Readers will probably find Professor Borgesmore enthralling as a document of Borges himself than as a guide to English literature. Borges’s vast erudition is felt everywhere in these pages, and he is at his best when he digresses.
— The Rumpus
In English at last, Borges’s erudite and entertaining lectures on English literature from Beowulf to Oscar Wilde
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.”
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, from the Viking's kennings through Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, the Romantic poets, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Charles Dickens, and Robert Louis Stevenson. 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 Martín Arias and Martín Hadis.
Borges’ delivery will engross you — he is an excellent storyteller.
— New York Daily News
What you glean from seeing Borges’s work as a whole is just how thoroughly he dedicated himself to literature as a medium, and as a tradition. That panoramic passion and erudition has been captured once more, this time in a more informal setting, in Professor Borges.
— The Globe and Mail
