The Classics of British Literature - An Exploration

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  The Classics of British Literature - An Exploration
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  736 MB
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• Added:
  12/28/2008
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  2009-08-25 16:53:35
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  Classics of British Literature<br /> <br /> Taught by John Sutherland<br /> California Institute of Technology (Caltech)<br /> University College London Ph.D., Edinburgh University<br /> <br /> <br /> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> <br /> How does literature connect a nation to its past? And why does hearing a poem, attending a play, or reading a novel so often become more than the act itself? How do such works open windows into the historical, cultural, or intellectual worlds of the writers who created them?<br /> <br /> Few nations offer a literary legacy that addresses these questions as well as that of Great Britain. For more than 1,500 years, the literature of this tiny island and its founding peoples has taught, nurtured, entertained, thrilled, outraged, and humbled us.<br /> <br /> But how, exactly, do masterpieces of great literature do this?<br /> <br /> Why do we place the mantle of "greatness" upon works as different from one another as the surviving fragments of Beowulf, snatched from the flames by an unknown hero centuries ago, and Salman Rushdie's contemporary novel The Satanic Verses, whose publication sent its author into years of hiding?<br /> <br /> And why does understanding the world its creators inhabited increase the insights and pleasures a literary work can give us?<br /> <br /> British-born Professor John Sutherland has spent a lifetime exploring these questions, and in Classics of British Literature, he shares the answers that can forever alter the way you experience a novel, poem, or play. Its 48 lectures reveal why these great works are important - not only as literature, but also as fascinating documents of social, cultural, and political history:<br /> <br /> - You'll learn, for example, how the King James Bible of 1611, because it was read aloud in church each week, could teach a newly evolved English language to an entire population - even a largely illiterate one. Teaching the new rhythms and structure of the language in this manner paved the way for much of the literature that followed, including the work of an entire generation of dramatists whose success depended on an understanding of the spoken word by that same largely illiterate audience.<br /> <br /> - You'll understand why the Victorian society of Dickens's Oliver Twist chose to change its social welfare legislation to make the experience of poverty even more painful and degrading. This seemingly paradoxical approach was based on philosopher Jeremy Bentham's influential theory that people organized their lives around the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It was a theory that allowed for the belief that the responsible poor would always choose the "option" of gainful employment over the painful alternatives of unemployment, destitution, the workhouse, or the public dole.<br /> <br /> <br /> Learn How the Unlikeliest of Collaborations Changed Poetry Forever<br /> <br /> - You'll see how a shared sense of urgency over Britain's direction resulted in the unlikely pairing of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Though as different in their approaches to life as any two writers might be, the two nonetheless shared a common perception of the corrupting influences of industrialization. It was a bond that pushed them to pen an anonymous collaborative volume, Lyrical Ballads, which offered a way for poetry to cleanse itself of those hated influences and return to more primal sources of inspiration. Their book's tremendous success would change the face of English poetry forever.<br /> <br /> - And you'll experience the ultimately fatal blow that John Osborne's Look Back in Anger dealt to the centuries of censorship that had long shackled British drama. Written by a leading member of the "angry young men" of British art, the play did more than simply fire still another outraged round at England's long-standing class system. It also signaled the coming end of the censorial power long wielded by the Lord Chamberlain, the officer of the Crown charged with insulating theater-goers from anything offensive.<br /> <br /> <br /> See the Interaction of Literature and the Social Landscape<br /> <br /> More than just a survey course about great writers, this is a course about ideas and the social landscape, and how these factors and literature have acted upon and influenced one another.<br /> <br /> The great writers you expect to find are here, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Swift, and so many others.<br /> <br /> But you'll also enjoy the company of less familiar voices whose importance we now recognize.<br /> <br /> These include Aphra Behn, cited by Professor Sutherland as the "first loud and clear, wholly independent woman's voice" in literature. Behn achieved both fame and commercial success as a Restoration dramatist, poet, and author and was the first female writer honored with a tomb in Westminster Abbey. It is a tomb upon which, according to Virginia Woolf, "all women together ought to let flowers fall." But Behn was, as you'll learn, even more. She lived a life that saw her a widow, a spy, and an imprisoned debtor who by necessity wrote her way our of hardship. Her masterful Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, subtitled A True History, was in fact a novel, though the term had not yet been invented.<br /> <br /> And you'll also learn the extraordinary story of Olaudah Equiano, a young Nigerian who was kidnapped and enslaved in his own country at the age of 11 and subsequently sold to white slavers - yet became "the first major author whose skin is black." His remarkable life - which included the unusual opportunity of being sent to school by the Royal Navy officer who had purchased him as a personal slave - provided the stuff of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Purchased again - this time by a Quaker merchant who eventually allowed Equiano to repay that purchase price and receive his freedom - Equiano became an accomplished merchant in his own right, a leading figure in the abolitionist movement, and the author of what is arguably the first important slave narrative - a volume as rich in its detailing of the Middle Passage and its horrors as of the unlikely fortunes of Equiano himself.<br /> <br /> <br /> A Teacher with a Relish for the Sounds of the Language<br /> <br /> It's hard to imagine a professor better suited to teach this course than Professor Sutherland, who brings to these lectures not only his decades of academic and teaching honors but also extraordinary charm and wit.<br /> <br /> When he reads aloud, as he does throughout the course, you can't help but revel with him in the many different sounds of his native language.<br /> <br /> As he moves from the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf to the Middle English of Chaucer to the various class accents still representative of today's English speech, his delivery alone conveys a sense of just how much is encompassed by the term "British literature."<br /> <br /> And be sure to watch and listen for his surprise unveiling of the real accents of his own upbringing at the end of his lecture on George Bernard Shaw. It's a teaching touch that adds a special resonance to that lecture's discussion of Shaw's Pygmalion.<br /> <br /> Professor Sutherland's examination of Britain's literary treasures and their creators will also show you how each artist is connected to those who have come before.<br /> <br /> It's a connection expressed not only in building on their predecessors' works and viewpoints, but also in choosing to cast them aside when need be, the better to challenge readers and audiences with new ways of understanding both a changing world and the literature that reflects it.<br /> <br /> 128 kbps 44100 Hz mono<br />
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Files

File	Size
01 Anglo-Saxon Roots Pessimism and Comradeship.mp3	16 MB
02 Chaucer Social Diversity.mp3	15 MB
03 Chaucer A Man of Unusual Cultivation.mp3	15 MB
04 Spenser The Faerie Queene.mp3	16 MB
05 Early Drama Low Comedy and Religion.mp3	15 MB
06 Marlowe Controversy and Danger.mp3	15 MB
07 Shakespeare the Man The Road to the Globe.mp3	15 MB
08 Shakespeare The Mature Years.mp3	14 MB
09 Shakespeare's Rivals Jonson and Webster.mp3	15 MB
10 The King James Bible English Most Elegant.mp3	15 MB
11 The Metaphysicals Conceptual Daring.mp3	15 MB
12 Paradise Lost A New Language for Poetry.mp3	15 MB
13 Turmoil Makes for Good Literature.mp3	15 MB
14 The Augustans Order, Decorum, and Wit.mp3	15 MB
15 Swift Anger and Satire.mp3	15 MB
16 Johnson Bringing Order to the Language.mp3	15 MB
17 Defoe Crusoe and the Rise of Capitalism.mp3	15 MB
18 Behn Emancipation in the Restoration.mp3	15 MB
19 The Golden Age of Fiction.mp3	15 MB
20 Gibbon Window into 18th-Century England.mp3	15 MB
21 Equiano The Inhumanity of Slavery.mp3	15 MB
22 Women Poets The Minor Voice.mp3	15 MB
23 Wollstonecraft First of a New Genus.mp3	15 MB
24 Blake Mythic Universes and Poetry.mp3	15 MB
25 Scott and Burns The Voices of Scotland.mp3	16 MB
26 Lyrical Ballads Collaborative Creation.mp3	16 MB
27 Mad, Bad Byron.mp3	16 MB
28 Keats Literary Gold.mp3	15 MB
29 Frankenstein A Gothic Masterpiece.mp3	16 MB
30 Miss Austen and Mrs. Radcliffe.mp3	16 MB
31 Pride and Prejudice Moral Fiction.mp3	16 MB
32 Dickens Writer with a Mission.mp3	16 MB
33 The 1840s Growth of the Realistic Novel.mp3	15 MB
34 Wuthering Heights Emily's Masterwork.mp3	15 MB
35 Jane Eyre and the Other Brontë.mp3	16 MB
36 Voices of Victorian Poetry.mp3	15 MB
37 Eliot Fiction and Moral Reflection.mp3	16 MB
38 Hardy Life at Its Worst.mp3	15 MB
39 The British Bestseller An Overview.mp3	16 MB
40 Heart of Darkness Heart of the Empire.mp3	15 MB
41 Wilde Celebrity Author.mp3	16 MB
42 Shaw and Pygmalion.mp3	15 MB
43 Joyce and Yeats Giants of Irish Literature.mp3	16 MB
44 Great War, Great Poetry.mp3	15 MB
45 Bloomsbury and the Bloomsberries.mp3	15 MB
46 20th-Century English Poetry Two Traditions.mp3	16 MB
47 British Fiction from James to Rushdie.mp3	16 MB
48 New Theatre, New Literary Worlds.mp3	16 MB
Torrent_downloaded_from_Demonoid.com.txt	0 KB
TTC - Classics of British Literature.pdf	0.8 MB

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