Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd Edition

Have heard 6 of the 7 books, very entertaining and interesting, would buy again. Listen to many lectures more then once.

These lectures are o.k. but a bit of a slog. The main problem is after listening to 10 or so lectures by a single lecturer I want to start screaming because their personal styles start to get really aggravating. Each time I hope that the next lecturer in the series will be better, but each one gets worse. And their approaches are uneven, some lecturers give something of a cliff-notes narrative, which is helpful because it gives you a sense of how a book is structured, while other lecturers hardly mention the storyline at all and focus instead on a broad analysis, which is great for providing some valuable context but leaves the listener wondering what the book is about. Overall, I find myself drifting off and missing many key points but I still feel that these lectures provide a solid grounding in the general trajectory of western literature and I'm hopeful that I'll come away with a better understanding of key books, authors, and moments in history.

I have many of The Great Courses, and find most of them to be excellent. This one,.however, is an exception. I am halfway through the set, and have heard 3 of the lecturers. I would rate none as exceptional, nor even very good. I find most of the lectures rambling, uninformative and provide little insight into the works under discussion. It may be that the set concept is flawed in that there is very little attention paid to the works of these authors and much irrelevant information provided about the authors themselves. Very disappointing. If I find later lecturers to be more enlightening, I will update this review. Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, Parts 1-7 .

thanks.

“I don't study to know more, but to ignore less.”― Juana Inés de la Cruz1 Foundations2 The Epic of Gilgamesh3 Genesis and the Documentary Hypothesis4 The Deuteronimistic History5 Isaiah6 Job7 Homer The Iliad8 Homer The Odyssey9 Sappho and Pindar10 Aeschylus11 Sophocles12 Euripides13 Herodotus14 Thucydides15 Aristophanes16 Plato17 Menander and Hellenistic Literature18 Catullus and Horace19 Virgil20 Ovid21 Livy, Tacitus and Plutarch22 Petronius and Apuleius23 The Gospels24 Augustine25 Beowulf26 The Song of Roland27 El Cid28 Tristan and Isolt29 The Romance of the Rose30 Dante Alighieri Life and Works31 Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy32 Petrarch33 Giovanni Boccaccio34 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight35 Geoffrey Chaucer Life and Works36 Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales37 Christine de Pizan38 Erasmus39 Thomas More40 Michel de Montaigne41 Francois Rabelais42 Christopher Marlowe43 William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice44 William Shakespeare Hamlet45 Lope de Vega46 Miguel de Cervantes47 John Milton48 Blaise Pascal49 Moliere50 Jean Racine51 Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz52 Daniel Defoe53 Alexander Pope54 Jonathon Swift55 Voltaire56 Jean-Jacques Rousseau57 Samuel Johnson58 Denis Diderot59 William Blake60 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe61 William Wordsworth62 Jane Austen63 Stendhal64 Herman Melville65 Walt Whitman66 Gustav Flaubert67 Charles Dickens68 Feodor Dostoevsky69 Leo Tolstoy70 Mark Twain71 Thomas Hardy72 Oscar Wilde73 Henry James74 Joseph Conrad75 William Butler Yeats76 Marcel Proust77 James Joyce78 Franz Kafka79 Virginia Woolf80 William Faulkner81 Berthold Brecht82 Albert Camus83 Samuel Beckett84 ConclusionEach of these 84 lectures either introduces us to an author or explains why the author is important in the Western Literary Tradition. Five different lecturers teach this course and I thought they were all excellent in their methods. This is a long course but I found it very interesting especially for the more ancient writers that I was unfamiliar. I also enjoyed learning about the French and German writers that I have never read.My absolute favorite was the obscure nun named Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz whose letters have just recently been discovered. She was a nun in New Spain, (Mexico) and was a feminist before there were feminists. She was lucky enough to have been born in a wealthy enough family to allow her to be educated. Her only option for freedom in those days was to dedicate her life to God and become a nun. I have a new person to investigate.Each of these lectures is around thirty minutes so you have plenty of time to listen a little bit each day. I enjoyed about three a night before falling asleep. This was one of my favorite Great Courses and I highly recommend it to anyone who would enjoy an overview of the writers that made our Western Literature popular.

Superb overview. Great refresher on all the best western works!