Catalog Search Results
Language
English
Description
Camera Three presents two dramatizations of literature at the expense of scientific thought. The first scene combines excerpts from the novellas Nightmare Abbey, Gryll Grange, Melincourt, and Crochet Castle. In Inflexible Logic, six apes are encouraged to write all the books in the British Museum to test the law of probability.
Language
English
Description
The digital revolution has nourished creativity in an unprecedented way and has made available unlimited creative opportunities. But does democratized creative expression mean better art, film, music, and literature, or is true talent drowned in the digital ocean of uncurated mass mediocrity? That is the question addressed in this intriguing film by influential creatives and visionaries of the digital era. Musician/DJ Moby, best-selling author Seth...
3) Genre
Language
English
Description
Genre is a great way of communicating what type of story a novel, film or text is. Understanding different genres - the structure and style, tone and mood, and how a particular text conforms to or challenges the generic conventions, helps us to analyze the text and draw out themes. Australian authors Amra Pajalic, Angela Savage, Gabrielle Wang and Tony Wilson discuss the genres they write within.
4) Theme
Language
English
Description
This program looks at theme from the authors' perspective as Australian authors Amra Pajalic, Angela Savage, Gabrielle Wang and Tony Wilson share how they work with theme during the writing process. When and how do they determine and develop theme? How does it shape their stories? We also take a closer look at the theme of Australian identity.
Language
English
Description
This introduction to William Shakespeare's life and works from the Famous Authors series begins at the author's childhood home in Stratford and tours the institutions of the town and country that would have been part of Shakespeare's life. The film follows the 23-year-old writer to London, providing a picture of the city in Elizabethan and Jacobean England when Shakespeare went to make his success in the theater. Tension between the Catholics and...
Language
English
Description
This program begins in 16th century England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the beginning of a cultural revolution. It was an age marked by the battle of conscience and power and, eventually, by Civil War. Through historic documents we discover that contrary to popular belief, William Shakespeare was born to a wealthy family and as a child received a rather privileged education. Yet as a teenager, his world is turned upside down when his family...
Language
English
Description
A hilarious and insightful introduction to Shakespeare's Scottish play, This Is Macbeth offers a decidedly different approach to exploring and appreciating the renowned tragedy. The program consists of amusing talk show-style interviews with the main characters interspersed with scenes from the play itself, performed in deadly earnestness by professional Shakespearean actors in a black box theater. Musical summaries help viewers keep track of plot...
Language
English
Description
Even as the poets were fostering a rebellion, contemporary prose writers began creating a new American tradition comprised of many strands, many voices, and many myths about the past. This program explores the search for identity by three American writers: Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Leslie Feinberg.
Language
English
Description
For many, the 1960s mark the true end of modern America. Whereas the modernists remained serious about the transcendent nature of art, the artists of the 1960s wanted an art that was relevant. They wanted an art that not only spoke about justice, but also helped create it. This program explores the innovations made in American poetry in the 1960s by Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Adrienne Rich.
10) Social Realism
Language
English
Description
This program presents the authors of the American Gilded Age, such as Edith Wharton, and juxtaposes them with social realists like Anzia Yezierska. These writers expose the double world that made up turn-of-the-century New York: that of the elite and that of the poorest of the poor. Which of these realities is the more truly American?
Language
English
Description
My subject in fiction, Flannery O'Connor tells us, "is the action of grace in the territory held largely by the devil." One might do well to ask what, if not the devil, haunts the American South in this era between the wars. This program uncovers the revisioning of Southern myths during the modernist era by writers William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston.
Language
English
Description
Jazz filled the air and wailed against the night. Caught in the sway, American prose writers sought out the forbidden, the slang, the dialects, and the rhythms of the folk and of everyday life. Writers such as Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald forged a new style: one which silhouetted the geometry of language, crisp in its own cleanness.
14) Masculine Heroes
Language
English
Description
In 1898, Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier as the defining feature of American culture, but American authors had uncovered its significance much earlier. This program turns to three key writers of the early national period, James Fenimore Cooper, John Rollin Ridge, and Walt Whitman, and examines the influential visions of American manhood offered by each author.
15) Becoming Visible
Language
English
Description
This program guides the viewer through the works and contexts of ethnic writers from 1945-1965. Starting with the works of Ralph Waldo Ellison, Philip Roth, and N. Scott Momaday, we explore the way writers from the margins took over the center of American culture.
16) Utopian Promise
Language
English
Description
When British colonists landed in the Americas, they created communities that they hoped would serve as a "light onto the nations." But what role would the native inhabitants play in this new model community? This program compares the answers of two important groups, the Puritans and Quakers, and exposes the lasting influence they had upon American identity.
17) Migrant Struggle
Language
English
Description
Americans have often defined themselves through their relationship to the land. This program traces the social fiction of three key American voices: John Steinbeck, Carlos Bulosan, and Helena María Viramontes.
18) Native Voices
Language
English
Description
Native Americans had established a rich and highly developed tradition of oral literature long before the writings of the European colonists. This program explores that richness by introducing Native American oral traditions through the work of three contemporary authors: Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), and Luci Tapahonso (Navajo).
Language
English
Description
Amidst the chaos following World War I, Ezra Pound urged poets to "Make it new!" This call was heeded by a large range of poets, ranging from T. S. Eliot to Jean Toomer. This program explores the modernist lyrics of two of these poets: William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes. What is modernism? How did these poets start a revolution that continues until this day?
Language
English
Description
The Enlightenment brought new ideals and a new notion of self-hood to the American colonies. This program begins with an examination of the importance of the trope of the self-made man in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, and then turns to the development of this concept in the writings of Romanticist Ralph Waldo Emerson.