Wow, I’m relatively tearing through this set. I “just” finished up the previous binder, a 6 disc/12 lecture set, last month. And, with each as we get later into the canon, which spreads and broadens after antiquity, I think, “Man, I don’t think I will have read or will want to read many I’m about to hear about.” But in this set, I am wrong.
This set is taught by Dr. Heinzelman, an Englishwoman whose accent was almost somnulent at the beginning, is subtitled “Neoclassical Literature and the 18th Century”.
Individual lectures include:
- Molière
- Jean Racine
- Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz
- Daniel Defoe
- Alexander Pope
- Jonathan Swift
- Voltaire
- Jean-Jacques Rosseau
- Samuel Johnson
- Denis Diderot
- William Blake
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sorry, I guess with a book quiz, I would have highlighted what I have read and would have posted links to what I have read in the last 20 years, but I didn’t. Allow me to say I just read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in 2016. I thought I’d reviewed some Blake on the blog, but maybe I was thinking about Drawings of William Blake in 2016 (also) or hearing a lecture on Blake in The Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets last year (a recurring theme, as the next set kicks off with Wordsworth). I listened to Voltaire and the Triumph of the Enlightenment in 2021, and my beautiful girlfriend (now wife) and I read Candide to each other while courting (although she identified with Cunegonde, but my wife is beautiful and baked me little rhubarb pies to take to work when I was going to work in the 1900s). I read Robinson Crusoe on my own in high school. I read Sor Juana de la Cruz…. In high school? In college? But en español (so, of all the things we will cover/will have covered in this lecture series, this will be the only non-native English writer I will have read in the original, although I remember only a bit/concept). Also, no, no Molière, but to contrast Wisconsin with Missouri, at least we pronounce Racine correctly (even though many or most people up north do not know who Racine was). Also, although I did not read Faust in the original (I read Dr. Faustus by Marlowe in 2020 and saw the opera form of it at Loretto-Hilton Center in St. Louis with that same beautiful girlfriend who would become my beautiful wife), I am almost there in pronouncing Goethe with the invisible R like an educated person.
So: I’ve read a bunch. I might need to look into my Classics Club editions to see what I can read from these authors (and authors from previous binders in this series). Hopefully, some Diderot. But I listened to this, and I came home from St. Louis, and I found a substack from Jack Baruth quoting Samuel Johnson. So maybe I should pick up that volume, should I have it in the stacks, first. After all the other things, cheap and/or deep, I have stacked up beside the chair.
