E-Book Content
Classic Novels: Meeting the Challenge of Great Literature Parts I–III Professor Arnold Weinstein THE TEACHING COMPANY ® Arnold Weinstein, Ph.D. Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University Born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1940, Arnold Weinstein attended public schools before going to Princeton University for his college education (B.A. in Romance Languages, 1962, magna cum laude). He spent a year studying French literature at the Université de Paris (1960−1961) and a year after college at the Freie Universität Berlin, studying German literature. His graduate work was done at Harvard University (M.A. in Comparative Literature, 1964; Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, 1968), including a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the Université de Lyon in 1966−1967. Professor Weinstein’s professional career has taken place almost entirely at Brown University, where he has gone from Assistant Professor to his current position as Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature. He won the Workman Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities in 1995. He has also won a number of prestigious fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship in American literature at Stockholm University in 1983 and research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1998 (in the area of literature and medicine) and in 2007 (in the area of Scandinavian literature). In 1996, he was named Professeur Invité in American literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Professor Weinstein’s publications include the following: Vision and Response in Modern Literature (Cornell University Press, 1974), Fictions of the Self: 1550−1800 (Princeton University Press, 1981), The Fiction of Relationship (Princeton University Press, 1988), Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo (Oxford University Press, 1993), A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life (Random House, 2003), and Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison (Random House, 2006). He has just completed Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art from Ibsen to Bergman, to be published by Princeton University Press in 2008. His latest project is Literature and the Phases of Life: Growing Up and Growing Old, under contract with Random House, with an expected completion date of 2009. In addition to his career in teaching and writing, Professor Weinstein has produced a number of courses for The Teaching Company, including The Soul and the City: Art, Literature and Urban Life; Drama, Poetry and Narrative: Understanding Literature and Life; 20th-Century American Fiction; and American Literary Classics. ©2007 The Teaching Company. i Table of Contents Classic Novels: Meeting the Challenge of Great Literature Professor Biography .....................................................................................................................................................i Course Scope................................................................................................................................................................1 Lecture One Meeting the Challenge of Great Literature .........................................................................3 Lecture Two Defoe—Moll Flanders........................................................................................................6 Lecture Three Sterne—Tristram Shandy ...................................................................................................9 Lecture Four Laclos—Les Liaisons Dangereuses..................................................................................12 Lecture Five Laclos—Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Part 2.......................................................................14 L