Here at Literary Tales we will have a regular schedule as we cycle through the joy and wonder of the humanities. Every Monday a new episode will be uploaded; the second and final Wednesday of the month will be devoted to the “Philosophy Hour” where we cover philosophy, theology, and politics and other such topics related to the “Queen of the humanities.”
Below is a tentative “survey” schedule of the lectures we will be covering.
ANCIENT SURVEY
Epic of Gilgamesh I
Epic of Gilgamesh II
Hesiod’s Theogony
Introduction to the Iliad
Introduction to the Odyssey
Greek Theogony and Theodicy (Hesiod, Homer, to Virgil!)
Introduction to Aeschylus (The Oresteia)
Introduction to Sophocles (Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Electra)
Introduction to Euripides (Bacchae and Medea)
Introduction to Aristophanes (Wasps, Frogs, and Lysistrata)
Introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid: From Myth to History
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
The Poetry of Horace
MEDIEVAL SURVEY
Augustine’s Confessions
Memory in Beowulf
The Song of Roland
Dante’s Inferno
Understanding Hell in the Inferno
Dante’s Purgatorio
Dante’s Paradiso
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
ENGLISH LIT SURVEY
Shakespeare & The Tragedy of Politics (Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Antony & Cleopatra)
Shakespeare on Love and War (Henry V & Richard III)
Shakespeare and the Limits of Justice (Merchant of Venice)
The Death of Eros and the Tragedy of Love in Antony and Cleopatra (Antony & Cleopatra)
Introduction to John Milton’s Paradise Lost
The Erotic Cosmos of Milton’s Paradise Lost
John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
Swift as a Political Theorist
Romanticism & the Poetry of John Keats
Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations
Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities
Anthony Trollope’s The Warden
WORLD AND AMERICAN LITERATURE SURVEY
Nineteenth Century American Literature (Hawthorne, Cooper, Melville)
The Gaze of Sin and Saintliness (Scarlet Letter)
Heroism and Tragedy in Last of the Mohicans
Moby-Dick as a Cosmic Voyage
War and Peace, Introduction
War and Peace
Guilt and Sin in Crime and Punishment
The Tyranny of History (Brave New World, 1984, War and Peace)
Romanticism and the Origins of Fantasy
Catholicism and Gothic Horror
FILM ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM
Mythology and Symbolism in Science Fiction
The Hidden Theologies of Science Fiction
Star Wars: The Original Trilogy
Star Wars: The Prequel Trilogy
Memory and Identity in Cowboy Bebop
Tragedy and Allegory in the Godfather