This lecture introduces both the first two parts of this seven-part course, and the course in general. Professor Vandiver defines the key terms, "Western" and "literature," and describes the course's objectives.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest surviving work of Western literature. We explore its themes and the parallels between the Mesopotamian flood story as reflected in Gilgamesh and the story of Noah as it appears in Genesis.
We examine the Documentary Hypothesis, which posits four different source documents for the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Then we compare the Book of Genesis to other Mesopotamian creation stories.
This lecture considers the Books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings, and discusses the theory that these books were edited and reworked to form a unified whole, perhaps around the time of the Babylonian Captivity. We analyze the story of David and Bathsheba.
The Book of Isaiah contains some of the finest poetry in the Bible. We examine its role as a prophetic text during a critical period of Jewish history. Later, Christians read certain passages as foretelling the birth of Christ.
We conclude our treatment of the Hebrew Scriptures by considering one of the most remarkable books of the Bible, the Book of Job—the story of a righteous man who undergoes great suffering through no fault of his own.
Beginning our survey of ancient Greek literature, we study the nature of Homeric epic. Then we turn to the Iliad, paying special attention to its themes of kleos (glory or fame) and time (honor).
We continue our discussion of Homeric epic by looking at the Odyssey, focusing on its portrayal of the human condition through Odysseus's reunion with his wife and son after 20 years of absence.
This lecture considers the development of Greek lyric poetry, taking Sappho and Pindar as outstanding examples—Sappho for her exquisite love poetry and Pindar for his victory odes commemorating athletic competitions.
From speculation on the origin of Greek tragedy, we move to Aeschylus, the first of the three great Athenian tragedians. We focus on his trilogy The Oresteia, discussing how he used myth to reflect on social issues of the day.
Sophocles wrote 123 plays; only seven survive. We concentrate on the play Ajax. The absence of the gods makes Sophocles's work in some ways the most realistic of the three tragedians.
This lecture discusses how Euripides differs from Aeschylus and Sophocles. In particular, we focus on Euripides's unorthodox treatment of the gods, especially in The Bacchae and Hippolytus.
The first great prose narrative in Western literature is the Histories by Herodotus, which describe the Persian invasions of Greece in the 5th century B.C. Professor Vandiver explains the nature and significance of this work.
Many scholars see Thucydides rather than Herodotus as the true father of history. This lecture examines Thucydides's Peloponnesian Wars and looks at the key differences between his methodology and that of Herodotus.
Aristophanes is the only 5th-century comic playwright whose work has in part survived. This lecture pays particular attention to two plays, Clouds and Frogs, that satirize philosophers and tragedians respectively.
This lecture offers an overview of Plato by concentrating on one work, The Republic, and its treatment of literature and poetry. Among other issues, we consider why Plato banishes poets from his ideal state.
Menander wrote a new style of comedy that took its subject matter from the troubles of everyday people. After discussing his plays, we consider other writers from the Hellenistic age and their influence on later Roman authors.
We begin with a brief summary of Rome's cultural borrowings from Greece, and then examine two Roman lyric poets, Catullus and Horace, who used Greek models to transform the poetic possibilities of Latin.
Inspired by the Iliad and the Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid went on to become one of the most influential texts in Western culture. This lecture examines how Virgil infused his epic with a psychological complexity beyond that of Homer.
Ovid's most important work is the Metamorphoses, which features stories linked as much by themes of love, desire, and sexual passion as by the stated subject of "bodies changed into other forms."
The Roman historians Livy and Tacitus reflect the contrasting styles of their Greek predecessors Herodotus and Thucydides. We also study the immensely influential Roman biographer Plutarch, who wrote in Greek.
This lecture considers the development of the ancient novel, exemplified by the two remarkable extant Roman novels, the fragmentary Satyricon of Petronius and the Metamorphoses of Apuleius.
We examine the four Gospels of the New Testament, whose importance to Western culture cannot be overestimated. As literary works, they pioneered the presentation of common people as subjects for serious rather than comic writing.
We consider Augustine as both one of the last great writers of Roman antiquity and one of the first great writers of Christianity, concentrating on his powerful works Confessions and the City of God.
After introducing this part of the course, Professor Noble begins his study of medieval literature with Beowulf, a stirring tale of monsters and dragons that in our own era inspired the themes and stories of J. R. R. Tolkien.
French literature emerges with stunning rapidity in The Song of Roland, an epic tale of Christians versus Muslims that is the earliest and perhaps finest of the genre called chansons de geste, stories about great exploits.
Probably composed between 1201 and 1207, El Cid is the oldest epic in Spanish. The poet creates a new epic hero who is a more complete and believable character than either Beowulf or Roland.
In this lecture, we study the origins of romance. We turn to the greatest of the German romances, Tristan and Isolt, which immerses us in the Arthurian world of quests, courtly love, mistaken identity, and enchantment.
Though long, complex, and difficult, The Romance of the Rose enjoyed unprecedented popularity in the Middle Ages. In this lecture, we unravel its sustained allegory "in which the entire art of love is contained."
The first of two lectures on Dante considers his life and some of his "minor" works, including La vita nuova, which narrates his love for Beatrice. Also covered are Convivio, De volgari eloquentia, and De monarchia.
We discuss different aspects of The Divine Comedy, which comprises the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, especially noting Dante's growing wisdom as he moves from the hideous visage of Satan to the ineffable face of God.
Petrarch is sometimes called the "Father of the Renaissance." We examine his letters, My Secret Book, and beautiful lyric poems called the Canzoniere. A central theme is his attempt to reconcile Humanism and Christianity.
After reviewing Boccaccio's early Italian writings and his Latin works based on classical literature, we turn to his prose masterpiece The Decameron, 100 short stories told by 10 fashionable young people taking refuge from the plague.
We study the celebrated poem in which a hideous Green Knight appears at Arthur's Camelot at Christmas and offers to let anyone cut off his head who will, one year hence, consent to the same fate. Gawain accepts the challenge.
The first of two lectures on Chaucer sets his life in context, discusses the many influences that affected him, and analyzes The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and the exquisite Troilus and Criseyde.
In The Canterbury Tales, we meet almost every kind and class of person in medieval England. To form a sense of Chaucer's art, this lecture considers the "General Prologue" and then several types of tales.
Professor Herzman begins his exploration of Renaissance literature with Christine de Pizan, believed to be the first European woman to earn her living as a writer. We focus on The Book of the City of Ladies.
We study the great Dutch humanist scholar Erasmus, focusing on his satirical Praise of Folly. Erasmus uses Folly to criticize corruption in Christianity and show the way to live a proper Christian life.
Executed by order of Henry VIII, Thomas More was a high government official and humanist scholar. His best-known work is Utopia, which coined the term "utopia" and served as a powerful critique of contemporary society.
In his ceaseless attempt to understand himself and thereby the human condition, Montaigne invented a new literary form—the essay. We concentrate on his essay titled "On the Education of Children."
Imbued with humanist philosophy, Rabelais' great work Gargantua and Pantagruel combines comedy, satire, obscenity, fantasy, farce, parody, and politics. Fittingly, ribald exuberance has a name: "Rabelaisian."
Born the same year as Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe died young and is one of the great "what-ifs" of literature. He left us seven superb plays. We look in particular at Dr. Faustus.
The first of two lectures on Shakespeare looks at The Merchant of Venice as a representative comedy, shedding light on the qualities that give Shakespeare a central position in Western literature.
Turning to Shakespearean tragedy, we examine Hamlet, focusing on Shakespeare's genius for multiple plots. In particular, we look at the conflict between Hamlet's introspective world and the Machiavellian court of Claudius.
Lope de Vega was a remarkably gifted and prolific playwright of the Spanish Golden Age. We concentrate on his Fuente Ovejuna, a story of sex, love, and justice that was one of his most popular plays.
Cervantes's Don Quixote has been called both the first novel and the greatest novel. We study it as a work harking back to the world of the chivalric romance and looking forward to the mature modern novel.
After a brief overview of the career and writings of Milton, we concentrate on his Paradise Lost, the most important epic poem written in English. We look closely at Book Nine, narrating the Fall of Adam and Eve.
Pascal is claimed as an important figure by scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers, as well as by literary scholars. This lecture explores his Pensées, or Thoughts, an incomplete but profound work of religious meditation.
Professor Heinzelman begins this part with a discussion of the key terms "Neoclassical" and "Romantic." We then turn to Molière and through Tartuffe explore his representation of Neoclassical values.
Racine's re-creations of classical Greek tragedy are deeply moving representations of psychological conflict. In this lecture, we study Phaedra, an example of Racine's elegant simplicity of style and form.
What kind of life could an intellectual woman live in the 17th and 18th centuries? We study Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican nun, composer, poetess, dramatist, philosopher, and feminist.
Defoe exploited the public's appetite for new stories, publishing narratives about the sexual and commercial entrepreneurs of London, such as Moll Flanders, Roxana, and that essential guide to empire building, Robinson Crusoe.
This lecture focuses on two of Pope's works: An Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock. The first is a poetic essay asserting the values of Neoclassical culture. The second is a mock-epic satire on Pope's social circle.
We use Swift's Gulliver's Travels and The Modest Proposal to analyze the "other" side of Neoclassical thought: the extremism produced by the single-minded pursuit of reason untempered by compassion.
Voltaire's work spans the spectrum of literary genres, from drama and satire to history and philosophy. We examine his satirical masterpiece Candide for its use of wit to expose the self-deceiving dogma of philosophical optimism.
We study several of Rousseau's works, including The Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract, both of which played an inspirational role in the French and American revolutions.
Johnson wrote widely and prolifically. We look at "The Vanity of Human Wishes" as an example of his poetry. Then we examine some of his essays from "The Rambler" and "The Idler," as well as his "Life of Pope."
Diderot spent 20 years writing and soliciting articles for his Encyclopedia, the creation of which was arguably the defining intellectual event of the 18th century. We explore some of the articles and investigate another of his works, Rameau's Nephew.
For Blake, the Enlightenment heralded a progressive loss of meaning in the world. We study his deceptively simple and deeply ironic poems, "Songs of Innocence" and "Experience."
Born at the height of the Enlightenment, Goethe symbolizes the transition to Romanticism. We concentrate on his Faust as a way to understand the philosophical and aesthetic concerns of the time.
Professor Heffernan opens this part of the course by briefly treating Wordsworth's autobiographical epic, The Prelude. Then he examines at length Wordsworth's first major poem, "Tintern Abbey."
In Pride and Prejudice, Austen makes the traditional fairy-tale romance fit the socioeconomic facts of life in early 19th-century England, but nonetheless contrives a fairy-tale ending.
In Stendhal's Red and Black, the hero is obsessed with the memory of Napoleon's glory, yet impelled to gratify his ambition by social rather than military triumphs. One conquest ultimately leads to disaster.
When Melville started writing Moby-Dick at age 30, he was already well known for his novels about sea life. In telling the tale of a maimed sea captain obsessed with revenge on a great white whale, he brings to modern fiction the mythic power of ancient epic.
In "Song of Myself," Whitman inaugurates the reign of free verse in American poetry and re-conceives the tradition of autobiographical writing reaching back to Rousseau's Confessions.
In writing Madame Bovary, Flaubert struggled to make his prose as poetic as possible while realistically depicting the commonplace life of a bourgeois adulteress.
In Great Expectations, Dickens transforms the familiar story of the foundling. Narrator Pip is an abused orphan whose innate gentility is "recognized" and nurtured by a mysterious benefactor, but his dream of wealth and marriage to the beautiful Estella becomes a nightmare of frustrated expectations.
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment tells the story of a man who believes that his exemption from moral law gives him the right to murder an old woman for her money. In the end, however, he accepts and even wills his own punishment.
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's psychologically complex novel of domestic life, shows why a socially distinguished woman who has left her unfeeling husband for a dashing and devoted Count takes her own life.
Like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn tells the story of a boy's adventure, but this time Twain fuses the adventure with the history of the struggle to break the chain of slavery in America, and dramatizes the conflict between Northern and Southern morality.
In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy challenges us to see how a "pure" woman can remain so while losing her virginity to a seducer, living with him as his mistress, and ultimately killing him.
Wilde's wittiest play, The Importance of Being Earnest, dramatizes the varieties of suspense in courtship and resolves them in the end with a brilliant pun. A British law against homosexuality turned the ending of Wilde's own life into a tragedy.
James wrote a series of novels that chiefly aim to dramatize the interaction of American energy and innocence with the sophisticated but often
In Heart of Darkness, based on his experience in the Congo, Conrad reveals the insane rapacity of European traders bent on "civilizing" the African natives whom they exploit.
Yeats's early poems seek to reconfirm "the ancient supremacy of the imagination." In his late work, he became a visionary struggling to make order out of the "mere anarchy" war had loosed upon the world.
In Proust's oceanic novel, In Search of Lost Time, the narrator explores childhood memories awakened by the taste of pastry dipped in tea. In a rich tradition of autobiographical narrative, Proust paints an extraordinarily complex picture of social life in France at the turn of the 19th century.
In his autobiographical first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce creates one of the three leading characters of his later novel, Ulysses. By tracing the life of Stephen Dedalus—his fictional self—from infancy to early manhood, Joyce reveals the genesis of his own art.
In The Trial, a respectable banker is arrested for no reason, subjected to endless delays by an incomprehensible legal system, and executed without being tried. Josef exemplifies the Modernist focus on the isolated self, cut off from all traditional sources of support—emotional, institutional, legal, moral, or spiritual.
Woolf produced a remarkable body of fiction, essays, and criticism. In Mrs. Dalloway, she tells the story of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a prominent London hostess giving an elegant party.
By turns grotesque, tragic, and comic, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying tells the story of a family taking a corpse to a burial ground on a journey menaced by fire and flood. It is narrated from 15 points of view.
At the outset of World War II, Brecht wrote the sympathetic Mother Courage to dramatize the effect of the Thirty Years' War in 17th-century Europe. An unmarried mother of three sons and a brain-damaged daughter makes her living off the war from a wagon she hauls herself.
In The Plague, which he wrote during World War II, Camus narrates a doctor's struggle against bubonic plague. The novel may be read as symbolizing the seemingly inexorable recurrence of war. Exemplifying the dogged faith of his landmark essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus' doctor strives to heal in the face of futility.
In Waiting for Godot, a play with no action in the conventional sense, Beckett depicts the human condition as one of interminable waiting for something that never comes.
Looking back on 3,000 years of literary history, is there a way to make sense of it all? This lecture shows how literature treats war, love, and humankind's relation to God in three basic literary forms: lyric, narrative, and drama.