There are a number of outfits -- The Teaching Company and The Modern Scholar among them -- that produce audio and video university courses for those who never lose their thirst for learning. The audio courses are perfect for the car, and since my local library has a number of The Modern Scholar courses on CD, I've been checking them out. I must say that they are very impressive. Only the most compelling and charismatic (and clearest) professors get hired to do these courses, and they make excellent listening.
The first such course I listened to all the way through is Thomas Schmidt's The Enlightenment, which consists of 14 half-hour lectures and a small book. It opened up vistas I hadn't explored for a long time. The Modern Scholar thoughtfully makes copies of the accompanying books for these courses available to library borrowers for just a shipping charge, so you can pursue your studies further after returning the library set -- a nice touch. Using the book's suggestions for further reading as a guide, I've been doing just that.
The first follow-up was a bit of a bust, unfortunately. Schmidt recommends Dorinda Outram's The Enlightenment (2005), which I obtained through interlibrary loan and was not impressed by. I posted a little review at Amazon and Library Thing:
"A typical example of Modern Academic Style -- impotent, equivocal, non-committal; everything is 'problematic.' It has some potential although unpleasurable use as an indication of the current state of academic debates concerning the Enlightenment (although on that score, it will go out of date fast), and it can point one in the direction of some better books, such as Albion W. Small's The Cameralists, an interesting, confident 1909 study that can still be read with pleasure and profit one hundred years after publication -- because of that very confidence (as well as the depth of Small's research). The mousiness of Outram's text is, by contrast, extremely unattractive."
(I haven't finished the long Small volume yet, but it is an excellent specialized political science study.)
The next volume I picked up after Outram and Small was a winner, Robert Darnton's The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), about the writing and publishing scene in France and nearby countries in the late 18th century. Darnton, a celebrated scholar, is everything that Outram is not: decisive, engaging, and unpretentious. His prose style is straightforward and delightful, and the subject-matter is stimulatingly down-to-earth -- you will have no idea just how grubby Grub Street can be until you read this book. Sample choice bit that made me laugh out loud:
Charles Theveneau de Morande, one of Grub Street's most violent and virulent pamphleteers, lived in a demimonde of prostitutes, pimps, blackmailers, pickpockets, swindlers, and murderers. He tried his hand at more than one of these professions and gathered material for his pamphlets by skimming the scum around him. As a result, his works smeared everything, good and bad alike, with a spirit of such total depravity and alienation that Voltaire cried out in horror.
Breakfast is being served
3 years ago
