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Audio book description
How do you get a handle on Hamlet's complex character? What makes for great performances of the play? Professor Rebholz brings a new and compelling interpretation of this great Shakespearean work, offering insights on Hamlet's mysterious actions and inaction and his slow march toward revenge. He also engages in a lively debate with Professor Ryan about ways to perform the play, and the 2 also discuss its religious and political contexts. Both professors have received Stanford's highest awards for teaching excellence. For more informative lectures about this work, don't miss A Study Guide to Hamlet.

Audio book description
When is a book not just a book, but a work of art? Professor Guerard explains the difference between the novel as art and the novel as entertainment, maintaining that the latter "does not invade our lives as the great novels do." By citing many examples of modern literary masterworks, Guerard builds a case for the novel as a invaluable contributor to "dynamic knowledge" and the psychology of the human condition. He also describes the 2 types of great modern novelists - the perfectionist and the innovator - and explains the value of each. Guerard ends his talk with a discussion of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent .

Audio book description
What are the enduring themes and tensions of Chinese literature? In this lecture, Professor Van Zoeren uses 2 of China's most revered and venerable poems (separated in time by 1, 000 years) as windows into something quite characteristically Chinese: the tension between private desire and social responsibility, between politics and nature, between public role and private anguish. He demonstrates how these tensions give Chinese literature much of its energy and poignancy, and explores the unique power of Chinese ideograms.

Audio book description
Professor Ueda explores the mystery of suicide among Japan's reigning modern literary masters and asks how these writers have, in turn, both reflected and helped to shape the modern consciousness and self-image of the Japanese people. With grace and dramatic pathos, he examines his subject as he considers 4 well-known Japanese novelists in the light of traditions and legacies of the past.

Audio book description
At the age of 48, film critic David Denby returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, to re-experience the core humanities courses he had taken as a freshman 30 years before. Facing the question of what he really knows, Denby re-examines the besieged Western classics, ranging from Homer, Sappho, and Sophocles to Dante, Nietzsche, and Woolf. What relevance do the writers and thinkers of the past have to our current life? The answer surprised Denby and will surprise and enlighten his listeners. Great Books is a fascinating look at the crisis of literature in the late 20th century, mixing personal reflection, criticism, and the story of one man's effort "to create a self."…