TC DVDs History of World Literature

[Quiver0f10]

Has anyone used these lectures? Did your student enjoy these? Did you find them beneficial? Would you recommend them? Thanks!

[RobinL in Canada]

Do you mean the one taught by Prof Voth? I listened to it and found it average. He covers a wide range of literature and has a pleasant delivery, but I found most of the lectures fairly superficial. He has a tendency to spend much of a lecture giving a plot summary of the text--essentially retelling the story-- and then offers some commentary but nothing that goes very deep. Of course, in a survey course like this, one can't expect as much depth as breadth. I enjoyed it well enough but not enough to give it a 5-star rating. However, my degrees are in literature, so I tend to prefer meatier, more analytical approaches; something like this may be just right for a high school student.

 

A course I very much enjoyed and would recommend for someone pursuing literary studies more deeply is the Western Literary Canon in Context. The prof makes many interesting connections amongst the texts covered, but it's best if one is already familiar with most of them before listening to the course as he, in contrast, does not provide much n the way of summary.

[MtnTeaching]

My ds is making his way through a portion of these this year. Wading would be a better term. He says the guy is a bit boring.

 

Ds took a break from Goth and is just finishing up the more indepth Vandiver "Iliad" DVDs. He said that she was a breath of fresh air compared to the Voth lectures.

 

Having said that, I do believe there is a great deal of very good info covered in these lectures and ds said they really were not that bad.

[Quiver0f10]

Thank you both!

[Nscribe]

:iagree:with Robin. After watching the course it struck me why the title included the "history of", as opposed to something like "analysis of".

 

Mr. Voth presents well and I might consider another course by him at some point.

 

If you are looking for something that might connect analyzing the literature in terms of literary devices and so forth, this would not be the course for it.

 

I keep coming back to How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster and Essential Literary Terms by Sharon Hamilton. I found an older edition of Perrines' Literature Structure, Sound and Sense, which also is referenced frequently.