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Beiträge, die mit JamesBoswell getaggt sind

Assoc for Scottish Literature

2 Wochen her

Assoc for Scottish Literature
2 Wochen her

“In his excitement at the prospect of the examined life Boswell invented modern biography.”

—Andrew O’Hagan’s celebration of James Boswell, London Review of Books, 5 Oct 2000

4/5

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n19/andrew-o-hagan/self-hugging

#Scottish #literature #biography #JamesBoswell #18thcentury #SamuelJohnson

Boswell’s way of talking about himself can seem to us very modern: pre-Freud and pre-tabloid, he talks in a shockingly open way about the nature of his own (and other people’s) desires, affections, tribulations and thoughts of death. He also suggests the quality of his own delight. He is a self-watcher and a self-hugger. And his way of looking at other people – including Johnson – reveals him to be a harbinger of the documentary techniques and psychological modes of enquiry we now take for granted. In his excitement at the prospect of the examined life Boswell invented modern biography. He wrote like hell, and the full fragrance, the authentic buzz, of his own life and period, such as it was, rises with Flemish exactness from every other sentence he chose to write down.

Andrew O’Hagan · Self-Hugging: A Paean to Boswell

Admiration is defined by Johnson in that Dictionary as ‘taken sometimes in a bad sense, though generally in a good...

^{Andrew O’Hagan (London Review of Books)}

#literature #biography #scottish #18thcentury #SamuelJohnson #jamesboswell

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Assoc for Scottish Literature

2 Wochen her

Assoc for Scottish Literature
2 Wochen her

“A fool can utter a brilliant sentence but it seems quite rare for a fool to be able to write an admirable biography of seven or eight hundred pages…”

Jorge Luis Borges asks, Was Boswell just an idiot who had the good fortune to meet Johnson & write his biography? Or is this “Samuel Johnson” actually a brilliant dramatic character created by Boswell?

3/5

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2013/07/28/lecture-johnson-and-boswell/

#Scottish #literature #biography #JamesBoswell #18thcentury #SamuelJohnson #Borges #JorgeLuisBorges

A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell | Jorge Luis Borges | The New York Review of Books

We have to think that just as Sancho is the companion Quixote sometimes treats badly, we see Boswell in that same relation to Dr. Johnson: a sometimes stupid and loyal companion.

^{Jorge Luis Borges (The New York Review of Books)}