“We should learn to treat literature as doctors treat their medicines, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing,” say the creators of an excellent video explaining what literature is for.
Centuries previously, Galileo observed that books have an uncanny power to transport us, across time and space, into the mind of another person. And suggests that we are drawn to books, and derive such pleasure from reading, because literature is a means of connecting human beings and human ideas across boundaries – and is, in this way, a means of both time travel and telepathy.
For those passionate about reading, and who wish to take the study of literature to new levels (but at their own convenience), we’ve provided below a list of dozens of online literature courses you can take for free, right now, from the world’s leading universities, including Yale, Oxford, Harvard, and Warwick.
You can download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player.
- American Literature I: Beginnings to Civil War – Free Online Video & Course Info– Free iTunes Video – Free Online Video – Cyrus Patell, NYU
- Approaching Shakespeare – Free iTunes Audio – Free Online Audio –Emma Smith, Oxford
- The art of the probable: Literature and probability – Free Online (registration required), MIT
- British and American Poetry: 1900 to the Present – Free iTunes Audio – Charles Altieri, UC Berkeley
- Cervantes’ Don Quixote – Free Online Video – Free iTunes Video – Free iTunes Audio – Course Materials – Roberto González Echevarría, Yale
- Dante in Translation – Free Online Video – Free iTunes Audio – Free iTunes Video – Course Materials – Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale
- Darwin and Design – Free Online Video & Course Info – James Paradis, MIT
- D.H. Lawrence – Free Online Video & Audio – Catherine Brown, Oxford
- Existentialism in Literature & Film – Free iTunes Audio – Free Online Audio – Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley
- George Eliot – Free Online Audio – Catherine Brown, Oxford
- Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner – Free Online Video – Free iTunes Audio – Course Materials – Wai Chee Dimock, Yale
- Holocaust in Film and Literature – Free Online Video – Todd Presner, UCLA
- Introduction to Theory of Literature – Free Online Video – Free iTunes Audio – Free iTunes Video – Course Materials – Paul H. Fry, Yale
- Invitation to World Literature – Free Online Video – David Damrosch, Harvard
- Jack Kerouac – Free Online Audio Part 1 and Part 2 – Allen Ginsberg, Naropa University
- Literature and Form – Free Online Video & Audio – Free iTunes Video –Free iTunes Audio – Catherine Brown, Oxford
- Literature and Psychoanalysis – Free Online Audio – John Fletcher, University of Warwick
- Literature and mental health – Free Online (registration required), University of Warwick
- Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre –Free iTunes Audio – Free Online Audio – Multiple profs, Oxford
- Old English in Context – Free Online Audio – Stuart Lee, Oxford University
- Oscar Wilde – Free Online Audio – Sos Eltis, Oxford
- Shakespeare and his world – Free Online (registration required), University of Warwick
- Tolkien’s The Book of Lost Tales: Part 1 – Free Online, Signum University
- Tolkien’s The Book of Lost Tales: Part 2 – Free Online, Signum Universiy
- This Craft of Verse: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures – Free Online Audio – Jorge Luis Borges, Harvard
nothing in the rulebook 