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Understanding Literature and Life: Drama, Poetry and Narrative
TEN AUDIO CASSETTES (PARTS 1 NAD 2) OF DRAMA
Audio Cassette
First published January 1, 1995
About the author
Arnold Weinstein
48 books56 followersDr. Arnold Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor at Brown University, where he has been teaching for over 35 years. He earned his undergraduate degree in Romance Languages from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Among his many academic honors, research grants, and fellowships is the Younger Humanist Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Senior Lecturer Award as a visiting professor at Stockholm University, Brown University's award as best teacher in the humanities, Professeur InvitÈ in American Literature at the Ecole Normale SupÈrieure in Paris, and a Fellowship for University Professors from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Weinstein is the author of many books, including Fictions of the Self: 1550ñ1800 (1981); Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo (1993); and A Scream Goes Through The House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life (2003). Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art from Ibsen to Bergman (Princeton University Press, 2008), was named one of the 25 Best Books of 2009 by The Atlantic. Professor Weinstein chaired the Advisory Council on Comparative Literature at Princeton University, is the sponsor of Swedish Studies at Brown, and is actively involved in the American Comparative Literature Association.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 11, 2020
May 2020. After three lectures on drama and Oedipus, the speaker's philosophy is getting in the way. I don't have a good name for it yet, but he has characterized deconstruction, Freud, and Marx with disconcerting blitheness. Naturally this leads to some muddy interpretations and vague assertions, but so far it hasn't ruined everything. He can be quite clear and sensitive when discussing a line or a speech.
After 14 lectures, my judgment is unchanged. Like many academic critics, he is sound enough when rehearsing historical data or performing literary analysis or discovering unexpected connections within books or between authors, but less so when commenting on society or making metaphysical assertions.
After 20 lectures: this series was recorded in 1995, when post-structural literary theory and cultural studies were still hip. To his credit, the author sees and admits the nihilism implicit in these strange and supposedly academic activities--see Lecture 20. But that doesn't change the value of his lectures, which, so far, are still a large but mostly barren tree.
On Lecture 23: The analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 146 is hampered by gross ignorance of the Christian tradition. He is working with a Wikipedia-deep knowledge of the biblical and theological context. Not sure if I can take another 20 hours of this lecturer.
On Lecture 24: "I think it's fair to say that the next great poet after William Shakespeare in the English tradition is William Blake." A remarkable statement from an accoladed, tenured professor at an Ivy League school. What about Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope? It is only defensible if he means "lyric poets."
After 32 lectures: I've decided to finish, but the lyric lectures are difficult in a new way. Part II, like Part I, is organized chronologically. He devotes two or three lessons to each poet (Shakespeare, Blake, Whitman, et al.), first presenting a thesis about the poet's work (which, inevitably, will be complicated before the final lecture), then reciting short poems or excerpts and offering a line-by-line commentary. The criticism is often enlightening on individual poems, but tiresome, for the series is too long, and the approach is too self-involved. One irritating verbal tic is the frequent qualification of assertions with phrases like "a kind of" or "a sort of." I take this habit to be (a) an act of preemptive defensiveness, born out of years in the academic trenches, or (b) a symptom of his hazy metaphysics and rhetoric.
After 40 lectures (end of Part Two, on lyric poetry): The bright spots are the six lectures on Baudelaire, Frost, and Stevens, whose work is only problematized (i.e. revealed as more complex than we thought), not deconstructed. He takes the same approach to Rich in the final two lectures, but I don't feel qualified to judge them because I don't know her poetry well enough; based on these lectures, I'm not interested in learning. Moving on to Part Three, fictional narrative.
Lecture 41: The introduction to narrative art is the most useful analytic tool he has provided so far; with the notion of the vertical and horizontal dimensions of stories (meaning time and space, whose positions I would have reversed), he is finally delivering on the promise of the title of this series: to show us how we can better understand "life" through literature. (This lecture also includes a clear example of 'hazy metaphysics': "Words cannot die, they are not possessed of flesh and blood. And so they live." The lines read like a syllogism, and in fact Weinstein delivers them like a syllogism. But they are laughably false, relying on a false dichotomy that Socrates and Diotima--or Foucault or Derrida--could have exploded for him. Of course he is speaking metaphorically, paraphrasing an age-old chestnut about the 'immortality' of the word (ars longa, vita brevis, etc.). But however we take this informal syllogism, its force relies on equivocation; his reformulation of the old doctrine can have power only for those who have not studied logic.)
Finished, still disappointed. The lectures in the latter half of Part III were better than the first half: JANE EYRE, BARTLEBY, Kafka, Faulkner, and THE COLOR PURPLE. His go-to theoretical approach is Freudian, which is more or less productive. It has some purchase on the books, but ultimately I find it unpersuasive. His reading of the Bronte novel was his most plausible psychoanalytic work, and I'd like to reread it again, then retry those three lectures. His deconstructive, cultural-studies, and ideological/multicultural criticism lead (usually) to dead ends. Weinstein really cares about the books he's reading: he is professionally "honest" in that regard. You can tell that a sensitive and sincere critic doesn't believe in the point he's making when he qualifies it for a live audience. He frequently resorts to such hedging phrases as, "I know some of you don't particularly like this..." and "This may sound esoteric, but..." That's because he's outside his preferred critical comfort zone. He never makes such qualifications about his psychoanalytically-flavored claims.
Takeaways and reminders:
* The essentially social nature of drama: bodies on stage, voices intoning lines, audience in seats.
* The centrality of the notion of "agon" in drama.
* (Want to read Moliere's Tartuffe.)
* I'd never heard of Buchner, an intriguing and seemingly anachronistic figure.
* (Want to read Strindberg's The Father.)
* Focus on "the city" in modernist poetry.
* Vertical and horizontal axes of fiction.
* (Want to read more Kafka and Faulkner.)
After 14 lectures, my judgment is unchanged. Like many academic critics, he is sound enough when rehearsing historical data or performing literary analysis or discovering unexpected connections within books or between authors, but less so when commenting on society or making metaphysical assertions.
After 20 lectures: this series was recorded in 1995, when post-structural literary theory and cultural studies were still hip. To his credit, the author sees and admits the nihilism implicit in these strange and supposedly academic activities--see Lecture 20. But that doesn't change the value of his lectures, which, so far, are still a large but mostly barren tree.
On Lecture 23: The analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 146 is hampered by gross ignorance of the Christian tradition. He is working with a Wikipedia-deep knowledge of the biblical and theological context. Not sure if I can take another 20 hours of this lecturer.
On Lecture 24: "I think it's fair to say that the next great poet after William Shakespeare in the English tradition is William Blake." A remarkable statement from an accoladed, tenured professor at an Ivy League school. What about Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope? It is only defensible if he means "lyric poets."
After 32 lectures: I've decided to finish, but the lyric lectures are difficult in a new way. Part II, like Part I, is organized chronologically. He devotes two or three lessons to each poet (Shakespeare, Blake, Whitman, et al.), first presenting a thesis about the poet's work (which, inevitably, will be complicated before the final lecture), then reciting short poems or excerpts and offering a line-by-line commentary. The criticism is often enlightening on individual poems, but tiresome, for the series is too long, and the approach is too self-involved. One irritating verbal tic is the frequent qualification of assertions with phrases like "a kind of" or "a sort of." I take this habit to be (a) an act of preemptive defensiveness, born out of years in the academic trenches, or (b) a symptom of his hazy metaphysics and rhetoric.
After 40 lectures (end of Part Two, on lyric poetry): The bright spots are the six lectures on Baudelaire, Frost, and Stevens, whose work is only problematized (i.e. revealed as more complex than we thought), not deconstructed. He takes the same approach to Rich in the final two lectures, but I don't feel qualified to judge them because I don't know her poetry well enough; based on these lectures, I'm not interested in learning. Moving on to Part Three, fictional narrative.
Lecture 41: The introduction to narrative art is the most useful analytic tool he has provided so far; with the notion of the vertical and horizontal dimensions of stories (meaning time and space, whose positions I would have reversed), he is finally delivering on the promise of the title of this series: to show us how we can better understand "life" through literature. (This lecture also includes a clear example of 'hazy metaphysics': "Words cannot die, they are not possessed of flesh and blood. And so they live." The lines read like a syllogism, and in fact Weinstein delivers them like a syllogism. But they are laughably false, relying on a false dichotomy that Socrates and Diotima--or Foucault or Derrida--could have exploded for him. Of course he is speaking metaphorically, paraphrasing an age-old chestnut about the 'immortality' of the word (ars longa, vita brevis, etc.). But however we take this informal syllogism, its force relies on equivocation; his reformulation of the old doctrine can have power only for those who have not studied logic.)
Finished, still disappointed. The lectures in the latter half of Part III were better than the first half: JANE EYRE, BARTLEBY, Kafka, Faulkner, and THE COLOR PURPLE. His go-to theoretical approach is Freudian, which is more or less productive. It has some purchase on the books, but ultimately I find it unpersuasive. His reading of the Bronte novel was his most plausible psychoanalytic work, and I'd like to reread it again, then retry those three lectures. His deconstructive, cultural-studies, and ideological/multicultural criticism lead (usually) to dead ends. Weinstein really cares about the books he's reading: he is professionally "honest" in that regard. You can tell that a sensitive and sincere critic doesn't believe in the point he's making when he qualifies it for a live audience. He frequently resorts to such hedging phrases as, "I know some of you don't particularly like this..." and "This may sound esoteric, but..." That's because he's outside his preferred critical comfort zone. He never makes such qualifications about his psychoanalytically-flavored claims.
Takeaways and reminders:
* The essentially social nature of drama: bodies on stage, voices intoning lines, audience in seats.
* The centrality of the notion of "agon" in drama.
* (Want to read Moliere's Tartuffe.)
* I'd never heard of Buchner, an intriguing and seemingly anachronistic figure.
* (Want to read Strindberg's The Father.)
* Focus on "the city" in modernist poetry.
* Vertical and horizontal axes of fiction.
* (Want to read more Kafka and Faulkner.)
January 31, 2020
I always learn something from the Great Courses and this one is no exception. I’m also always up for something about literature since I do like books.
All in all, I enjoyed this one but I consider twenty lectures on poetry to be more about character building than entertainment. I figured it would be useful to fill in a tiny bit of a gaping hole in my knowledge since I’ve read very little poetry.
There was plenty of analysis of books I haven’t read and some that I have.
In the end, it was worth my time.
All in all, I enjoyed this one but I consider twenty lectures on poetry to be more about character building than entertainment. I figured it would be useful to fill in a tiny bit of a gaping hole in my knowledge since I’ve read very little poetry.
There was plenty of analysis of books I haven’t read and some that I have.
In the end, it was worth my time.
December 30, 2020
[2026] At 64 lectures totaling 32 hours, this series is the longest Great Course Ive listened to. Twice. I had an agonizing 15 hour drive that turned into 18 (multiple crashes and traffic), and I wanted to revisit it. Usually, as I’ve matured - even if only by six years, I am more forgiving of myself for things I don’t understand, more patient with the explanations. I think Dr. Weinstein’s histories, analyses, descriptions are amazing. He does not convince me that what Whitman, (most of) Dickinson, Stevens, Rich wrote is poetry, though to be fair, he never tried. He just called them poets, and the words he read “poetry”. I am not sure if it is the format on the page that distinguishes them as such.
Now, I very much appreciate scholars of art who can show me more than the surface of the subject, be it visual, aural, or as in these cases, written. More than not, again, as I age, I can see when shown the symbolism, themes, cryptic meanings. Not so when it comes to literature, and less so specifically with poetry. A visual art expert can explain what they think the artist was trying to convey in a painting, and sometimes it makes sense to me. I find Dr. Weinstein’s interpretation of Adrienne Rich’s work to be quite imaginative. No matter how he says it, I cannot see what he sees. Really, I am often incredulous at the interpretation- “How did you get that from this passage/piece?” Is there background information that informs the conclusion? If so, why, when such is revealed, does the interpretation seem even more far-fetched? Is that his failing or mine? Probably my - not failing, rather… inability. I freely admit that when I read literature, unless it is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, I only see a story, almost never social or political commentary or whatever, and sometimes not even a good story. Am I less enriched? I don’t think so. But that me being defensive for no reason. But Dr. Weinstein gives me an out:
“Art, good art, that we read is always conflicted. The book that is unconflicted, straight forward and clear-cut, that has a kind of consistent picture of one set of values or one set of truths, those are precisely the books that die. That they may be bestsellers at the moment they are published, no one reads them later. They do not have the kind of resonance of great art.”
I would guess that nearly all of the scholars … that I appreciate … would argue against “art is subjective.” With visual or aural art, I can usually see through some of my occlusion when led by the experts. When it comes to written works… I have yet to “see”.
But… Dr. Weinstein also says, what is “more important than understanding what an author meant is what their work means to” me. I can work with that.
And though I said six years ago that I would jump off to read some of the works discussed, I am less patient with things that have no value to me. I’m 65. I have a limited amount of reading left to me. I’ll take the “CliffsNotes” synopses in these courses and be enriched that way. I’ll leave the rating at five stars. There is still a lot of good stuff here even if it doesn’t always make sense.
[2020] I like to listen to The Teaching Company's Great Courses while commuting, and 2020 being the year it was, didn't get to as many this year because my commute was quite short...bedroom to dining room"office", interspersed with real commute trips to the my actual office. This particular series by Prof. Arnold Weinstein is 64 lectures and I finally finished it two weeks ago on two 13 hour drives to Tennessee and back. Weinstein surveys a selction of theater (plays), poets, and literature (novels and stories). He's an engaging speaker.
For Theater: Oedipus the King, Othello, Moliere's Tartuffe, Georg Büchner's Woyceck, August Strindberg's The Father, and Beckett's Waiting for Godot. I was not familiar with Büchner or Strindberg, and those were enlightening.
For Poetry: Weinstein selected some sonnets from Shakespeare (I'd recently read them all), and poems from Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Frost, working to modernists Wallace Stevens and Adrienne Rich. Of all the written arts, I struggle the most with poetry and I admit not knowing anything about the latter two poets and without this series, probably would never because I struggle hardest with formless compositions that the authors call poems. Still, I am curious about things I am not interested in and Weinstein broadened my worldview.
Of Literature: Weinstein made the claim that Chretien de Troyes’ Yvain is the first true novel; he warns that Francisco de Quevedo’s The Swindler is thoroughly unlikely and hardly known example of Picaresque, but gives a great overview of its importance; Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders; Dickens’s Great Expectations (I escaped having to read that one in school...but am interested now); Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (also never read and interested); the stories Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, and Faulkner’s “The Bear”; and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.
I won't go into the details of all he covered because, well, Weinstein covered a lot. What he did do was prompt me to seek out some of the works (Project Gutenberg is a great source for open domain) and put them on my 2021 list. I'll see if I actually get to them. I will however continue my Great Courses, because I learn so much from them.
Now, I very much appreciate scholars of art who can show me more than the surface of the subject, be it visual, aural, or as in these cases, written. More than not, again, as I age, I can see when shown the symbolism, themes, cryptic meanings. Not so when it comes to literature, and less so specifically with poetry. A visual art expert can explain what they think the artist was trying to convey in a painting, and sometimes it makes sense to me. I find Dr. Weinstein’s interpretation of Adrienne Rich’s work to be quite imaginative. No matter how he says it, I cannot see what he sees. Really, I am often incredulous at the interpretation- “How did you get that from this passage/piece?” Is there background information that informs the conclusion? If so, why, when such is revealed, does the interpretation seem even more far-fetched? Is that his failing or mine? Probably my - not failing, rather… inability. I freely admit that when I read literature, unless it is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, I only see a story, almost never social or political commentary or whatever, and sometimes not even a good story. Am I less enriched? I don’t think so. But that me being defensive for no reason. But Dr. Weinstein gives me an out:
“Art, good art, that we read is always conflicted. The book that is unconflicted, straight forward and clear-cut, that has a kind of consistent picture of one set of values or one set of truths, those are precisely the books that die. That they may be bestsellers at the moment they are published, no one reads them later. They do not have the kind of resonance of great art.”
I would guess that nearly all of the scholars … that I appreciate … would argue against “art is subjective.” With visual or aural art, I can usually see through some of my occlusion when led by the experts. When it comes to written works… I have yet to “see”.
But… Dr. Weinstein also says, what is “more important than understanding what an author meant is what their work means to” me. I can work with that.
And though I said six years ago that I would jump off to read some of the works discussed, I am less patient with things that have no value to me. I’m 65. I have a limited amount of reading left to me. I’ll take the “CliffsNotes” synopses in these courses and be enriched that way. I’ll leave the rating at five stars. There is still a lot of good stuff here even if it doesn’t always make sense.
[2020] I like to listen to The Teaching Company's Great Courses while commuting, and 2020 being the year it was, didn't get to as many this year because my commute was quite short...bedroom to dining room"office", interspersed with real commute trips to the my actual office. This particular series by Prof. Arnold Weinstein is 64 lectures and I finally finished it two weeks ago on two 13 hour drives to Tennessee and back. Weinstein surveys a selction of theater (plays), poets, and literature (novels and stories). He's an engaging speaker.
For Theater: Oedipus the King, Othello, Moliere's Tartuffe, Georg Büchner's Woyceck, August Strindberg's The Father, and Beckett's Waiting for Godot. I was not familiar with Büchner or Strindberg, and those were enlightening.
For Poetry: Weinstein selected some sonnets from Shakespeare (I'd recently read them all), and poems from Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Frost, working to modernists Wallace Stevens and Adrienne Rich. Of all the written arts, I struggle the most with poetry and I admit not knowing anything about the latter two poets and without this series, probably would never because I struggle hardest with formless compositions that the authors call poems. Still, I am curious about things I am not interested in and Weinstein broadened my worldview.
Of Literature: Weinstein made the claim that Chretien de Troyes’ Yvain is the first true novel; he warns that Francisco de Quevedo’s The Swindler is thoroughly unlikely and hardly known example of Picaresque, but gives a great overview of its importance; Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders; Dickens’s Great Expectations (I escaped having to read that one in school...but am interested now); Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (also never read and interested); the stories Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, and Faulkner’s “The Bear”; and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.
I won't go into the details of all he covered because, well, Weinstein covered a lot. What he did do was prompt me to seek out some of the works (Project Gutenberg is a great source for open domain) and put them on my 2021 list. I'll see if I actually get to them. I will however continue my Great Courses, because I learn so much from them.
Read
June 1, 2018I would listen to this professor discuss the phone book! I have listened to several courses that he has produced for The Great Courses. I always grow and am enticed to read more of the classics.
February 7, 2023
This is an older lecture from The Great Courses, but it was a pleasure to listen to. In sixty-four lectures, from Sophocles to Alice Walker, Professor Weinstein not only unlocks the literary importance and details of the works he discusses, but makes often profound insights about how these writers examine life and the world. His best lectures tend to be the final lectures on each writer, most especially lectures five (on Sophocles), 32 (on Dickenson), and 61 (on Faulkner). I listened to this course mainly to understand how to read poetry better and listened to that section first. However, I enjoyed how Professor Weinstein presented things so much, I continued listening to the other sections with enthusiasm. Great course!
June 5, 2020
Insightful? Very.
Interesting? Sure.
Peaks and valleys*? Oh yes
That is: parts were good but a few lumps here and there.
Audio quality is ok, this being a 90s recording and Weinstein is given to mumbling some parts.
But overall I enjoyed it. A nice change from podcasts and YouTube and a welcome escape from reality.
Listened to it while cooking and cleaning and it helped turn those chores into and illuminating experience.
* Let’s just hope the author doesn’t read too much into this and points out the innuendo of peaks and valleys)
Interesting? Sure.
Peaks and valleys*? Oh yes
That is: parts were good but a few lumps here and there.
Audio quality is ok, this being a 90s recording and Weinstein is given to mumbling some parts.
But overall I enjoyed it. A nice change from podcasts and YouTube and a welcome escape from reality.
Listened to it while cooking and cleaning and it helped turn those chores into and illuminating experience.
* Let’s just hope the author doesn’t read too much into this and points out the innuendo of peaks and valleys)
January 23, 2023
I really enjoyed this, and it made me want to go read some of the classics that I have somehow missed during my looooooonnng education. I particularly like the section on poetry, but that is kind of my jam. I did find some of the choices to pieces to focus on, especially in the drama section, a bit odd, but interesting nonetheless.
February 4, 2018
I like this particular professor and that colors my experience with these books. This book for sixty some half hour lectures and it took me a while to get through them. Not because the subject matter wasn't interesting - it was. I found myself repeating a few of the lectures they were so good.
January 30, 2020
Weinstein taught me so much about literature and poetry within the context of real life. I had never thought of story as a way to transmit my experiences to someone else, or lots of other people. This book really taught me a lot about reading and writing.
March 12, 2022
I found these lectures interesting and thought provoking, going back and listening again to topics that particularly piqued my interest. Heartely recommend this course to any who enjoy the written word.
February 6, 2023
Too much fluff, as if it was a novel itself.
July 28, 2023
Lacking a central theme, this survey style lecture collection is a notch below the others in the series but still well crafted and delivered.
April 21, 2024
Rounded up from 3.5. In my view, the topic (with the selected works discussed) could have been approached in a better manner.
November 21, 2025
Everyone by now should know my thoughts on Great Courses….
With attachments!
And Literature… come on!
With attachments!
And Literature… come on!
February 4, 2015
Very good introductions to a lot of writers I have read and many that I have not. I am not always convinced by Weinstein's comments, especially his praise, but I am glad to have been exposed to his readings.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews