Publisher: The Teaching Company Publication Date: 2005 |
Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life [Audio Book]
Author: J. Rufus Fears
Books That Have Made History - Books that Can Change Your Life (Audiobook)
(36 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
What makes a written work eternal—its message still so fundamental to the way we live that it continues to speak to us, hundreds or thousands of years distant from the lifetime of its author?
Why do we still respond to an ancient Greek playwright's tale of the Titan so committed to humanity's survival that he is willing to endure eternal torture in his defiance of the gods? To the cold advice of a 16th-century Florentine exiled from the corridors of power? To the words of a World War I German veteran writing of the horrors of endless trench warfare?
Most important of all, what do such works ”"Great Books" in every sense—mean to us? Can they deepen our self-knowledge and wisdom? Are our lives changed in any meaningful way by the experience of reading them?
In this course, Professor J. Rufus Fears presents his choices of some of the most essential writings in history. These are books that have shaped the minds of great individuals, who in turn have shaped events of historic magnitude.
This course does not analyze the literature or discuss it in detail; rather, it focuses on intellectual history and ethics. What Professor Fears does is to take the underlying ideas of each great work and show how these ideas can be put to use in a moral and ethical life.
Beginning with his definition of a great book as one that possesses a great theme of enduring importance, noble language that "elevates the soul and ennobles the mind," and a universality that enables it to "speak across the ages," Professor Fears examines a body of work that offers an extraordinary gift of wisdom to those willing to receive it.
From the Aeneid and the Book of Job to Othello and 1984, the selections range in time from the 3rd millennium B.C. to the 20th century, and in locale from Mesopotamia and China to Europe and America.
Course Lecture Titles
1. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison
2. Homer, Iliad
3. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
4. Bhagavad Gita
5. Book of Exodus
6. Gospel of Mark
7. Koran
8. Gilgamesh
9. Beowulf
10. Book of Job
11. Aeschylus, Oresteia
12. Euripides, Bacchae
13. Plato, Phaedo
14. Dante, The Divine Comedy
15. Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice
16. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
17. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
18. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
19. George Orwell, 1984
20. Vergil, Aeneid
21. Pericles, Oration; Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
22. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
23. Confucius, The Analects
24. Machiavelli, The Prince
25. Plato, Republic
26. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
27. Sir Thomas Malory, Morte d'Arthur
28. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust , Part 1
29. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 2
30. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
31. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
32. Lord Acton, The History of Freedom
33. Cicero, On Moral Duties (De Officiis)
34. Gandhi, An Autobiography
35. Churchill, My Early Life; Painting as a Pastime; WWII
36. Lessons from the Great Books
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