Jorge Luis Borges 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 mos