Like most literary geeks, I’ve read a lot of Jorge Luis Borges. …
Like most literary geeks, I’ve read a lot of Jorge Luis Borges. If you haven’t, look into the influences of your favorite writers, and you may find the Argentine short-story craftsman appearing with Beatles-like frequency. Indeed, Borges’ body of work radiates inspiration far beyond the realm of the short story, and even beyond literature as commonly practiced. Creators from David Foster Wallace to Alex Cox to W.G. Sebald to the Firesign Theater have all, from their various places on the cultural landscape, freely admitted their Borgesian leanings. That Borges’ stories — or, in the more-encompassing term adherents prefer to use, his “fictions” — continue to provide so much fuel to so many imaginations outside his time and tradition speaks to their simultaneous intellectual richness and basic, precognitive impact. Perhaps “The Garden of Forking Paths” or “The Aleph” haven’t had that impact on you, but they’ve surely had it on an artist you enjoy.
Now, thanks to UbuWeb, you can not only read Borges, but hear him as well. They offer MP3s of Borges’ complete Norton Lectures, which the writer gave at Harvard University in the fall of 1967 and the spring of 1968:
Taught by William Flesch at Brandeis University, this course offers a survey …
Taught by William Flesch at Brandeis University, this course offers a survey of poetry that’s out of favor. But it turns out to be among the most skillful, brilliant, witty, invigorating, funny, sometimes dirty poetry ever written. (The dirty poetry is definitely NSFW. It may not even be safe for consenting adults.) Coverage goes from the urbane civic poetry of Dryden and his contemporaries to the beginnings of the intense subjectivity of Romanticism, with attention to the continuities between these wildly different schools. It’s helpful to have a complete Pope and the Penguin Dryden. We also use the Oxford Anthology of English Literature, ed. Martin Price.
Taught by William Flesch at Brandeis University, Spenser and Milton are the …
Taught by William Flesch at Brandeis University, Spenser and Milton are the two greatest non-dramatic English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they even rival Shakespeare. Shakespeare read (and adopted) Spenser; Milton read and used Spenser as a way to think about poetic, aesthetic, religious and political issues in a non-Shakespearean way. This course covers all of Spenser’s great allegorical poem The Faerie Queene, and all of Milton’s major poetry, including Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Any complete editions of Spenser and Milton will suffice.
This is a course on Shakespeare’s career, given at Brandeis University in …
This is a course on Shakespeare’s career, given at Brandeis University in the spring of 2010, by William Flesch. It covers several representative plays from all four genres: comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. We consider both the similarities and differences among those genres, and how his more and more radical experimentations in genre reflect his developing thought, about theater, about time, about life, over the course of his career. In terms of texts, any complete Shakespeare will suffice, including this free version online from MIT. The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, is also recommended.
Taught by William Flesch at Brandeis University, this course offers a survey …
Taught by William Flesch at Brandeis University, this course offers a survey of some of the greatest and most influential works on Western literature, philosophy and culture, from Homer through Milton. Part of the through line is that every writer covered in the course wrote in a context inherited from the earlier ones, so we look at affiliations between them all. The course used the Lattimore translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the Hollander translations of Dante. For the other works, any translation or edition is fine.
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