Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature

I'm giving this a 4 not because I didn't really enjoy it but because I feel many will be dissapointed if they take the title literally. I first encountered Borges seriously about 10 yrs ago while on a self-improvement project reading Spanish poetry. I was delighted to see we shared an interest in Schopenhauer, George Berkely and Old English. I read a bio and much of the material in the three volume set of Stories, Essays and Poems by Penguin Classics. I highly recommend this well produced paperback set set to anyone wishing acquantance with this 20th century seminal author. The poetry volume is a dual language book and so anyone with a rudimentery knowledge of the latinate languages can appreciate the poems in the original. I consider them his best work, though the short stories are also highly respected. Borges did not write longer works, all the pieces are quite short. It has often been remarked that he was skipped for the Noble because of some of his unfortunate affiliations with unsavory - to say the least - Latin tyrants. He was, however, no Ezra Pound.These lectures on English literature are highly idiosyncratic and selective. He goes from long remarks on Anglo Saxon and Scandanavian literature straight to Sam Johnson in the mid 17 hundreds. His remarks often digress into the aesthtics of the language of the period and the imagined national characteristics of the speakers to the virtues of the literature itself. However the reader reacts to these speculations, they are always full of sparkling comments and insights.After Johnson and Boswell, two of my favorites and engagingly treated, we proceed to Browning, Stevenson and some Romantics. Wordsworth, Blake and Coleridge are perhaps poets we know mostly in passing these days and Borges' remarks are stimulating. I went back to reread some of them and found it rewarding after Borges' remarks. We finish, surprisingly, with William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century. Because of Morris' influence on art and book production, I'm an afficionado, but I bet I'm in a distinct minority. As to Rossetti, who also gets a lot of attention, good luck even finding him in a standard anthology today (same with Morris, actually).I certainly wouldn't expect to find him in lectures on literature which exclude Milton, Shakespear and Joyce. Anyhow, that's the caveat. This is about the brilliant working of Borges mind, not a refresher course on English lit!Apparently these lectures, from the 60's, were taped, transcribed in 2003 or so, and just now translated into English. I read in a review in the NYRB that they were not particulary popular in Argentinia..."a prophet has no honor....." They seem to give a pretty good idea of how the master may have performed as a lecturer, side musings, digressions and all, and for that reason I think are a great addition to the library of all serious readers of Jorge Borges.

Borges brings alive the old english epics so that you wish the Normans had been beaten back in 1066; curious to see how our literature and our world would have evolved differently. His taste is for the action of old english, the sound of alliterative poetry in prose and the beginnings of an interior dialogue without the abstraction introduced with the injection of french. He finds mystery and enigma without the falsity and forcing of irony nor any overt Christian narrative overlay. He points to a world of pleasurable reading for 21st century sensibilities from a literature more than a century old. Funny, after a century of analysis from a legion of english professors it takes a man who wrote in spanish, lived in Argentina, who was outside the critical traditions of the Academy, who read only for pleasure, and finally was blind - to see the deepest into our literature.

If you have ever wondered what it would have been like to be a student of Borges, then this book is for your. It is well transcribed and translated from the original attendees. If you are interested in how English was taught in the mid-twentieth century then I recommend it.

Borges was a great admirer of English literature. In this series of lectures from 1966, he discusses the lives and works of many outstanding authors including Beowulf, Samuel Johnson, the English Romantic Poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespeare, William Blake, Charles Dickens, William Wilkie Collins, Robert Browning, Dante Rossetti, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson.Borges was a genius writer and poet, as well as an insightful critic of English literature. His relaxed style of lecturing and depth of knowledge make the chapters even more enjoyable and interesting.I read the eBook version of these lectures, and it was very satisfactory.

Borges is widely held to be the greatest ever writer in the Spanish Language. This translation is a boon to people like me who are not nearly literate enough in Spanish to begin to understand him. With his non-fiction, he allows us to share his thinking in a way that makes him seem like a close and very dear long-time friend. I so wish he had been my friend.

A beautiful book, with such erudite professor who gives these lectires on English literature and English language!!. I think that everybody who's interesed in English literature should read this book.

Never thought I would stick to a book which is a whole-course set of lectures on English literature but I find Borges style so fascinating. Every so often he presents words from some very old writer that are so meaningful for modern life.

Borges is still the father of us all

The content of the book is very eclectic, with Borges' attention on the sources of particular movements rather than, like Hazlitt or Nabokov in their own lectures, isolating the greatest of the great. This is more the history of english literature, where it came from and began and the historical trends of English writing. It's easily read, being translated from a casual spoken style but the subject matter seems to me to be almost exclusively for those studying. Not that it'll be tedious to others but every rift of the book is littered with allusions to other writers, philosophers and artists, and takes for granted a prior knowledge of them.This slant of English Literature is rarely discussed elsewhere, but there's plenty of it worth knowing.

Nothing short of fantastic that a south American has to teach us about the development of the English language and it is a first class course in language development in general as well.

Ok

the book is very good. it teaches literature in a very simple manner. i love to read the book. thank you

It's a book which not only tells you about literature but also about life.