SOURCE: Rincón, Carlos. “The Peripheral Center of Postmodernism: On Borges, García Márquez, and Alterity.” Boundary 2 20, no. 3 (fall 1993): 162-79.

In the following essay, Rincón discusses the roles that Jorge Luis Borges and García Márquez hold as South American postmodern authors.

Recently, Peter Buerger tried, like Lukács before him, to interpret literary modernism by resorting to the Hegelian premise that a double alienation between the subject and the object and between ‘man’ as an individual and ‘man’ as a member of a species are basic characteristics of modern (bourgeois) society.¹ Proceeding from this premise, he catalogs the variety of narrative modes in which the subject seeks (unattainably) to become one with surrounding objects. The historico-philosophical foundation of Buerger's investigation assumes the continuity of literary modernity and its Eurocentric determination. Is it possible to ascertain a threshold between the modern and the postmodern at...