Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature

If you're a fan of literature, meaning that you get pleasure out of not only reading but also thinking over and talking about books, then this is a must-read simply because it's one of the greatest writers of all time talking about some of the other greatest writers of all time with his customary immense insight and analytical ability. Idiosyncratically composed, far-ranging in scope, and unbelievably erudite, this collection is all the more amazing because it was compiled from a series of lectures he gave to students at the University of Buenos Aires in 1966 completely without notes and after having been legally blind for an entire decade.

The course he was teaching was on English Literature, which to Borges means going back to the very show more beginning with Anglo-Saxon literature. He spends the first seven lectures on things like Anglo-Saxon poetic styles, Beowulf, the Finnsburgh Fragment, Caedmon, and the elegiac tradition. He then, surprisingly, mostly skips over the big guys like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope and jumps right to the 18th century to discuss Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, William Blake, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Dante Rosetti, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Among and in between these brief but incredibly dense capsule biographies and literary treatments are all kinds of interesting side discussions of things like the history of the runic alphabet, why Anglo-Saxon poems use alliteration instead of rhymes, how English's lack of grammatical gender sounds to speakers of Romance languages, the literary effects of the Battles of Hastings and Maldon, how English literature differs from the French, the film Rashomon, the upsides of forgetfulness for G. K. Chesterton, the nature of crime and whether murdering someone truly makes you "a murderer", the difference between strong plots and strong characters in detective fiction, and a million other fascinating topics, tossing off all these thought-provoking insights as if they had just occurred to him. Here's a good example of the way he talks about someone, not only relating their work to that of their contemporaries, but also people throughout space and time:

"William Blake, on the contrary, remains not only outside the pseudo-classic school (to use the most elevated term), and that is the school represented by [Alexander] Pope, but he also remains outside the romantic movement. He is an individual poet, and if there is anything we can connect him to - for, as Rubén Darío said, there is no literary Adam - we would have to connect him to much more ancient traditions: to the Cathar heretics in the south of France, the Gnostics in Asia Minor and Alexandria in the first century after Christ, and of course to the great and visionary Swedish thinker, Emmanuel Swedenborg."

Yes... Gnostics and Swedenborg... that's just what I thought as well. You could spend hours or days trying to unpack those connections he drew in just two quick sentences, but he rattles off kind of panoptic synthesis of tradition so effortlessly it's clear that he's really thought about the connections between them and is not trying to play some kind of Harold Bloom-ish ranking game. Even if some of the sections aren't quite as riveting as the others - I thought some of the stuff about the Anglo-Saxons in the beginning and William Morris' poetry towards the end dragged on a bit long - there are so many quotable gems and good reading suggestions inside that it beggars belief. If you liked his essays in Selected Non-Fictions then this is the natural next step. show less

Not a history book but very good on the history of English Literature. Also incudes several influential authors I was unfamiliar with.

Transcripción de las clases del curso de literatura inglesa de Borges. Buenisimo, la tarea realizada por los compiladores rellenando los huecos, corrigiendo las citas es superlativo. Esta Borges en plenitud, la enciclopedia literaria, la ironía, todo . Recomendable

El libro Borges profesor reúne las veinticinco clases magistrales que dictara Jorge Luis Borges en la Universidad de Buenos Aires, en el curso de Literatura Inglesa, durante el año 1966. Era titular, desde hacía diez años, de la cátedra de Literatura Inglesa y Nortamericana, esta última dictada por un profesor adjunto. Profundo conocedor del tema, Borges profundiza sobre las kennings, la poesía cristiana, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Carlyle, Browning, Willam Morris, Stevenson y Oscar Wilde entre otros.