Literature in Our Lives : Talking About Texts From Shakespeare to Philip Pullman

This book recreates in written form seventeen of the most popular, frankly personal and engaging lectures on literature given by the award-winning teacher Richard Jacobs, who has been working with students for over forty years. This is a book written for students, whether starting their studies or more experienced, and also for all lovers of literature. At its heart is the conviction that reading, thinking about, and writing or talking about literature involves us all personally: texts talk to us intimately and urgently, inviting us to talk back, intervening in and changing our lives. These lectures discuss, in an open but richly informed way, a wide range of texts that are regularly studied and enjoyed. They model what it means to be excited about reading and studying literature, and how the study of literature can be life-changing - perhaps even with the effect of changing the lives of readers of this eloquent and remarkable book. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 The Myth of the Fall and its Impact: Pullman, Lewis and Others 2 Claribel’s Story: A Few Thoughts on Gender, Race and Colonialism in The Tempest 3 Wuthering Heights: Myth and the Wounds of Loss 4 Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: Transforming Lives 5 Great Expectations: Intertextualities, Endings and Life after Plot 6 Emily Dickinson: ‘And Then the Windows Failed’ 7 Emma: Rhetoric, Irony and the Reader’s Assault Course 8 Dorian Gray: ‘Queering’ the Text 9 The Fallen Woman: Emma Bovary and (Many) Others 10 Two Transgressive American Women: Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman 11 Hamlet/Lear: Realism/Modernism 12 John Keats: Three (or is it Two?) Poems and Thoughts on ‘Late Style’ 13 Republicanism, Regicide and ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ 14 Jean Rhys: Her Texts from the 1930s 15 Twelfth Night: Dream-Gift 16 Please Read Proust 17 Paradise Lost: Radical Politics, Gender and Education Index "This book recreates in written form seventeen of the most popular, frankly personal and engaging lectures on literature given by the award-winning teacher Richard Jacobs, who has been working with students for forty years. This is a book aimed at students, starting their studies or more experienced, and all lovers of literature and devoted to the idea that reading, thinking about, and writing or talking about literature involves us all personally, that texts talk to us intimately and urgently and invite us to talk back, and that literature intervenes in our lives and changes them. These lectures discuss, in an open but richly informed way, a wide range of texts that are regularly studied and enjoyed and they model what it means to be excited about reading and studying literature, how the study of literature can be life-changing - perhaps even with the effect of changing the lives of readers of this remarkable book"-- Provided by publisher A remarkable and frankly personal collection of seventeen lectures by an award-winning teacher with forty years of experience that covers an unusual range of literary texts regularly studied and enjoyed. The book models what it means to be excited about reading and studying literature and how it can change our lives.