The History of European Literature course at UVA. Paul Cantor's unedited lecture notes. The two-semester course spans from Homer's Iliad to Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
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Paul Cantor's groundbreaking analysis of Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth.
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Titus & Paul Cantor, America's eminent Shakespearian, talk movies, TV shows, & tragedy. From Godfather to Breaking Bad, from Aristotle to Mark Twain, we talk about how to understand pop culture & how to understand America's great love affair with tragic heroes (now called anti-heroes). Podcast
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Titus & Paul Cantor talk about David Milch's most famous achievement, Deadwood--the movie & the TV show both: A lawless, but orderly vision of America. An America with commerce but without religion, with freedom but without equality--what kind of community & what kind of justice is possible in such a situation? Podcast
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Titus & Paul Cantor discuss Frankenstein on its 200th an.--the novel, its history on the stage in the 19th c., & various movie adaptations in the 20th c. We talk about the genius of Mary Shelley & the rarity of a new myth being created by a single person under the historical spotlight! We talk about Enlightenment, Romantic poetry, & how new technologies of communication provoke nostalgic storytelling. Podcast
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The introductory lecture in Prof. Cantor’s course “Myths of Creation.” It explains the importance of creation myths in Western civilization; it lays out the classical and biblical traditions of creation; and outlines the readings in the course and its focus on the Romantic creation myth, which seeks to overturn in gnostic fashion the values of traditional creation myths. Lecture
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A study of Wagner’s Ring Cycle as a Romantic creation myth, analyzing how it tells the story of an initial harmony with nature, a fall from that unity into the power struggles of civilization, and Wagner’s hope for an apocalypse that would allow for the triumph of love in the world. Lecture
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This lecture analyzes Yeats as the poet of a Post-Nietzschean world, having rejected any vision of eternity and embraced human life as a series of historical cycles of creation and destruction; the lecture looks at the opposition between art and life in Yeats’s works and shows how he tries—but ultimately fails—to transcend it. Lecture
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Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) treated as a gnostic creation myth, in which what is created is the book itself, by a mysterious god or gods, who, like the Romantic demiurges, cannot create a decent world for their creatures. Accepting Nietzsche’s idea of the Death of God, Beckett creates a story in which the novelist dies midway, leaving his characters to fend for themselves in the absurd world he leaves behind him. Lecture
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This course will study the impact of science on nineteenth-century literature and in particular the development of science fiction as a genre, with emphasis on the epoch-making works of H. G. Wells. We will examine the ways in which science posed a challenge to literature and called into question the very notion of artistic truth.
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