't write either. I question whether even the most perceptive of spectators could discern any talent.
What does Pontine mean?
reading this was a chore, and the tone is repulsive. you'd think he wasn't talking about a book at all. super cringey. "essentially -- consciously -- a creative act."
"Buzzword Word Salad, the Review, by the post-ironic pseudo-hipster God and self-martyr of modern capitalistic society, DFW"
>>7400596
relax, man.
>pontine
God I hate this faggot
Dfw would be a great writer if he wasn't such a faggot.
>tfw this perfectly describes my own style of writing
next borges confirmed??
>>7400649
Post your stuff and I'll tell you.
To me heralding an author as a "bridge" between the gradual evolution into the very self-absorbed, irony-laden, nihilistic exageration of modernism that postmodernism essentially is, seems aggressively pseudointellectual. We might say that Stravinsky, for instance, is a "bridge" between the impressionist and serialist schools of music but impressionism and serialism are largely antithetical movements with irreconcilable mission statements. I personally tend to think of the designation "bridge" being warranted only when a cultural figure's work represents a punctual synthesis of two oppositional movements in a dialetical context. I would argue that no such dialectical process took place in the case of modernism vs. postmodernism, since postmodernism is merely a rebranding of the natural evolution of modernist concepts in one continuous direction. Perhaps the best argument for this is that any number of authors may be considered a bridge of one sort or another as long as they were born in the late 1800s or early 1900s.
>>7400544
>he comes to /lit/ to be a memester
Why even live?
>>7400595
It's a latinate-style adjective constructed from "pont" (bridge), which of course who but DFW would reach for.
>>7401013
Shit bait.
>>7401013
But what does it mean?
>>7401029
Look up pons.
>>7401029
>Borges is arguably the great bridge
>>7400437
damn dfw is riding borges' dick hard
Tissue connecting two parts of body organ or structure.
>>7400437
I nominate you for pseud of the year
>that sophistry and pallaver to no end
>"the pontine claim above"
>pontine
>fucking PONTINE
No, really, there is a limit. You crossed that line as soon as you started typing.
When Joyce does it you all suck his dick, DFW uses one elaborate adjective and suddenly you're up in arms!
