Seth Lerer has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 10 ratings. The most-rated is The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition.
The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition
Summary
This course offers an overview of the English language that is literary, historical, cultural, political, and scientific in its scope and designed to give you greater insight into the written and spoken word.The lectures provide a thorough understanding of the history of the English language - from its origins as a dialect of the Germanic-speaking peoples through the literary and cultural documents of its 1,500-year span to the state of American speech today. Professor Lerer defines concepts by illustrating them with copious examples. He often speaks in the dialect appropriate to each lecture - be it Old English, Chaucer’s Middle English, or the colloquial style of Mark Twain’s most unforgettable characters. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©1998 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)1998 The Great Courses
The Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer
Summary
Geoffrey Chaucer is one of our grandest and most enduring poets; an architect of our vocabulary and our literary style. By examining the English writer's texts, from his short love lyrics to the copious profusion of character and incident that is The Canterbury Tales, these 12 lectures will prepare you for the challenges of Chaucer's oeuvre, and will provide an understanding of what makes him the true "father" of English poetry. With Professor Lerer as your expert guide, you'll plumb the richness and depth of Chaucer's poetry and explore his life, the range of his work, and his impact on English language and literature. You'll examine Chaucer in virtually all the varieties of literature available to him: classical epic, domestic farce, ribald comedy, saint's life, beast fable, romance adventure, personal lyric, devotional prayer, and religious prose. You'll learn how Chaucer uses relationships between men and women, humans and God, social "insiders" and "outsiders," and high and low desires to explore our "ticklish" world, and the way life takes shape from literary forms-be they marriage vows, the verses of Scripture, or stories told by plain folk. You'll also meet some of the most vibrant characters in all of literature, including: the bawdy Wife of Bath, the manipulative Pandarus (whose very name gave rise to the term "pandering"), the upright Knight, and the ambiguous Pardoner. Professor Lerer leads you deeply into the texts, so that you learn about their sources and syntax, and the rich repertoire of poetic techniques they display. And while he makes it clear that these texts remain eminently worth reading today, he also does full justice to their medieval context.
©1999 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)1999 The Great Courses
The Life and Writings of John Milton
Summary
There is no disputing that John Milton is considered one of the supreme writers in the history of English letters. Yet, for a number of reasons, many modern readers are unaware of the pleasures of his poetry and prose. These 12 lectures examine Milton's life and work in order to understand the richness and depth of his poetry, its ways of representing 17th-century English life and culture, and its impact on later writers and on English literary history as a whole. You'll learn about Milton's works in all their fullness, whether or not you've read them in the past. You'll get both an introduction to Milton's achievements and a means by which you can cultivate your own thoughts and opinions about works including Paradise Lost and Areopagitica. While Paradise Lost alone could easily be the subject of an entire lecture series, Professor Lerer chooses not to restrict himself to this unique masterwork, but rather to make it manifest in the context of its maker's life and career, and to give you a foundation on which to build your future enjoyment of Milton. Because of this, you'll get a chance to explore Milton's early poetry, "Lycidas," his various political works, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and more. Professor Lerer describes these lectures as "an invitation to the modern reader to find ways of enjoying, appreciating, valuing, and even struggling through a poetry that says as much about human nature and political life now as it did over three centuries ago." And in learning to feel the living pulse of Milton's world, you'll join generations of readers and authors, including William Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, and Mary Shelley, who have taken inspiration from his genius.
©1999 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)1999 The Great Courses
Children's Literature
Summary
Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children's literature. Children's Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop's fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter. The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children's literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkein, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers. Children's Literature is an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word. The book is published by University of Chicago Press.
©2008 University of Chicago Press (P)2010 Redwood Audiobooks