a bit of a break... Mirrors and Voices.

I have taken a bit of a break from my online postings lately, due to the time-constraints imposed by the grad-school application process. I apologize.

To my avid and disapointed readers (*cough*), I apologize.

To tide you over in the meantime, this evening I will begin to post segments of a piece of essay-work that I am currently working on retyping and reformatting for a professor.

This is the first installment in a series, and thus a cliff-hanger; so keep posted.


Mirrors and Voices;
Borges’ and Beckett’s Collective Postmodern Project of Tearing Down and Rebuilding Representations.


Refining the Scope of the Project


To encapsulate a major theme of the Postmodern project, it has been the job of both artists and critics to tear down all that had existed before, particularly as it relates to the idea of representation, and rebuild admittedly false but just-as-plausible representational constructs in the place where structures that were held as “truth” in the modernist and pre-modern eras had been removed. In this regard, critically, far more work has been done in the earlier phase of this project; that of the removing of past assumptions of representational “truth,” than in the latter stage, the process of rebuilding where the first stage leaves enormous opportunity for new Art-for-Art’s-sake initiatives. In terms of the works of Art that participate in the project, however, effort has definitely been made on all sides of the task. In this regard, Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett represent opposite ends of this spectrum that compliment each other nicely in view of the combined project of the movement. Borges can be seen to represent the beginning of the postmodern process in this regard, the early process of tearing down, by way of the works of art themselves, the constructs of the previously assumed “truths.” Correspondingly, Beckett represents the end goal of the project, the reconstruction, by way of Art itself, of new constructs based on the assumption that the old ones, by this point, are understood to be irrelevant (these new constructs would, therefore, also be irrelevant in any regard but to the advancement of the Art of representation itself). The two authors, therefore, if taken collectively, represent, in many ways, the fulfillment of the postmodern task. Deconstruction is inconsequential if some form of Reconstruction doesn’t follow, and true artistic construction cannot take place without the tabula rasa that early post-modern truth-destruction (both critical and artistic) provides. Borges and Beckett allow us to view how the two can most successfully function together to achieve a coherent artistic (and inherently Art-focused) statement.

...to be continued...