2004 Program Topics

167. The Don Juan Myth

Three adaptations of the Don Juan story, from Tirso de Molina's seventeenth-century Spanish play El burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville), which establishes the character as a defiant everyman and a counterforce to death, to Lord Byron's epic English Romantic poem Don Juan, which transforms the protagonist from worldly seducer to inexperienced comic hero. How music's immediate intensity captures the character's fleeting passions in Mozart's 1787 operatic interpretation, Don Giovanni.

Participants: Margaret Greer, Andrew Elfenbein, Denise DiPuccio

Listen    Download

168. The Ballad as History

Long narrative songs that reveal a culture's values and record its history. Characteristics of traditional ballads and Thomas Percy's 1765 collection, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which inspired an eighteenth-century ballad revival and an interest in local popular culture. The continuing appeal of the fifteenth-century legend "Robin Hood." Traits of American ballads, including the slave voyage narrative "The Flying Cloud" and the broadside "The Avondale Mine Disaster," which emphasizes the nobility of labor.

Participants: Nick Groom, Robert Yeager, Michael Lofaro

Listen    Download

169. The Spanish Ballad Tradition

Medieval Spanish romances and how they have been adapted over centuries and across cultures. Printed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century blindman's ballads, or romances de ciego, as mass literature that reflected the concerns of the day. Mexican and Mexican American corridos and Spanish outlaw ballads as inspiration for twentieth-century narcocorridos, stories about drug smugglers.

Participants: Michael Solomon, Madeleine Sutherland-Meier, Jaime Nicolopulos

Listen    Download

170. How Language Changes

New words and the shifting meanings of old words. How prefixes, suffixes, and Latin influences expanded the vocabulary of Shakespeare's Renaissance England; five factors that predict whether a new word will last; how demographic change and increasing multilingualism are reshaping the role of English in the world.

Participants: Lynne Magnusson, Allan Metcalf, Richard Bailey

Listen    Download

171. Famous Speeches

Three speeches that shaped American history. Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar," on the relation between scholarship and democracy; Frederick Douglass's 1852 "Fourth of July" oration as ironic critique of Northern hypocrisy about slavery; and Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, which attempts to heal a post-Civil War nation by acknowledging its shared guilt.

Participants: Barbara Packer, David Blight, John Burt

Listen    Download

172. Contemporary Women Playwrights

Three dramatists who challenge theater conventions to consider social issues. Cross-racial and cross-gender casting as feminist critique in Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine. How Suzan Lori-Parks's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Top Dog Underdog, addresses African American displacement and the omissions of history. Nostalgia for an imaginary Mexico in Cherrie Moraga's drama about three generations of Chicanas, Giving Up the Ghost, and Moraga's Shadow of a Man as a comment on Mexican American gender roles and the American dream.

Participants: Jill Dolan, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Catherine Wiley

Listen    Download

173. Catholic, Jew, and Muslim in Shakespeare's Writings

Sixteenth-century Europe's religious concerns and conflicts in Shakespeare's plays. Hamlet's ghost, purgatory, and the importance of Catholicism to the English imagination after the Protestant Reformation. Shylock as villain or victim in The Merchant of Venice. How Othello evokes and questions Renaissance stereotypes of Moors.

Participants: Karen Raber, M. Lindsay Kaplan, Ania Loomba

Listen    Download

174. Famous Love Letters

What love letters reveal about well-known couples. How the eighteenth-century correspondence of John and Abigail Adams suggests a relationship of equals and friends; the nineteenth-century epistolary courtship of the poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and how it brought together opposites; and religion in the romantic correspondence of the medieval French lovers Abelard and Eloise.

Participants: Frank Shuffelton, Dorothy Mermin, Virginie Greene

Listen    Download

175. Horses in Literature and Film

The role of horses in popular culture and the literary imagination, from Anna Sewell's 1877 novel, Black Beauty, which reflects the horse's shift from work animal to pet and comments on reforms in child rearing, to Jack Schaefer's Westerns Shane and Mavericks, in which cowboys and mustangs evoke a nostalgia for freedom and open spaces. How the movie Seabiscuit, based on Laura Hillenbrand's book, reveals Americans' conflicting feelings about class during the Depression.

Participants: Lesley Ginsberg, Joseph Flora, Samuel B. Girgus

Listen    Download

176. Literature by Child Survivors of the Holocaust

Memoir and fiction by writers who lived through the Holocaust. Ruth Kluger's memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, life in the Czechoslovakian concentration camp Theresienstadt, and how children experienced the trauma differently from adults. How a child's naive perspective produces irony in Fateless, a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian survivor Imre Kertész. Struggling with the absence of memory in the Romanian-born Aharon Appelfeld's The Age of Wonders.

Participants: Ruth Kluger, Michael Rothberg, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

Listen    Download

177. Greek Tragedy Now

Classical dramas and their modern adaptations. Why women had more important roles in Greek plays, such as Sophocles's Antigone, than in Greek life. Ellen McLaughlin's twenty-first-century interpretation of Aeschylus's The Persians and the original's insights on war, suffering, and compassion. How Medea: A Modern Retelling, Krista Woolf's 1996 version of Euripides's Medea, sympathizes with the heroine to comment on the loneliness of people in exile.

Participants: Helene Foley, Ellen McLaughlin, Peter Arnds

Listen    Download

178. Learning a Language with a Different Alphabet

Studying a second language with an alphabet you don't know. The process of teaching Russian's Cyrillic alphabet to college students, the difference between spoken Japanese and the more complex written syllibary or kana, Arabic's many dialects and the aesthetic appeal of Arabic script.

Participants: Edna Andrews, John Treat, Ala Alryyes

Listen    Download

179. What Do Writers Teach?

The poems and fiction creative writers enjoy teaching. Alliteration and simile in Gerard Manley Hopkins's "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" and how the sonnet inspires students to write poetry. Neighborhood as inspiration in Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool," and the importance of sound in "Those Winter Sundays," Robert Hayden's tribute to his father. The revelation of human nature's complexities through small details in Anton Chekhov's short story "Gooseberries."

Participants: Rachel Hadas, Michael S. Harper, Wayne Fields

Listen    Download

180. Wise Fools

Insight from unlikely places, including the fool in Shakespeare's King Lear, who shows the audience the king's folly. Prince Myshkin as a Russian yurodivi--or holy fool--in Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the place of goodness in a corrupt world. A madwoman's critique of the Lebanese civil war in Hanan al-Shaykh's The Story of Zahra.

Participants: William C. Carroll, Robin Feuer Miller, Amal Amireh

Listen    Download

181. Muslim Women Writers

How twentieth-century women writers complicate official Islam, from the Egyptian-born Leila Ahmed, whose memoir A Border Passage asserts a "women's Islam" is passed down through oral tradition and example, to the Algerian writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar, whose Far from Medina celebrates Islamic female reciters, called rawilla. Forugh Farrokhzad's "Conquest of the Garden," an egalitarian revision of the Adam and Eve story written in mid-twentieth-century Iran.

Participants: Leila Ahmed, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Farzaneh Milani

Listen    Download

182. Shakespearean Queens

Shakespeare's depictions of powerful women in three dramas. The questions Hamlet raises about Gertrude's motives and how Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus Complex made the queen a pivotal character. Antony and Cleopatra's tale of sexuality and political cunning and the symbolic contrast the play draws between East and West. French-born Margaret D'Anjou as a powerful general and the voice of history in Henry VI and Richard III.

Participants: Alan Friedman, Linda Charnes, Phyllis Rackin

Listen    Download

183. Writers as Heroes

Fictional portraits of real authors, including William Blake's early-nineteenth-century Romantic poem Milton that incorporated mythology to revise Paradise Lost and to celebrate unconventional art. How Henry James's response to the commercialism of publishing is portrayed in David Lodge's Author, Author. The star power of Virginia Woolf in Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours.

Participants: Mark Edmundson, David Lodge, Brenda Silver

Listen    Download

184. Petrarch and Love Poetry

The influence of Petrarch's fourteenth-century Italian sonnets on imitators and detractors. Petrarch's idealized and symbolic muse Laura in the Canzoniere, consummated love in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a challenge to the Petrarchan ideal of unrequited love, and the anti-Petrarchan tradition that started with Petrarch's own self-parody and continued in the work of Edmund Spenser and Joachim Du Bellay.

Participants: David Wallace, Dympna Callaghan, Anne Lake Prescott

Listen    Download

185. Learning a New Language, Volume 2

Methods of teaching languages to college students, including Français Interactif, an interactive video introduction to French; how the Internet and other technologies enable Arabic students to experience virtual immersion; and how language learning now emphasizes functioning in another culture instead of repetition and drills.

Participants: Carl Blyth, Kristen Brustad, Judith Némethy

Listen    Download

186. Written to You

Writers' use of the second person in poetry and prose. Rainer Maria Rilke's twentieth-century poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" and its use of lyric address to show art's power to challenge its audience. Rhetorical roots of apostrophe in John Donne's "Sun Rising" and Thomas Wyatt's "My Lute Awake." Leo Tolstoy's nineteenth-century Sebastopol sketches and the experience of the Russian army during the Crimean War.

Participants: William Waters, Heather Dubrow, Julian Connolly

Listen    Download

187. The Making of the English Bible

Early English translations of the Bible and and the evolution of Renaissance bibles, from William Tyndale's vernacular bible, which translated key words in ways that challenged the authority of the church, to the precursors to the Puritans, who were inspired to write the Geneva Bible, with its verse divisions and controversial marginal notes. The 1611 King James Bible's origins and struggle to become the bible of the English church.

Participants: David Baker, John King, Alan Stewart

Listen    Download

188. Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe's 1719 adventure novel, Robinson Crusoe, which changed ideas about solitude in the eighteenth century, blended myth and reality, and influenced writers of the nineteenth century--from Marx and capitalist economists, who saw Crusoe as an example of homo economicus, or economic man, to the writers of Crusoe-inspired adventure tales called Robinsonades. Twentieth-century film adaptations of the novel, including Robert Zemeckis's movie Cast Away, and how cinema has changed the character of Crusoe's servant, Friday.

Participants: Maximillian Novak, Patrick Brantlinger, Robert Mayer

Listen    Download