Filter By Subjects
American literature History 20th century American literature History 21st century British literature History 19th century British literature History 20th century British literature History 21st century Feminist art criticism Irish literature History 19th century Latin America Social life and customs Women artists Women in artFilter By Subjects
American literature History 20th century American literature History 21st century British literature History 19th century British literature History 20th century British literature History 21st century Feminist art criticism Irish literature History 19th century Latin America Social life and customs Women artists Women in artSummary: Following acclaimed poet and memoirist Maya Angelou on a visit to her childhood surroundings in Stamps, Arkansas, this Bill Moyers interview remains a classic of broadcast journalism and a valuable teaching tool for African-American studies. "I was terribly hurt in this town," Angelou tells Moyers, "and vastly loved." She recalls her rapturous discovery of Shakespeare (while savoring a favorite...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
View online at AVOD
Summary: I have the strength to walk my own path, no matter how hard, in my search for reality, and not cling to the splendid wagon of desperate illusions. A writer of novels, short stories, folktales, plays, and essays, Zora Neale Hurston combined a hunger for research and a desire to penetrate the deepest of popular beliefs with a truly exquisite narrative talent. This illuminating biography of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: In this retelling of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," Kathy, deemed "too sensitive for her own good" and told to control herself, is confined to a child's bedroom with barred windows and garish decor by her well-meaning husband. As the enforced idleness of a rest cure begins to drive her mad, Kathy imagines there is someone imprisoned within the wallpaper, and she works to set...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
View online at AVOD
Summary: For 15 years, National Humanities Medalist Maxine Hong Kingston has been working with veterans-soldiers from World War II, from Vietnam, and now, from Iraq-to convert the ghosts of war into the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that Kingston believes will help them survive. In this program, Bill Moyers speaks with Kingston about her book Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, an anthology called...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: She disobeyed the social mores of her time, defied the critics bent on her destruction, and maintained her reputation by her brilliant books. Along with Charles Dickens, she was one of the two most successful novelists in Victorian England. This program offers a concise biography of George Eliot, exploring the complexities and contradictions of her personal character and the achievements of her...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Illustrated with clips from movie and television adaptations of her novels, this program takes a visually rich approach to understanding the woman behind such classics as Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. An extensive biographical and psychological profile of the author provides insight into what life was like for a woman in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Filmed at key...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Her father was philosopher William Godwin. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was feminism's founder. By pedigree and experience, Mary Shelley was uncannily equipped to write the gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein. This program offers a fresh exploration of her novel, focusing on how Shelley's personal life influenced the book and mirrored it afterwards. Along with reenactments of scenes from her...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte were a trio whose writings rocked Victorian England and yet who lived, suffered, and died far from mainstream British society. Featuring dramatizations, excerpts from their letters, and period illustrations, this elegiac program explores the England that they knew and portrayed, their familial relationships, and the men-both real and invented-who loomed large...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Since their appearance in Europe some 300 years ago, the stories of The Thousand and One Nights have entranced Western readers with visions of an exotic, magical Middle East. In this program, actor and director Richard E. Grant revisits the book he loved as a child and seeks to understand its persistent hold on the collective imagination. Grant travels to Paris to discover how the Arabist...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
View online at AVOD
Summary: Facing the reality of what happened in Southeast Asia-and bringing others together to reconcile with it-has become the life work of novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, who teaches Buddhism and creative writing to Vietnam veterans. "In the workshops, [they] break out of the solipsism, the narcissism, the isolation," says Professor Kingston, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: What were Alice Walker's motivations in writing "Everyday Use"? In this program, the author discusses her short story with her official biographer, Evelyn C. White. Over the course of the interview, Walker talks about the autobiographical aspects of the story, the significance of quilting to African-American women, the perception of class differences, and the important life lessons she wished...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Being black, being a woman, and being a writer is just the most wonderful challenge. It's like having three eyes, three hearts, rather than one, says the author of The Color Purple in this profile, as she relives her journey from an impoverished childhood in rural Georgia to the peace and creativity of her present life in northern California. Alice Walker describes how the Civil Rights movement...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
View online at AVOD
Summary: When Maxine Hong Kingston was growing up in California, she listened to her parents' stories and memories of their native China. In her highly acclaimed memoirs, The Woman Warrior and China Men, she linked those tales of tradition to the story of her own American experience, blending childhood memory, meditation, and magic. They are the most widely taught books by a living American author on...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: A leading voice among American writers, Alice Walker has published books of influential poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and criticism. In this program, Ms. Walker talks with Bill Moyers about a range of subjects, including The Color Purple, whose themes are as relevant today as they were when she wrote the book in 1982; the way in which her life experiences and ancestry are reflected in...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: The late Susan Sontag was not a photographer, yet her famous book On Photography is required reading in almost every serious photography course in the world. Her novels and nonfiction books such as Illness as a Metaphor have been translated into a score of languages. And she also wrote and directed films and plays. In this program, the renowned writer and human rights activist talks with Bill...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Flannery O'Connor is often likened to Faulkner for her portrayal of the character and lifestyle of the South, Kafka for her fascination with the bizarre, and Beckett for her dark humor-comparisons that underscore the fact that her voice has a unique place in the canon of American literature. This program provides a biographical sketch of O'Connor that illuminates her efforts to come to terms...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: This moving dramatization of Tillie Olsen's frequently anthologized "I Stand Here Ironing" is an unvarnished exploration of an impoverished single mother's ambivalence toward her worth as a parent and her 19-year-old daughter's future. Rich in subtext, the highly metaphorical story-penned in a stark and dramatic fashion devoid of cliche and sentimentality-raises important questions about...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: In this compelling program, world-renowned author Toni Morrison candidly answers questions regarding how she became a writer, the pain of empathizing with her characters, the sensual nature of her novels, and how it felt to win the Nobel Prize. In addition, she pulls no punches discussing how she first became aware of her racial otherness, how writing for a black audience has kept her work from...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Surveying some of the most under-appreciated art of the 20th century, this program documents a groundbreaking exhibit of work by Latin American women at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The video opens up the world of these bold and sensitive visionaries, illuminating their accomplishments, their impact on artists outside their own countries, and the relationship between cultural and artistic...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: The works of Frida Kahlo, one of the 20th century's most prominent artists, are included in museums and private collections the world over. This documentary incorporates archival material, readings from journals and letters, and interviews with friends and scholars to retrace the life and work of one of Mexico's most highly recognized painters.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. So spoke Virginia Woolf in 1929 as she discussed the problems of the writer and of women in general. Woolf's talk represents perhaps the most persuasive of all her writings on liberty, literature, and the role of women in her society. Woolf spoke not only about writing, but about writing as a woman-speaking in an age when...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Born in Iran when it was still Persia and raised in colonial Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing has transformed her remarkable life into a literary tour de force. Her oeuvre comprises novels, poetry, short stories, plays, essays, a two-volume autobiography, and even a couple of operas-testimony to a drive that she herself calls compulsive. In this program, Ms. Lessing talks with Bill Moyers about her life...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Chilean novelist Isabel Allende has sold 15 million books in 30 languages over the past two decades. Few living writers receive the critical acclaim, popular following, and consistent sales records that she has enjoyed since the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits, in 1982. And yet her own story of exile after the rise of the dictator Pinochet is, perhaps, the most...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010