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