Professor Grant L. Voth
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The History of World Literature Part I Professor Grant L. Voth THE TEACHING COMPANY ® Grant L. Voth, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Monterey Peninsula College Grant L. Voth earned his B.A. degree in Philosophy and Greek from Concordia Senior College, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, in 1965. He received his M.A. in English Education from St. Thomas College, St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1967 and his Ph.D. in English from Purdue University in 1971. Professor Voth taught at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois; Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia; and Monterey Peninsula College in California, from which he retired in 2003 and where he is Professor Emeritus in English and Interdisciplinary Studies. For several years he was a consultant for the National Endowment for the Humanities, reading proposals for interdisciplinary studies programs and advising colleges that wished to initiate such programs; he was also an N.E.H. Fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. He served as Director of an American Institute of Foreign Studies program for a consortium of California colleges in London in 1988, and he has led travel-study tours to England, Ireland, France, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt. He has been taking students to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Santa Cruz Shakespeare Festival for 30 years, and he is currently a Discovery Series Lecturer for the internationally acclaimed Carmel Bach Festival in Carmel, California. Professor Voth is the author of more than 30 articles and books on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to Edward Gibbon to modern American fiction, including the official study guides for many of the plays in the BBC The Shakespeare Plays project in the late 70s and early 80s. He was the recipient of the first Allen Griffin Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in 1996 was the Students’ Association Teacher of the Year. He created a series of mediated courses in literature and interdisciplinary studies for the Bay Area Television Consortium and the Northern California Learning Consortium, one of which won a Special Merit Award from the Western Educational Society for Telecommunication. This is his first course for The Teaching Company. ©2007 The Teaching Company. i Table of Contents The History of World Literature Part I Professor Biography...................................................................................................................................... i Course Scope..................................................................................................................................................1 Lecture One Stories and Storytellers .........................................................................................3 Lecture Two The Epic of Gilgamesh .........................................................................................5 Lecture Three The Hebrew Bible.................................................................................................8 Lecture Four Homer’s Iliad......................................................................................................10 Lecture Five Homer’s Odyssey................................................................................................12 Lecture Six Chinese Classical Literature ...............................................................................14 Lecture Seven Greek Tragedy ....................................................................................................17 Lecture Eight Virgil’s Aeneid....................................................................................................19 Lecture Nine Bhagavad Gita ....................................................................................................22 Lecture Ten The New Testament............................................................................................25 Lecture Eleven Beowulf...............................................................................................................28 Lecture Twelve Indian Stories......................................................................................................31 Timeline........................................................................................................................................................34 Glossary........................................................................................................................................................36 Biographical Notes.......................................................................................................................................38 Bibliography.................................................................................................................................................42 Permissions Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................44 ii ©2007 The Teaching Company. The History of World Literature Scope: In 48 half-hour lectures, The History of World Literature explores cross-cultural themes, techniques, and modes of representation over nearly 5,000 years of history. The focus of the individual lectures is on themes as they are repeated, echoed, and modified through time, but the unifying thread for the course as a whole is the evolution of storytelling, beginning with the relatively straight-forward relationship of teller to tale in the earliest works in the course and ending with the much more complicated relationships in the works of contemporary writers. Along the way we also notice the many different functions narratives have fulfilled vis-à-vis the cultures and times in which they were produced. The first lecture suggests some of the many different kinds of stories that the course treats—explaining the inclusion of a few lyric poems and plays among the narratives—and some of the most important ways stories have functioned for people: defining cultures and nations, offering ways to remember the past, explaining the reasons for and nature of our presence in the universe, and helping us to survive in a world in which we think of ourselves as alien. We also define such terms as “literature” and “history” as they are used in the course. Lectures Two through Eleven focus on epic poems and epic heroes who are larger-than-life and who define a people or a culture or a nation, from the Middle Eastern Epic of Gilgamesh to the Germanic Beowulf. The three religious texts treated in these lectures—the Hebrew Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and the New Testament—form a subset of epic literature, focusing on the relationship between God and human beings while subordinating other aspects of epic narrative. In all of these works, the writers speak in more or less official capacities as spokespersons for their cultures, and the stories they tell are important in helping people define their nature and values. The early literature of China is the exception in the first unit of the course; while their writers help to define their cultures, they do so outside the parameters of the epic, in lyric poetry and writings whose focus is on the everyday and the commonplace rather than the extraordinary and the heroic. Lectures Twelve through Thirty-Five, the major portion of the course, cover the periods in Western history from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic Movement, and the Industrial Revolution up to about the time of the First World War. They also deal with these corresponding periods in the Middle East, India, China, and Japan. The focus of these lectures is on narrative techniques and strategies—on the ways writers learn to write their stories in more complicated ways. In these lectures, Dante is our last epic writer, speaking for an entire culture (in his case, medieval Christendom). Most of the other writers speak for segments of their cultures, sometimes in opposition to the dominant voices in those cultures (in new genres like the novel) that use new narrative strategies designed to place some distance between the writer and the narrator on the one hand, and the narrator and the tale he or she tells on the other. Frames—that is, envelope narratives containing other narratives— become increasingly important in this development, as seen in the work of Indian storytellers, Murasaki, Chaucer, the 1001 Nights, Marguerite of Navarre, Cervantes, The Story of the Stone, and Goethe. In Lecture Twenty-Nine we arrive at the Realist mode in fiction, whose purpose was to abstract the narrator out of the story altogether and give what purports to be an unmediated picture of reality. Since the Realist Movement in the West corresponded with the height of the colonial period, realism had a huge impact on the literature of the rest of the world, and we trace that impact in succeeding lectures. From this point on in the course, all literary movements are international. Before we get to realism we deal with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, an extraordinarily experimental novel in its own time that embeds all of the storytellers inside the story; in so doing, the novel anticipates techniques that we think of as modern or even contemporary. In Lecture Thirty-Six we deal with Marcel Proust, who in rejecting the Realist mode in fiction redefined the novel and narrative technique for the modern world, so that the final 13 lectures in the course deal with the amazing innovations in stories and storytelling that carry us to the present. Modernists such as Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, and Kawabata in fiction and Pirandello and Brecht in