Author(s): Jorge Luis Borges (New Directions)

Culture Ideas Politics

Borges takes us on a startling, idiosyncratic, fresh, and highly opinionated tour of English literature, weaving together countless cultural traditions of the last three thousand years. Borges s lectures delivered extempore by a man of extraordinary erudition bring the canon to remarkably vivid life.Now translated into English for the first time, these lectures are accompanied by extensive and informative notes by the Borges scholars Martin Arias and Martin Hadis. Writing for Harper s magazine, Edgardo Krebs describes Professor Borges A compilation of the twenty-five lectures Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature. Starting with the Vikings kennings and Beowulf and ending with Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, the book traverses a landscape of precursors, cross-cultural borrowings, and genres of expression, all connected by Borges into a vast interpretive web. This is the most surprising and useful of Borges s works to have appeared posthumously.