For Monday, be sure to read both Borges’ nonfiction essay “When Fiction Lives in Fiction,” as well as John Barth’s infamous essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), and come prepared with highlighted ideas and marginal notes. Both of these are included in your Borges packet, and below is what we should look for as we read Barth’s essay:
1. What is Literature of Exhaustion or the “literature of exhausted possibility”?
2. How does Barth use the term “ultimacy”? How does Borges do this?
3. Why, in Barth’s opinion, is “Mernard” successful and interesting?
4. What example does Barth give of Tlon’s “self-realization”?
5. What is the “contamination of reality by dream”?
6. How is The 1001 Nights a “story of a story turned back on itself”?
7. In what ways is Barth’s essay a Postmodern manifesto?
8. How do Barth’s ideas relates to Borges’ ideas in “When Fiction Lives in Fiction.”