A Way with Words II: Approaches to Literature

In A Way with Words: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Persuasion, widely published professor Michael D.C. Drout embarked on a thought-provoking investigation into the role of rhetoric in our world. Now, in A Way with Words II: Approaches to Literature, the renowned literary scholar leads a series of lectures that focus on the big questions of literature. Is literature a kind of lie? Can fiction ever be "realistic"? Why do we read? What should we read? Professor Drout provides insight into these and other provocative questions, including those related to the role of the text, author, and audience in the reading process.

A Way with Words IV: Understanding Poetry

In A way with words I,  II, III  , Professor Michael D.C. Drout increased listeners' understanding of the way literature works, of the rhetoric that in many ways defines people's lives, and of the intricacies of grammar, all while maintaining a lively tone that conveys the professor's infectious enthusiasm for the subject.
In part IV of this fascinating series, Professor Drout submerses listeners in poetry's past, present, and future. Addressing such poetic luminaries as Milton,Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, these lectures explain in simple terms what poetry is while following its development through the centuries. 

BOOK ADDED by KundAlini

Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890-1950 - A Critical Anthology

This critical anthology of avant-garde drama offers comprehensive coverage of that distinctively twentieth-century tradition. It includes the full texts of sixteen important plays, each preceded by a historical-critical introduction and followed by an essay, often written by the playwright, that elaborates on the dramatic and aesthetic issues raised by the play. Cardullo and Knopf, in making plays and documents of the avant-garde available in one collection for the first time, underscore the place and importance of the movement.

Beyond Minimalism - Beckett's Late Style in the Theater

Beyond Minimalism explores Beckett's drama of the '70s and '80s, examining the ways in which play text and performance merge through the playwright's poetic idiom. Beginning with Not I and continuing through Catastrophe and What Where, Brater examines the plays not only as texts but also as theater pieces. Discussing the technical and aesthetic demands that productions like Footfalls and Rockaby make on actor, director, and spectator, Brater clarifies the essential relationship between Beckett's achievement in the context of the breakdown of genre, performance poetry, and the electronic intrusion of the recorded voice as a new theatrical convention.

The Art of Crime

The Art of Crime: The Plays and Films of Harold Pinter and David Mamet is the first collection of essays dedicated to a critical assessment of the centrality and pervasiveness of crime, crime stories, and criminalityin the work of Harold Pinter and David Mamet, writers whose work is typically linked by their facility with language, theatricality, and distinctive idiom.