Stanford on Your iPod: The Literature of Crisis

Day after day, on cam­pus­es across the coun­try, pro­fes­sors impart invalu­able knowl­edge to stu­dents. And, some­what unfor­tu­nate­ly, this knowl­edge has been tra­di­tion­al­ly dis­sem­i­nat­ed only so far — which is to say not beyond the class­room walls.

We’re per­haps at the ear­ly stages of see­ing this change. Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty has recent­ly teamed up with Apple to pilot iTunes U — a vari­a­tion on the iTunes soft­ware pack­age that explod­ed into con­sumer con­scious­ness with the iPod rev­o­lu­tion.

Until recent­ly, Stan­ford has used iTunes U to make avail­able a series of one-off lec­tures, many of them extreme­ly worth­while. (If you have iTunes, click here to enter Stan­ford iTunes. If you don’t, you can down­load it from Apple for free.) But what’s new is the uni­ver­si­ty’s deci­sion to make full-fledged cours­es avail­able to the pub­lic. This quar­ter we’re start­ing to see that deci­sion bear some fruit. In iTunes, you’ll now find week­ly install­ments of a course called The Lit­er­a­ture of Cri­sis. Taught by Marsh McCall and Mar­tin Evans, two senior fac­ul­ty mem­bers, the course explores how cri­sis — dra­mat­ic per­son­al cri­sis and larg­er soci­etal cri­sis — have shaped the lives and writ­ings of major intel­lec­tu­als, from Pla­to, to Shake­speare, to Voltaire. Whether you live in Palo Alto, New York, or Ban­ga­lore, you can sub­scribe to this course as a pod­cast by click­ing here, and, each week your iPod should auto­mat­i­cal­ly down­load the lat­est install­ment. (If you don’t have an iPod, you can sim­ply lis­ten to the course on your com­put­er.)

Click to access:

Stan­ford on iTunes

Lit­er­a­ture and Cri­sis

The Quick Start Guide to Stan­ford on iTunes

If you want to sub­scribe to the indi­vid­ual RSS feeds rolling into Stan­ford on iTunes, just click here.