The Teaching Company (TTC) - Life and Work of Mark Twain

Professor Stephen Railton - U of Virginia, V6
 
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=2567

Samuel Clemens, the man known to history as Mark Twain, was more than one of America's greatest writers. He was our first true celebrity, one of the most photographed faces of the 19th and 20th centuries. This course explores Twain's dual identities as one of our classic authors and as an almost mythical presence in our nation's cultural life. It seeks to appreciate Twain's literary achievements and to understand his life by highlighting seven of his major works:

Innocents Abroad
Roughing It
Old Times on the Mississippi
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson.

Professor Stephen Railton is extraordinarily qualified to bring to light the subtlest insights into Twain's texts. An expert on Twain, he has appeared on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer as a distinguished Twain scholar and is the creator of Mark Twain in His Times, an award-winning Internet archive about Twain's life and career. Professor Railton shows the issues that concerned Twain most throughout his lifetime and that appear repeatedly in the pages of his books.


01 Needing No Introduction?
02 From Samuel Clemens to Mark Twain
03 The Sense of Mark Twain's Humor
04 Marketing Twain
05 Innocents Abroad, I—Going East
06 Innocents Abroad, II—Traveling to Unlearn
07 Roughing It—Going West
08 The Lecture Tours
09 The Whittier After-Dinner Speech
10 "Old Times on the Mississippi"
11 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
12 The Performances of Tom Sawyer
13 Huck Finn, I—Defining an American Voice
14 Huck Finn, II—The Quest for Freedom
15 Huck Finn, III—The Great American Novel?
16 Huck Finn, IV—Classrooms and Controversy
17 Connecticut Yankee, I—Unwriting the Middle Ages
18 Connecticut Yankee, II—Revisiting the Nineteenth Century
19 Connecticut Yankee, III—The Quest for Status
20 Pudd'nhead Wilson—Fictions of Law and Custom
21 Anti-Imperialist Works
22 Late Twain in Public
23 Late Twain in Private
24 Sam Clemens is Dead/Long Live Mark Twain