Course Overview

An expert storyteller and professor shows you how some of Western civilization’s greatest literary masterpieces can provide guidance in your life across the gulf of time and culture.

What You Will Learn

Study more than three dozen works spanning Western history, from ancient Greece and Rome to the modern age. These enduring works of literature offer invaluable lessons for every important moment in life. You will explore six broad themes throughout the 36 insightful lectures:

1. The unconquerable human spirit

• Youth and old age

• Romance and love

• Adventure and courage

• Laughter and irony

6. Patriotism

Course Lectures

1. Seneca – “On Providence” – 32 min

• The Gospel of John – 30 min

• Boethius, Martin Luther King – Conscience – 30 min

4. Dostoevsky – The Brothers Karamazov – 30 min

5. Elie Wiesel – Night – 30 min

• Schweitzer – Out of My Life and Thought – 30 min

• Goethe – The Sufferings of Young Werther – 30 min

• Shakespeare – Hamlet – 30 min

• Sophocles – Ajax – 30 min

• Plato – Epistle VII – 30 min

11. Cicero – “On Old Age” – 30 min

• Isaac Bashevis Singer – The Penitent – 30 min

13. Euripides – Alcestis – 30 min

14. Euripides – Medea – 30 min

15. Von Strasburg – Tristan and Isolde – 30 min

• Shakespeare – Antony and Cleopatra – 30 min

17. Shakespeare – Macbeth – 30 min

• Aldous Huxley – Brave New World – 30 min

• Homer – Odyssey – 30 min

• Sophocles – Philoctetes – 29 min

21. The Song of Roland – Chivalric Adventure – 30 min

• Nibelungenlied – Chivalric Romance – 30 min

23. Lewis and Clark – Journals – 30 min

• T. E. Lawrence – Seven Pillars of Wisdom – 31 min

• Aristophanes – Comedies – 30 min

• Menander – The Grouch – 30 min

• Machiavelli – La Mandragola – 30 min

• Erasmus – In Praise of Folly – 30 min

29. Thomas More – Utopia – 30 min

• George Orwell – Animal Farm – 30 min

• Josephus – History of the Jewish War – 30 min

32. Joseph Addison – Cato – 30 min

33. George Washington – Farewell Address – 31 min

34. Abraham Lincoln, George Patton – War – 30 min

• Theodore Roosevelt – An Autobiography – 31 min

• The Wisdom of Great Books – 32 min