Thursday, March 29, 2012

Language and literature masterpieces of Great Britain.



For more than 1,500 years, the literature of this tiny island has taught, nurtured, thrilled, outraged, and humbled readers both inside and outside its borders. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Swift, Conrad, Wilde—the roster of British writers who have made a lasting impact on literature is remarkable. More importantly, Britain's writers have long challenged readers with new ways of understanding an ever-changing world.

The 48 fascinating lectures in Classics of British Literature provide you with a rare opportunity to step beyond the surface of Britain's grand literary masterpieces and experience the times and conditions they came from and the diverse issues with which their writers grappled.

British-born Professor John Sutherland, the Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English at University College London and Visiting Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology, has spent a lifetime exploring these rich works. The unique insights he shares into how and why these works succeed as both literature and documents of Britain's social and political history can forever alter the way you experience a novel, poem, or play.
Britain's Literary Mosaic

More than just a survey course, Classics of British Literature shows you how Britain's cultural landscape acted upon its literature—and how, in turn, literature affected the cultural landscape. Professor Sutherland takes a historical approach to the wealth of works explored in these lectures, grounding them in specific contexts and, oftentimes, connecting them with one another.

While it is vital that we appreciate the universal and transcendent quality of literature, according to Professor Sutherland, we also need to appreciate "as fully as one can, the conditions that gave birth to these works of literature; to reinsert them, that is, back into history."

The end result is not a laundry list of famous works but instead a mosaic of Britain's history as revealed through the individual threads of its most revered literary masterpieces. Throughout the course, you discover how each work is linked to others that have come before it—whether building on its predecessors' work or casting it aside to challenge readers and audiences with new ways of understanding a changing world. For example:
The King James Bible of 1611 paved the way for succeeding literature, including an entire generation of dramatists whose success depended on an understanding of the spoken word by a largely illiterate audience. The language of the King James Bible, read aloud in church weekly, became the English language familiar to an entire population.
Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, set in Sierra Leone during World War II, echoes themes about the British colonization of Africa cemented almost 50 years earlier in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
James Joyce's highly experimental fiction—including Ulysses and Finnegans Wake—shocked the British literary establishment of the early 20th century. By opposing conventional thinking and morality, he helped create a new climate for future writers.
(Gerasimchik)
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=2400

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