Author:Ian Courtenay Johnston

Ian Courtenay Johnston
(1938–)

Works

Translations

Works by Franz Kafka

• Before the Law
• A Hunger Artist
• The Hunter Gracchus
• Up in the Gallery
• In the Penal Colony
• A Country Doctor
• A Report for An Academy
• The Metamorphosis
• An Imperial Message
• Jackals and Arabs
• The Great Wall of China

Lectures

• Ancient and Modern Science: Some Observations (external text)
• Introductory Note on Classical Greece (external text)
• The Triumph of the Lions? An Introduction to Antony and Cleopatra (external text)
• Critical Approaches to Shakespeare: Some Initial Observations (external text)
• On Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (external text)
• A Note on the Life and Work of Aristotle (external text)
• Variations on a Theme of Love: An Introduction to As You Like It (external text)
• An Introductory Note to Euripides’ Bacchae (external text)
• On Satire in Aristophanes’s Clouds (external text)
• Creationism in the Science Curriculum? (external text)
• Preliminary Notes on Cubist Architecture in Prague, 2004
• Some Introductory Historical Observations (on Czech history), 2004
• Lecture on Dante’s Inferno (external text)
• Some Non-Scientific Observations on the Importance of Darwin (external text)
• Lecture on Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (external text)
• Basic Historical Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to The Second Sex (external text)
• Lecture on Robinson Crusoe (external text)
• On Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method (external text)
• Notes on Notes from Underground (external text)
• Lecture on T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land (external text)
• Introduction to Rousseau’s Emile (external text)
• Lecture on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (external text)
• Responses to Some Common Objections to “The Short Proof of Evolution” (external text)
• Introductory Remarks on the Book of Exodus (external text)
• Lecture on Frayn’s Copenhagen (external text)
• On Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (external text)
• On Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (external text)
• Introductory Lecture on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (external text)
• On Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, 2007
• The Foxes, The Lion, and the Fat Knight: Introduction to Henry IV, Part 1 (external text)
• The Ironies of Success in Politics: An Introduction to Shakespeare’s Henry V (external text)
• On Hobbes’ Leviathan (external text)
• On Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (external text)
• Introduction to Shakespeare Studies (external text)
• A Brief Introduction to The Varieties of Religious Experience (external text)
• Lecture on Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” (external text)
• Speak What We Feel: An Introduction to King Lear (external text)
• Some Observations on Lucretius (external text)
• Introduction to Macbeth (external text)
• Lecture on Machiavelli’s The Prince (external text)
• On Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, 2000
• Lecture on Marx (external text)
• Karl Marx on Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (external text)
• Introductory Lectures on Matthew and Epistle to the Romans (external text)
• On Spiegelman’s Maus I and II (external text)
• Lecture on Plato’s Meno (external text)
• Some Observations on Montaigne’s Essays (external text)
• An introduction to the work of Alfons Mucha and Art Nouveau (2004, revised 2014)
• Myth Conceptions of Academic Work Once More (external text)
• “There’s Nothing Nietzsche Couldn’t Teach Ya About the Raising of the Wrist” (external text)
• Some Preliminary Observations on Classical Greek Literature (external text)
• Lecture on the Odyssey (external text)
• Fate, Freedom, and Tragic Experience: An Introductory Lecture on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (external text)
• Lecture on the Oresteia (external text)
• Lecture on Plato’s Republic (external text)
• Research Revisited: The Rage of Caliban (external text)
• The Issue of Language: Introduction to Richard II and Hamlet (external text)
• Lecture on Shakespeare’s Transformation of Medieval Tragedy and an Introduction to Richard III (external text)
• Introduction to the Romantic Era in English Poetry (external text)
• A Brief Note on the Historical Background to Shakespeare’s First and Second History Cycles (external text)
• On Rousseau’s Discourse On Inequality (external text)
• The Short Proof of Evolution (external text)
• A Note on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (external text)
• Why Should I Obey the State? (external text)
• Lecture on Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (external text)
• Lecture on Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (external text)
• Lecture on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (external text)
• You Can Go Home Again, Can’t You?: An Introduction to The Tempest (external text)
• Preliminary Observations on Thucydides (external text)
• The Legend of the Trojan War (external text)
• Lecture on Huckleberry Finn (external text)
• The Ironies of Happy Endings: An Introduction to Twelfth Night (external text)
• Towards an Initial Understanding of Science (external text)
• Some Historical Observations on Western Civilization; or, Why Is Everyone Studying English These Days? (external text)
• Lecture on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (external text)
• Lecture on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (external text)

Other lectures, etc.

• My Body the Billboard (external text)
• A Toast to the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns (external text)
• God’s Handicap: Golf as Spiritual Ordeal (external text)
• In Praise of Conversation (external text)
• Is not the Truth the Truth? (external text)
• No Snakes on these Islands (external text)
• Participating in Seminars (external text)
• the e-coli (external directory)
• God Rides a Harley in the Land of the Free (external text)
• Lecture on Hildegard of Bingen (external text)
• Essays on Homer’s Iliad: a series of eight essays (external directory)
  • Homer’s War
  • Homer’s Similes: Nature as Conflict
  • The Gods
  • The Heroic Code
  • Arms and the Men
  • Hector and Achilles
  • Homer and the Modern Imagination
  • On Modern English Translations of the Iliad
• Lecture Notes on Mill’s On Liberty (external text)
• Losing One’s Cherry: Reactions to Rorty’s Contingency, irony, and solidarity (external text)
• Our Universities: How We Got Where We Are (external text)