In “History of Beauty,” Umberto Eco explored the ways in which notions of attractiveness shift from culture to culture and era to era. With ON UGLINESS, a collection of images and written excerpts from ancient times to the present, he asks: Is repulsiveness, too, in the eye of the beholder? And what do we learn about that beholder when we delve into his aversions? Selecting stark visual images of gore, deformity, moral turpitude and malice, and quotations from sources ranging from Plato to radical feminists, Eco unfurls a taxonomy of ugliness. As gross-out contests go, it’s both absorbing and highbrow.
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Showing posts with label Literature lecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature lecture. Show all posts
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Modern Poetry with Professor Langdon Hammer
This course covers the body of modern poetry, its characteristic techniques, concerns, and major practitioners. The authors discussed range from Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, to Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and Frost with additional lectures on the poetry of World War One, Imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance. Diverse methods of literary criticism are employed, such as historical, biographical, and gender criticism.
Click session titles below to access audio, video, and course materials.
The American Novel Since 1945 with Professor Amy Hungerford
In "The American Novel Since 1945" students will study a wide range of works from 1945 to the present. The course traces the formal and thematic developments of the novel in this period, focusing on the relationship between writers and readers, the conditions of publishing, innovations in the novel's form, fiction's engagement with history, and the changing place of literature in American culture. The reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones. The course concludes with a contemporary novel chosen by the students in the class.
Click session titles below to access audio, video, and course materials.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Milton with Professor John Rogers
A study of Milton's poetry, with some attention to his literary sources, his contemporaries, his controversial prose, and his decisive influence on the course of English poetry.
Click session titles below to access audio, video, and course materials.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Boston Athenaeum History Essays
Stanley Ellis Cushing, curator, rare books, Boston Athenaeum
James Reid-Cunningham, chief conservator, Boston Athenaeum
Conservation concerns are frequently heard in libraries, as time and use take their toll on treasured holdings. Collections assembled over decades, or centuries as in the case of the Athenaeum, offer daunting challenges. Few libraries can boast of the long history of tackling these problems that is apparent in the history of the Athenaeum. This lecture tells the story of the rise of book conservation as a profession not only at the Boston Athenaeum but also at American libraries in general, and outlines the conservation issues facing the library at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Rare books curator Stanley Cushing discusses the development of the artists' books collection over the last seven years, building upon the library's earlier acquisitions of fine bindings, printing, and illustrated books. He discusses examples of avant garde design, structure, and materials that are pushing the accepted limits of the concept of the book.
File type: mp3
DOWNLOAD HERE
James Reid-Cunningham, chief conservator, Boston Athenaeum
Conservation concerns are frequently heard in libraries, as time and use take their toll on treasured holdings. Collections assembled over decades, or centuries as in the case of the Athenaeum, offer daunting challenges. Few libraries can boast of the long history of tackling these problems that is apparent in the history of the Athenaeum. This lecture tells the story of the rise of book conservation as a profession not only at the Boston Athenaeum but also at American libraries in general, and outlines the conservation issues facing the library at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Rare books curator Stanley Cushing discusses the development of the artists' books collection over the last seven years, building upon the library's earlier acquisitions of fine bindings, printing, and illustrated books. He discusses examples of avant garde design, structure, and materials that are pushing the accepted limits of the concept of the book.
File type: mp3
DOWNLOAD HERE
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