Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
The Great Courses (2007), 18 hours, 36 lectures, 224 page guidebook
Description
Thirty-six lectures examining influential works of fiction from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
User reviews
LibraryThing member lycomayflower
Great courses lectures about classic novels of the western canon, running from the 18th century through the twentieth. Weinstein does a good job in both his analysis and in his presentation of the material. Even when I wasn't necessarily interested in one of the texts he chose to discuss, it was
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mostly a pleasure to listen to him. (I'll tell ya what: he sounded like Richard Thomas playing John Boy Walton, and that was just fiiine with me.) Especially toward the end, I got a little impatient with his choices of material (a lot of this was just personal preference: I'd have much rather have heard him talk about Mrs Dalloway, for instance, than To the Lighthouse. But some of it was less so: many of his discussions of an individual text spanned two or even three lectures, and while I agree that some of them deserved that extended treatment, I might have argued for spending a little less time on Ulysses, say, in order to make room for Toni Morrison, maybe, or James Baldwin (or Tolkien)). Of course, anyone putting together a series of lectures like this would make slightly different choices, and certainly none of Weinstein's were bad. I wish they had sometimes been a little less on the nose, though someone without my background might be better served with the on-the-nose-ity displayed here. In any case, a great course. Recommended. Show Less
Language
Original language
English
Physical description
224 p.; 9.5 inches
Local notes
[1] Meeting the challenge of great literature [2] Moll Flanders / Defoe [3] Tristram Shandy / Sterne [4, 5] Les liaisons dangereuses / Laclos [6, 7] Père Goriot / Balzac [8, 9] Wuthering heights / Brontë [10, 11] Moby-Dick / Melville [12, 13] Bleak house / Dickens [14, 15] Madame Bovary / Flaubert [16, 17] War and peace / Tolstoy [18, 19] Brothers Karamazov / Dostoevsky [20] Heart of darkness / Conrad [21] Death in Venice / Mann [22] "The metamorphosis" / Kafka [23] The trial / Kafka [24–26] Remembrance of things past / Proust [27–29] Ulysses / Joyce [30, 31] To the lighthouse / Woolf [32, 33] As I lay dying / Faulkner [34, 35] One hundred years of solitude / García Márquez [36] Ending the chourse, beginning the world