A History of World Literature



Course No. 2300 (48 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Taught by Grant L. Voth
Monterey Peninsula College
Ph.D., Purdue University



As Professor Voth explains, "As long as there have been people in the world, there have been stories." In this course, you'll sample some of the greatest literary expressions the world has known and experience storytelling in its many forms, including poetry, drama, and narrative.

The course begins in the ancient world, where tribal bards created national myths and founded religious texts out of legends, history, philosophy, and local lore. From there, you'll travel to the Far East to encounter the brief, suggestive, and deeply personal lyric poets of Classical Japan and China.

You'll also wander the countryside and aristocratic courts of India and the Middle East, collecting stories and folklore of magical men, terrifying beasts, alluring women, and conniving tricksters that live on in today's fairy tales and bedtime stories.

Subsequent lectures follow the evolution of the art of the story as it appears in sophisticated narratives such as Wu Ch'eng-en's Monkey and Voltaire's Candide; the poetic masterpiece of Dante's Inferno; the great drama pioneered by Shakespeare and Molière; and other works of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.

With the coming of the modern world, you'll trace the rise of Realism in the works of Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Ibsen and the development of experimental modes by Brecht, Beckett, Borges, Rushdie, and Pirandello.




Course Lecture Titles:

1. Stories and Story Tellers
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh
3. The Hebrew Bible
4. Homer's Iliad
5. Homer's Odyssey
6. Chinese Classical Literature
7. Greek Tragedy
8. Virgil's Aeneid
9. Bhagavad Gita
10. The New Testament
11. Beowulf
12. Indian Stories
13. T'ang Poetry
14. Early Japanese Poetry
15. The Tale of Genji
16. Inferno, from Dante's Divine Comedy
17. Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
18. 1001 Nights
19. Wu Ch'eng-en's Monkey
20. The Heptameron
21. Shakespeare
22. Cervantes's Don Quixote
23. Molière's Plays
24. Voltaire's Candide
25. Cao Xueqin's The Story of the Stone
26. Goethe's Faust
27. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
28. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin
29. Flaubert's Madame Bovary
30. Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground
31. Twain's Huckleberry Finn
32. Dickinson's Poetry
33. Ibsen and Chekhov—Realist Drama
34. Rabindranath Tagore's Stories and Poems
35. Higuchi Ichiyo's "Child's Play"
36. Proust's Remembrance of Things Past
37. Joyce's Dubliners
38. Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"
39. Pirandello's Six Characters
40. Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan
41. Anna Akhmatova's Requiem
42. Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country
43. Faulkner—Two Stories and a Novel
44. Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy
45. Achebe's Things Fall Apart
46. Beckett's Plays
47. Borges's Labyrinths
48. Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.



All Files are MPEG Audio, (English)
PDF Lecture Guide, (English)



Enjoy and Seed!!