Lecture 1. The Bible and the literary canon
Lecture 2. The Bible as literature
Lecture 3. The epic of Gilgamesh: Western literature?
Lecture 4. Homer's odyssey and the seafaring hero
Lecture 5. The context of Athenian tragedy
Lecture 6. Herodotus versus Thucydides
Lecture 7. Socrates and Plato: writing and reality
Lecture 8. Aristotle's poetics: how we tell stories
Lecture 9. Virgil's Aeneid and the epic of empire
Lecture 10. Love interest: Ovid's metamorphoses
Lecture 11. St. Augustine saves the classics
Lecture 12. All literature is consolation: Boethius.
Lecture 13. Beowulf: the fortunate survivor
Lecture 14. King Arthur, politics, and Sir Gawain
Lecture 15. Dante and the canon of Christian literature
Lecture 16. Boccaccio: ancient masters, modern rivals
Lecture 17. Chaucer: the father of English literature
Lecture 18. "Man for all seasons": More and his Utopia
Lecture 19. Hamlet: English literature goes global
Lecture 20. Brave new worlds: Shakespeare's The tempest
Lecture 21. Cervantes's Don Quixote and the novel
Lecture 22. The rebel as hero: Milton's paradise lost
Lecture 23. Voice of an age: Voltaire's Candide
Lecture 24. Pride and prejudice: women in the canon.
Lecture 25. Nationalism and culture in Goethe's Faust
Lecture 26. Melville's Moby-Dick and global literature
Lecture 27. Cult classic: The charterhouse of Parma
Lecture 28. East meets West in War and peace
Lecture 29. Joyce's Ulysses and the avant-garde
Lecture 30. The magic mountain and modern institutions
Lecture 31. Mrs. Dalloway and post-war England
Lecture 32. T.S. Eliot's divine comedy
Lecture 33. Faulkner and the great American novel
Lecture 34. Willa Cather and mosaics of identity
Lecture 35. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: literature?
Lecture 36. Postcolonialism: the empire writes back.
