Well, not much of a rave, but:
Luckily I have more than enough for part 1 of the new seminar, so some stuff from there will be moved to part2.
Which makes me atm have roughly 50% of the seminar ready.
The plan is to avoid literature I haven't bothered to read. Which was tricky, given this was a seminar on fantasy literature.
Naturally I filled it with horror and magical realism, but some scifi and (the dreaded) high fantasy have to be there. Scifi should be ok-ish due to P.K. Dick, Arthur Clarke and some semi-randoms (I have no mouth and I must scream, flowers for Algernon etc). But high fantasy is a problem (I can't just write about Lord Dunsany or a couple of romanticist poems for twenty pages).
Personally I would not omit Frank Herbert's Dune (first novel, not the rest of it, though the first 3 make the best part of the series). There are so many interesting themes to talk about in that book, some of which is playing out in RL right now. One of Herbert's main themes is "beware the charismatic leader". No matter how competent a ruler, no matter how benign his/her intentions, nobody is perfect and every leader is corruptible in some way. Or they get careless or start believing their own PR and consider themselves invincible - and there's where the corruption sets in.
Harlan Ellison? Wow. He had quite an ego, and a decades-long hatred of Gene Roddenberry and other Star Trek production people, because they dared to tell him that his original "City on the Edge of Forever" was unfilmable as written and it had to be revised. Both versions won awards (Ellison's version was later published in the volume "Six Science Fiction Plays").
High fantasy... people are going to say Tolkien, obviously. I'd recommend checking out some of the works of Poul Anderson. He wrote my favorite time travel series, but he was also into what could be termed "historical fantasy" based on Viking myths.
Fairy tales... you'd like the Brothers Grimm, since their stories are... grim. And scary as far as children are concerned (I remember being terrified of mud puddles for
years after reading one particular story). There's a gaming company making fantasy adventure games out of some of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales.
Alice in Wonderland is a well-known fantasy that's generated all sorts of mainstream references and iconic characters (ie. the Cheshire Cat).
If you take "high fantasy" to mean medieval/Middle Ages mythology, there's a whole slew of works about King Arthur, Camelot, and Robin Hood.
There's been a lot of fantasy published over the last few decades based on tabletop RPGs - D&D and AD&D for the most part.
You'd have a harder decision figuring what to leave out than what to put in.
