Open University Set Books

The Arts Good Study Guide (Open University Set Book)

Book DescriptionSynopsis
The Arts Good Study Guide is essential reading for students of arts and humanities subjects. Based on the experience of real students, it offers practical examples and activities to help you develop study strategies that really work. It will help you: organize yourself so that you make best use of your time; read and understand written, visual and aural 'texts'; make useful notes; write fluently and convincingly, making good use of textual illustration and evidence; get the most out of lectures, group discussions, audio-visual media and visits to galleries, museums and theatre; use a computer in your studies; prepare effectively for exams. The book is designed for students of arts and humanities subjects, including art history; classical studies; cultural, media and film studies; history; law; languages; literature; music; philosophy; religious studies. You will find the book invaluable whether you are new to study or more experienced, or perhaps taking it up again after a break. It is full of practical advice whether you are studying full-time or part-time, in your own home or in a group with other students and a tutor. It is a set book for The Open University's Arts Faculty course, An Introduction to the Humanities.This invaluable study guide is specifically written for students studying the arts and humanities whether beginners or more experienced. It offers comprehensive guidance on key skills and helps students to learn how to present their thoughts with confidence, both in discussion with other people and in writing. Topics covered include: reading and understanding written, visual and aural texts; writing fluently and convincingly making good use of textual illustration and evidence; the processes of analysis-interpretation-evaluation; getting the most out of lectures, group discussions, audio-visual media and galleries, theatres and museums; and, research techniques including writing a project report. This book is currently only available to A103 students.

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Medea and Other Plays: "Medea","Hecabe","Electra","Heracles" (Penguin Classics)

Product DescriptionSynopsisAbout the Author
`the most tragic of the poets' Aristotle Euripides was one of the most popular and controversial of all Greek tragedians, and his plays are marked by an independence of thought, ingenious dramatic devices, and a subtle variety of register and mood. He is also remarkable for the prominence he gave to female characters, whether heroines of virtue or vice. In the ethically shocking Medea, the first known child-killing mother in Greek myth to perform the deed in cold blood manipulates her world in order to wreak vengeance on her treacherous husband. Hippolytus sees Phaedra's confession of her passion for her stepson herald disaster, while Electra's heroine helps her brother murder their mother in an act that mingles justice and sin. Lastly, lighter in tone, the satyr drama, Helen, is an exploration of the impossibility of certitude as brilliantly paradoxical as the three famous tragedies. This new translation does full justice to Euripides's range of tone and gift for narrative. A lucid introduction provides substantial analysis of each play, complete with vital explanations of the traditions and background to Euripides's world.Medea, in which a spurned woman takes revenge upon her lover by killing her children, is one of the most shocking and horrific of all the Greek tragedies. Dominating the play is Medea herself, a towering and powerful figure who demonstrates Euripides' unusual willingness to give voice to a woman's case. Alcestis, a tragicomedy, is based on a magical myth in which Death is overcome, and The Children of Heracles examines the conflict between might and right, while Hippolytus deals with self-destructive integrity and moral dilemmas. These plays show Euripides transforming the awesome figures of Greek mythology into recognizable, fallible human beings.James Morwood is Grocyn Lecturer at Wadham College, Oxford.

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Pygmalion (Penguin Classics)

Product Description
Shaw radically reworks Ovid's tale with a feminist twist: while Henry Higgins successfully teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak and act like a duchess, she adamantly refuses to be his creation. First produced in 1914, it remains one of Shaw's most popular plays.

The Definitive Text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence
With an Introduction by Nicholas Grene

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Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin Modern Classics)

Book DescriptionAmazon.com
Jean Rhys' novels and stories are powerful works with poignant and disturbing insights into women's lives. Born in the Windward Islands, Rhys spent WW I in England and the next decade wandering the Continent. She returned to England prior to WW II.

In WIDE SARGASSO SEA, set in Jamaica and Dominica during the 1830s, Rhys imaginatively constructs the girlhood and marriage of Antoinette Bertha Cosway, the mysterious mad woman in JANE EYRE. It is a romantic and tragic novel, intense and spellbinding.

"This is Charlotte Bronte reconstructed from the inside out. Rhys draws you into a childhood dream that turns nightmare...chilling and beautifully realized." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)In 1966 Jean Rhys reemerged after a long silence with a novel called Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had enjoyed minor literary success in the 1920s and '30s with a series of evocative novels featuring women protagonists adrift in Europe, verging on poverty, hoping to be saved by men. By the '40s, however, her work was out of fashion, too sad for a world at war. And Rhys herself was often too sad for the world--she was suicidal, alcoholic, troubled by a vast loneliness. She was also a great writer, despite her powerful self-destructive impulses.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched."

The novel is Rhys's answer to Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë's book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself. Wide Sargasso Sea follows her voyage into the dark, both from her point of view and Rochester's. It is a voyage charged with soul-destroying lust. "I watched her die many times," observes the new husband. "In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty."

Rhys struggled over the book, enduring rejections and revisions, wrestling to bring this ruined woman out of the ashes. The slim volume was finally published when she was 70 years old. The critical adulation that followed, she said, "has come too late." Jean Rhys died a few years later, but with Wide Sargasso Sea she left behind a great legacy, a work of strange, scary loveliness. There has not been a book like it before or since. Believe me, I've been searching. --Emily White

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