SOURCE: “The Canonical Texts,” in Borges Revisited, edited by David W. Foster, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 37–68.

In the following discussion of Borges's fiction, Stabb analyzes the elements that define the pieces as characteristically Borgesian.

Borges's present fame rests on a relatively small number of short narratives. While his complete works fill many volumes, and although his essays, poems, and literary musings complement his central achievement, it is this corpus of quintessentially Borgesian texts that have established him as a major voice among Western postmodernists. The bulk of these pieces appear in Ficciones (Ficciones, 1944) and El Aleph (The Aleph, 1949, 1952): in terms of their date of composition they represent his work of the mid-thirties through the early fifties. These texts, perhaps only twelve or fifteen in number, have been frequently reedited, widely anthologized, intensively studied, and extensively translated. It is possible that a few of the narratives written in his later...