Classic Novels: Meeting the Challenge of Great Literature
by Professor Arnold Weinstein (The Great Courses)
In this course, Professor Weinstein discusses some of the most challenging books of world literature in order to illuminate for listeners some of the themes within each one. His goal, I believe, is to encourage people to read these books, even if they are sometimes difficult, because they have something important to offer people as we think about how we live and our relationships with others. He also points out how they are part of the development of literature, as later authors write novels that play on the same themes or offer alternative viewpoints.
I love the Great Courses on Audible and listen to a wide range of topics. One of the aspects I appreciate about the ones focused on literature is that they help me to better appreciate books, even if I don't enjoy the books themselves. Wuthering Heights, for example, is a book I've read and listened to as an audiobook. I don't care for it much, but listening to Professor Weinstein's lectures on it, I could see how it accomplished something innovative.
The books covered by the course are:
- Moll Flanders by Defoe (1 lecture)
- Tristam Shandy by Sterne (1 lecture)
- Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos (2 lectures)
- Père Goriot by Balzac (2 lectures)
- Wuthering Heights by Bronte (2 lectures)
- Moby Dick by Melville (2 lectures)
- Bleak House by Dickens (2 lectures)
- Madame Bovary by Flaubert (2 lectures)
- War and Peace by Tolstoy (2 lectures)
- The Brothers Karamazov (2 lectures)
- Heart of Darkness by Conrad (1 lecture)
- Death in Venice by Mann (1 lecture)
- "The Metamorphosis" by Kafka (1 lecture)
- The Trial by Kafka (1 lecture)
- Remembrance of Things Past by Proust (3 lectures)
- Ulysses by Joyce (3 lectures)
- To the Lighthouse by Wolfe (2 lectures)
- As I Lay Dying by Faulkner (2 lectures)
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez (2 lectures)
I'm also always asking myself, "Is this something I would share with my high school students?" In this case, most of the novels covered would be tremendous challenges for a high school student. In addition, some of the themes addressed may be more explicit than you may want to include in your high school English class. I don't intend to assign any of them to my own students, but I would not be opposed to one of my children wanting to listen to this audiobook in senior year.
In the last lecture, Professor Weinstein mentioned Kierkagaard who, in the second chapter of Fear and Trembling, said:
An old proverb fetched from the outward aspect of the visible world says: “Only the man that works gets the bread.” Strangely enough this proverb does not aptly apply in that world to which it expressly belongs. For the outward world is subjected to the law of imperfection, and again and again the experience is repeated that he too who does not work gets the bread, and that he who sleeps gets it more abundantly than the man who works.
But in the world of literature, Professor Weinstein noted that we do have to work for our bread. We can read a book and get nothing out of it, but when we work, we reap the benefits. An apt reminder for Charlotte Mason's ideas of narration.
I have received nothing in exchange for this post. Links to Amazon and Bookshop are affiliate links. I purchased this audiobook.
