Teaching Co Great Courses CDs : UNDERSTANDING LITERATURE and LIFE sealed

Description: Understanding Literature & Life : Drama Poetry Narrative ( course # 210 ) The complete course of 64 lectures on 32 AUDIO CDs, and the guidebook ( Voice only -- NO VIDEO ) This course is now out-of-print so this is probably the last CD sets available ! Condition: BRAND NEW, SEALED ( the shrinkwrap has a few small insignificant tears ) Shipping 6 days a week I offer combined shipping : $2 off the shipping on each additional item About This Course 64 lectures | 30 minutes per lecture All too often, people fail to give the great books the attention they deserve. They might feel locked out of these masterpieces because they believe themselves unequipped to savor their richness. Or they might feel that great literature has only some antiquarian or museum value. As an introduction to the major texts of Western culture from antiquity to the present, this course empowers you to enter into these great works of the past. A Gratifying and Enlightening Experience Taught by an extraordinary scholar and educator, this course is a gratifying experience that can widen your views on self and society in enduring ways. Dr. Arnold Weinstein of Brown University has been honored as Brown's Best Teacher in the Humanities and has studied and taught at major universities all over the world. His remarkable ability to make a writer's voice come alive makes this one of our most exciting literature courses. And he has made a point of creating a wide-ranging, enriching experience. The course has been designed to exhibit not only the themes and techniques of great literature but also to expose both the power and limitations of several different analytic tools in assisting our understanding of these monuments of the human spirit, including: Feminism Marxism Freudianism Deconstruction Close reading. A Pandora's Box of "Potent Stuff" "Literature—that of the past and that of the present—is potent stuff," says Professor Weinstein, serving not only as transcription of history but also as a literary Pandora's box, capable of shedding light on those transactions which remain in the dark for many of us: love, death, fear, desire. "We are talking about more than artful language; we are talking about the life of the past and the life of the world." These lectures with Professor Weinstein examine great works in the three forms of literary expression: drama, poetry, and narrative. Understanding Drama The lectures on drama begin with the pre-eminent text of Western culture, Sophocles's Oedipus the King, continue through Shakespeare and Molière, and then go on to the realist and naturalist work of the 19th century, closing with Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Theater itself is a profoundly social art form. It possessed a religious character for the Greeks and its staging of values and crises are still resonant today. The sequence of plays discussed thus illuminate for us the changing notions of "representative man," from Sophocles's king to Beckett's clowns. You learn that theatrical literature makes visible the conflicts and wars of culture in ways other forms cannot manage, because theater is founded on the agon, the struggle between disparate subjectivities and voices. Notions of self, human relationship, and meaningful action are debated, forged, actualized, and undone before our very eyes. This enables a holistic and environmental picture of life that we do not have in our daily affairs. Understanding Poetry Poetry is at once the most artful and most elemental form of literature. Its conventions of rhyme, meter, metaphor, and the like distinguish poetry unmistakably from the prose we use all the time. It enables it to go to the heart of human existence with a purity and power akin to surgery. It is truly a privileged form of expression, a mode of discovery that bids to challenge and change the way we customarily do business. The means by which it gains its remarkable power include its: "Thickened" language Economy of verse Startling vistas of metaphor and simile Play of rhythm Sheer concentration of vision. Portraits of Private Psyche and Public Setting From Shakespeare's sonnets through the great poets of our own times, Dr. Weinstein demonstrates what a bristling human document the poem can be and how it offers a unique portrait of private psyche and public setting. More than any other art form, poetry captures the dance of the human mind. It displays for us the way meanings are made and makes us understand just how precious a resource language itself is in our lives. Understanding Narrative Narrative is doubtless the most familiar form of literary expression, since everyone reads, or used to read, novels. The perspective of this section is long-range, with the lectures beginning with a medieval Arthurian romance and closing with Alice Walker's The Color Purple. The varied list of works includes: The picaresque classic, The Swindler The 18th-century saga of a self-made woman, Moll Flanders Classic coming-of-age stories by Dickens and Brontë Metaphysical probes by Melville and Kafka Faulkner's The Bear, which asks painful questions about race and progress. The lectures reveal some astonishing common ground, including the emphasis on rites-of-passage; the fit or misfit between self and society; the creation of an identity; and the weight and presence of the past. You learn that narrative is especially constituted to convey the curve of time in human life; the central business of the novel is to tell the life story, enabling a possession of that life that is hardly imaginable any other way. Encounter Works of Undisputed Value Though notions of "completeness" and coverage make little sense in a course such as this, the texts chosen are of undisputed literary and historical value and place particular emphasis on the English and American traditions. Dr. Weinstein's approach to each of these works is multifaceted, including: Acquaintance with the historical moment Introduction to the verbal and formal features of the work Close study of both the artist's craft and the larger meanings of the text Final consideration of the "life" of the text Its analogues in other cultures Its continued vitality in other times. This course is meant to widen your view by using single texts as touchstones for other texts and other moments. A Dialogue of Books Across the Centuries Reading great literature makes it possible to grasp something of the march and struggles of history and to apprehend the contours of a second history—a history composed of books that signal to one another and that are revisited and replayed throughout the centuries. "Civilization and its discontents" is Freud's term for the external and internal warfare and policing that characterize the work of culture. These lectures show that works of art give us vital testimony about the actual cost of civilization—about the tensions between anarchy and order and between experience and language. "It should be no surprise," notes Dr. Weinstein, "that literature is a privileged locus for these conflicts, conflicts that we would scarcely understand at all if it were not for the record provided by art. "The study of literature, then, must be both microscopic and macroscopic, attuned to the nuances and craft of artistic packaging no less than the larger philosophical and socio-political forces that attend human life." 64 Lectures 1 Why Literature—Civilization and Its Discontents 2 Oedipus the King and the Nature of Greek Tragedy 3 Fate and Free Will—Reading the Signs in Oedipus 4 Self-making vs. Self-discovery in Oedipus 5 The Interpretive Afterlife of Oedipus 6 Shakespeare's Othello—Tragedy of Marriage and State 7 Poison in the Ear, or the Dismantling of Othello 8 Rethinking Othello—Race, Gender and Subjectivity 9 French Theater and Moliere's Comedy of Vices 10 Tartuffe and Varieties of Imposture 11 Religious Hypocrisy—Beyond Comedy 12 Georg Büchner—Physician, Revolutionary, Playwright 13 Woyzeck the Proletarian Murderer—"Unaccommodated Man" 14 Woyzeck and Visionary Theater 15 Strindberg's Father—Patriarchy in Trouble 16 Marriage—Theatrical Agon or Darwinian Struggle? 17 The Father—From Theater of Power to Power of Theater 18 Beckett's Godot—Chaplinesque or Post-nuclear? 19 Beckett and the Comedy of Undoing 20 Godot Absent—Didi and Gogo Present 21 Study of Literature—Approaches, Encounters, Departures 22 Shakespeare's Sonnets—The Glory of Poetry 23 The Shape of Love and Death in Shakespeare's Sonnets 24 Innocence and Experience in William Blake 25 Blakean Fables of Desire 26 Blake—Visionary Poet 27 Whitman and the Making of an American Bard 28 "Myself" as Whitman's Nineteenth-Century American Hero 29 Form and Flux, Openness and Anxiety in Whitman's Poetry 30 Emily Dickinson—The Prophetic Voice from the Margins 31 Dickinson and the Poetry of Consciousness 32 Dickinson—Death and Beyond 33 Baudelaire—The Setting of the Romantic Sun 34 Baudelaire's Poetry of Modernism and Metropolis 35 Robert Frost—The Wisdom of the People 36 Frost—The Darker View 37 Wallace Stevens and the Modernist Movement 38 Stevens and the Post-Romantic Imagination 39 Adrienne Rich and the Poetry of Protest 40 Rich's Project—Diving into the Wreck of Western Culture 41 The Lives of the Word—Reading Today 42 Chretien de Troyes' Yvain—Growing Up in the Middle Ages 43 Yvain's Theme—Ignorant Armies Clash By Night 44 The Picaresque Novel—Satire, Filth and Hustling 45 Francisco Quevedo's Swindler—The Word on the Street 46 Daniel Defoe's Plain Style and the New World Order 47 Moll Flanders and the Self-made Woman 48 Matter and Spirit in Defoe 49 Dickens—The Novel as Moral Institution 50 Pip's Progress—From Blacksmith to Snob and Back 51 Riddles of Identity in Great Expectations 52 Charlotte Brontë and the Bildungsroman 53 Jane Eyre—Victorian Bad Girl Makes Good 54 The Madwoman in the Attic—19th Century Bills Coming Due 55 Melville's "Bartleby" and the Genesis of Character 56 "Bartleby"—Christ on Wall Street? 57 Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis"—Sacrifice or Power Game? 58 Kafka's "In the Penal Colony"—The Writing Machine 59 Faulkner's "The Bear"—Stories of White and Black 60 "The Bear"—American Myth or American History? 61 Tracking the Bear, or Learning to Read 62 Alice Walker's Celie—The Untold Story 63 Ideology as Vision in The Color Purple 64 Reconceiving Center and Margin

Price: 78.99 USD

Location: Pompano Beach, Florida

End Time: 2024-12-09T18:22:22.000Z

Shipping Cost: 6.78 USD