(For details of our summer course, click here.)
Our summer course is based on Professor O’Hear’s latest book:
The Great Books: A Journey through 2,500 Years of the West’s Classic Literature, published by Icon in the UK and ISI in the USA.
The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, The Canterbury Tales: great literature can be read by anyone, with a little help. The eminent British philosopher Anthony O’Hear leads the way with this captivating journey through two-and-a-half millennia of books as powerful, thrilling, erotic, politically astute, and awe-inspiring as any modern bestseller.
O’Hear begins with Homer, whose poems of epic struggle have made him the father of Western literature. After Greek tragedy, Plato, and Virgil’s Aeneid comes Ovid, whose encyclopedic Metamorphoses is an inexhaustible source for European art and literature. Via Saint Augustine, O’Hear reaches Dante and his terrifying and sublime Divine Comedy. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Pascal, Racine, and finally Goethe complete the cast list. In each case, O’Hear patiently draws out themes, focuses on key passages, and explains why they are important.
Not simply a grand work of reference, The Great Books is also a narrative history shot through with a love of literature and the author’s deeply held belief in its power to enrich and enliven everyone’s world.
(For details of our summer course on The Great Books, from 26th July to 4th August, click here.)
Speaking of great literature, here’s a useful search engine tool for your student to look up authors and their influences, connections between writers, and book recommendations: http://www.infloox.com
Hope your students will gain more interest in their favourite authors by finding out who and what influenced their writing!