Цитаты из книги The Literature Of Exhaustion. The Literature Of Replenishment

Whether historically the novel expires or persists as a major art form seems immaterial to me; if enough writers and critics feel apocalyptical about it, their feeling becomes a considerable cultural fact, like the feeling that Western civilization, or the world, is going to end rather soon. If you took a bunch of people…

This "contamination of reality by dream," as Borges calls it, is one of his pet themes, and commenting upon such contaminations is one of his favorite fictional devices. Like many of the best such devices, it turns the artist's mode or form into a metaphor for his concerns, as does the diary-ending of Portrait of the…

I want to discuss three things more or less together: first, some old questions raised by the new "intermedia" arts; second, some aspects of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose fiction I greatly admire; third, some professional concerns of my own, related to these other matters and having to do with what I'm…

Mace and peppergas wafted through the academic groves; the red flag of communism and the black flag of anarchism were literally waved at English Department faculty-student meetings, which -- a sight as astonishing to me as those flags -- were attended by hundreds, like an Allen Ginsberg poetry reading with harmonium and…

Those years -- 1965-1973 -- were the American High Sixties. The Vietnam War was in overdrive through most of the period; the U.S. economy was fat and bloody; academic imperialism was as popular as the political kind.

What I quickly discovered is that while some of the writers labeled as postmodernists, myself included, may happen to take the label with some seriousness, a principal activity of postmodernist critics (also called «metacritics» and «paracritics» ), writing in postmodernist journals or speaking at postmodernist symposia,…

It is sad, for a storyteller, to see his opinions read where his stories cannot be. But it is pleasing to have these essays, separated since birth, here for the first time reunited. May their two-part harmony make clear their song: that what matters is not the exhaustion or the replenishment, both of which may be…

«The Literature of Exhaustion» was written in 1967 in Buffalo, New York, during the troubles at the state university there and in our land. (See my headnote to it earlier in this Friday Book.) «The Literature of Replenishment» was written twelve years later in a calmer place and time – – Johns Hopkins, Jimmy Carter – –…