This is a Teaching Company course that I recently watched on video (mostly listened to in the car) on imaginative literature, starting with fairy tales and other fantastical works, and ending up with a pretty thorough study of science fiction.
It's the first course I didn't just thoroughly enjoy. It surprised me with how dry it was, and the literary analysis of works was sometimes like being a car going off a cliff - in places I completely lost any connection with what the professor was talking about about what some aspect of book meant, or why a character was named such and such, or what the story was trying to tell us. I'm always suspicious that an author intends as much as a professor extracts out of a book (Bram Stoker damn sure did not intend at least two-thirds of what people attribute to him in Dracula, and would have been horrified that anyone even speculated he might entertain such thought). Granted most professional writers are probably more interested in laying in subtext and hidden meanings than Stoker, but still - I have to wonder if they intended quite this much.
That having been said, I did enjoy the explanations and especially the sections on science fiction where Rabkin explains the origins and demise of the pulp magazines and the rise of paperback sci-fi. Here I do agree with him that the pioneering sci-fi authors were absolute masters of their craft - simply because they wrote so much out of economic necessity. By the time they started writing novels, they had learned from the short story form and had the mechanics of telling stories down and were ready to tackle the larger canvas. I need to go back and read some Heinlein, Asimov,Bradbury, Clarke, and LeGuin. I've read some of each (and more than some of Clarke and Asimov) but there's a lot here I haven't really looked at and should.
But unfortunately this is one of those where I learned a lot - always a primary goal - but I didn't always enjoy it.