Dark Side of the American Dream

Paul Cantor’s History of European Literature Course Part 1. Lecture 1

Paul Cantor’s lecture notes on Homer’s Iliad from his Comparative Literature course at the University of Virginia. Lecture 2

Paul Cantor’s lecture notes on Homer’s Iliad from his Comparative Literature course at the University of Virginia. Lecture 3

Paul Cantor’s lecture notes on Homer’s Odyssey from the History of Literature. Lecture 4

Paul Cantor’s lecture notes on Homer’s Odyssey from the History of Literature. Lecture 5

An introduction to Greek Drama. Part of Paul Cantor’s History of European Literature course. Lecture 6

Sophocles turns the tyrant, the self-made hero who conquers the city itself, into a study of how the very qualities that let Oedipus solve the Sphinx's riddle and save Thebes are the same qualities that drive him to uncover, and be destroyed by, the truth about himself. Lecture 8

Second lecture on Oedipus Tyrannos. Lecture 9

History of European Literature lecture on Sophocles’ Antigone. Lecture 10

History of European Literature lecture on Aristophanes’ The Birds and general introduction to the birth of Greek comedy. Lecture 11

History of European Literature lecture on Aristophanes’ The Clouds. The lecture examines philosopher as the last Greek hero. Lecture 12

History of European Literature. From the Greeks to the Romans, this is an introduction to Rome and Virgil’s Aeneid. Lecture 13

History of European Literature lecture on Virgil’s Aeneid. Lecture 14

As Rome hardens from Republic into Empire, Ovid answers Virgil's myth of order with a world where the gods are as fickle as emperors, the ground beneath every certainty keeps shifting, and the only truths left to tell have to be smuggled in as myth. Lecture 15

Cantor opens the Middle Ages out of order, using the late medieval morality play Everyman to show how Christianity dethrones the Homeric hero — swapping strength for soul, glory for grace, and the aristocratic "good vs. bad" of pagan antiquity for the democratic "good vs. evil" that Nietzsche called a slave revolt in morality. Lecture 16