Classic Novels: Meeting the Challenge of Great Literature

Overview

Course No. 2310
Embark on a journey through 36 lectures that explore the transformative power of classic literature. Professor Arnold Weinstein guides you through:

• 18 masterpieces from the 18th to 20th centuries
• Innovative narrative techniques that revolutionized fiction
• Profound insights into the human condition
• How great novels reveal truths hidden in everyday life

From the moors of Wuthering Heights to the Congo’s heart of darkness, discover why these works remain essential reading.

Video Lessons

1. Meeting Great Literature (34 min)
   Introduction to literature’s unique power to show complete life stories.
2. Defoe: Moll Flanders (31 min)
   Explore identity and disguise in this 18th-century picaresque novel.
3. Sterne: Tristram Shandy (31 min)
   Analyze this eccentric, digressive precursor to modernist fiction.

4-5. Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses (64 min total)
Examine seduction as power in this epistolary French classic.

6-7. Balzac: Père Goriot (62 min total)
Study Parisian society through Balzac’s tragic father figure.

8-9. Brontë: Wuthering Heights (61 min total)
Unpack Gothic romance and unreliable narration on the Yorkshire moors.

10-11. Melville: Moby-Dick (62 min total)
Navigate metaphysical themes in America’s great whale hunt epic.

12-13. Dickens: Bleak House (62 min total)
Investigate Victorian London’s foggy legal labyrinths.

14-15. Flaubert: Madame Bovary (62 min total)
Dissect romantic disillusionment in provincial France.

16-17. Tolstoy: War and Peace (63 min total)
Experience Napoleon-era Russia through Tolstoy’s epic vision.

18-19. Dostoevsky: Brothers Karamazov (62 min total)
Grapple with patricide and existential questions in Russian literature.

20. Conrad: Heart of Darkness (31 min)
    Journey into colonial Africa’s moral abyss.
21. Mann: Death in Venice (31 min)
    Contrast Northern discipline with Venetian passion.

22-23. Kafka: The Metamorphosis & The Trial (62 min total)
Confront modern alienation through surreal bureaucracy.

24-26. Proust: Remembrance of Things Past (94 min total)
Explore memory’s “secular resurrection” across 3,000 pages.

27-29. Joyce: Ulysses (95 min total)
Decipher Dublin’s modern Odyssey through experimental prose.

30-31. Woolf: To the Lighthouse (64 min total)
Study stream-of-consciousness in this parental portrait.

32-33. Faulkner: As I Lay Dying (63 min total)
Witness a grotesque funeral procession through multiple perspectives.

34-35. García Márquez: 100 Years of Solitude (63 min total)
Experience magical realism in Macondo’s mythical town.

36. Conclusion (33 min)
    Reflect on literature’s power to make us “citizens of the world.”