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Borges the Post-Orientalist: Images of Islam from the Edge of the West
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 50, Number 2, Summer 2004
- pp. 435-459
- 10.1353/mfs.2004.0015
- Article
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This article simply examines the representation of the Islamic Orient in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, and suggests two things: 1) that Borges's different representations of Islam in his texts—Arab philosophers, Persian myths, Sufi motifs, quotations from the Koran—are best understood by a different set of Orientalist voices that Borges employs, from context to context, to best communicate his Oriental content and 2) that Borges's stories, understood in a chronological sequence, ultimately demonstrate an awareness of the artificial nature of his Orient—and a gradual disillusionment with the whole idea of representing Islam.