Here's an extraordinary website to add to your bookmarks: the BBC Four Interviews website hosts a wealth of audio recordings of actors, architects, philosophers, painters, writers, playwrights, poets, and so on, including the likes of Auden, Betjeman, Burroughs, Cummings, Gordimer, Nabokov, Pinter, Rushdie, Shaw, Thomas, Woolf, Yeats, eh... oh yes, and Chomsky. And many more. Warmly recommended!
To take just one example, the audio recording available for Virginia Woolf has her reading out a 'Eulogy for words' (eulo-what?), from which the title of this entry was taken. Speaking, in the same text, of the hundreds of professors teaching literature, the thousands of critics reviewing it, and the hundreds upon hundreds of students studying it, she asks
Do we write better? Do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago, when we were unlectured, uncriticised, untaught?
Not your average multiple choice quiz question, this ;)
P.S. More 'literary' BBC audio is available from the Poetry Out Loud page, which features, well, poets reading their work out loud.
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