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The Modern Scholar: Giants of French Literature audiobook cover art

  • The Modern Scholar: Giants of French Literature

  • Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, and Camus
  • By: Prof. Katherine Elkins
  • Narrated by: Katherine Elkins
  • Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
  • Original Recording
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 63
  • Performance
    4.5 out of 5 stars 39
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars 40

In this series of lectures, Professor Katherine Elkins details the lives and works of the premier French writers of the last two centuries. With keen insight into her subject material, Professor Elkins discusses the attributes that made classics of such works as Balzac's Human Comedy, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and Camus' The Stranger.

  • 5 out of 5 stars

  • The Modern Scholar: Giants of French Literature

  • By Dudley H. Williams on 11-29-11
Dubliners (Harper Audio Edition) audiobook cover art

  • Dubliners (Harper Audio Edition)

  • By: James Joyce
  • Narrated by: Frank McCourt, Patrick McCabe
  • Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
  • Unabridged
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    4.5 out of 5 stars 224
  • Performance
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    4.5 out of 5 stars 167

James Joyce revolutionized twentieth-century writing with his "stream of consciousness" technique. While ingeniously innovative and experimental, he was also a keenly precise chronicler of the people, places, and sounds of his native Dublin. In Dubliners, a cast of 15 internationally famous stage and screen actors perform stories that make up a brilliant journey over a human landscape that captures the bleakest of despair to the most blinding of epiphanies.

  • 3 out of 5 stars

  • Great Stories, Poor Performance

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The Modern Scholar audiobook cover art

  • The Modern Scholar

  • The Giants of Russian Literature: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov
  • By: Liza Knapp
  • Narrated by: Liza Knapp
  • Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 73
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Russian literature of the 19th century is among the richest, most profound, and most human traditions in the world. This course explores this tradition by focusing on four giants: Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov. Their works had an enormous impact on Russian understanding of the human condition.

  • 5 out of 5 stars

  • beautifully wrought

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The Giants of Irish Literature audiobook cover art

  • The Giants of Irish Literature

  • Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett - The Modern Scholar
  • By: Professor George O'Brien
  • Narrated by: George O'Brien
  • Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 30
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Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett: These four masters of Irish literature created works of startling innovation and unparalleled literary merit. Renowned professor George O'Brien provides the biographical background of these authors and an analysis of their greatest works. In these lectures, O'Brien discusses the very qualities that set these works apart and the "Irishness" that characterizes each of them.

  • 3 out of 5 stars

  • Great IF You've Recently Read the Works Discussed

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The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis audiobook cover art

  • The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis

  • By: Louis Markos, The Great Courses
  • Narrated by: Louis Markos
  • Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
  • Original Recording
  • Overall
    4.5 out of 5 stars 220
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What can we still learn from C.S. Lewis? Find out in these 12 insightful lectures that cover the author's spiritual autobiography, novels, and his scholarly writings that reflect on pain and grief, love and friendship, prophecy and miracles, and education and mythology.

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Swann's Way audiobook cover art

  • Swann's Way

  • By: Marcel Proust
  • Narrated by: Neville Jason
  • Length: 21 hrs and 33 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 384
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Swann’s Way is the first of seven volumes in Remembrance of Things Past. It sets the scene with the narrator’s memories being famously provoked by the taste of that little cake, the madeleine, accompanied by a cup of lime-flowered tea. It is an unmatched portrait of fin-de-siècle France.

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Publisher's Summary

A recipient of the Whiting Foundation Teaching Fellowship, Katherine Elkins is also the co-director of the Integrated Program in the Humane Studies at Kenyon College. In this lecture series, Elkins examines the development of the modern novel by investigating four great modernist authors: James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. The lectures explore the authors’ most respected works and illustrate how each author’s unique style and vision made a major contribution to the look and shape of the novel today.
©2013 Katherine Elkins (P)2013 Crescite Group, LLC

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Audible.com Reviews
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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Too short, I need more!

Any additional comments?

This lecture series covers the proper/academic definition of the "modern novel," that is, novels written as part of the Modernist movement in the earlier part of the 20th century. Don't be a dummy like me, not read the production description, assume the colloquial term for modern, and think the series was going to cover novels all through the 20th century well past the period actually addressed.

That being said, Prof. Elkins offers a wonderful little series of lectures about some books that definitely deserve a second (or first) reading if you haven't tackled these novels since school that provides great insight into the writing, and social and historical context behind the books.

I would definitely listen to a lecture series from Prof. Elkins that's a traditional length for the Great Courses (15-20 hours) and would recommend this series to anyone interested in 20th century literature. A very enjoyable listen.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Encore!

I specifically picked out this selection because of Prof. Elkins. My only disappointment is that it is half the length of her course on the giants of French literature.