Robin Blaser emerged from the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s and Ô50s along with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and later established himself as one of CanadaŐs foremost experimental poets. In addition to numerous works of poetry, criticism, and translation, Blaser has also penned an English and Latin opera libretto entitled The Last Supper in collaboration with Sir Harrison Birtwistle. (49 minutes)

The student reading includes winners of the following prizes: Academy of American Poets, Cook, Rosenberg, and Yang, as well as students nominated by BerkeleyŐs creative writing faculty, Lunch Poems volunteers, and representatives from student publications. (42 minutes)

Winners of the Academy of American Poets, Cook, Rosenberg, and Yang prizes, as well as students nominated by BerkeleyŐs creative writing faculty, Lunch Poems volunteers, and representatives from student publications read their work. ( minutes)

"There's love and sadness at the root of those Poems. There is also a bridge, a language that reads," writes Yusef Komunyakaa who selected Kim for the 2002 Walt Whitman Award for her debut collection of poetry, Notes from the Divided Country. Garrett Hongo writes of the collection, "Kim's brilliantly crafted, brave new Poems move us into an emotional union with the seemingly far-flung past of Korea political geography...what voice, what witness, what glorious descendancy." Formerly a Stegner fellow and Fulbright scholar, Kim now resides in New York State. (28 minutes)

One of the great postwar Central European poets, Slovenian Tomaz Salamun has published over thirty books. He has taught at universities around the world. He reads to an audience at UC Berkeley. (29 minutes)

Tracy K. Smith received degrees in English and creative writing from Harvard and Columbia, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford. Her first book, The Body's Question, was awarded the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and her most recent collection, Duende: Poems, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches creative writing at Princeton. (29 minutes)

This seminar provides intensive study of exciting texts by four influential American authors. In studying paired works, we can enrich our sense of each author’s distinctive methods, get a deeper sense of the development of their careers, and shake up our preconceptions about what makes an author or a work “great.” Students will get an opportunity to research an author in depth, as well as making broader comparisons across the syllabus.

This seminar provides intensive study of texts by two American authors (Herman Melville, 1819-1891, and Toni Morrison, 1931-) who, using lyrical, radically innovative prose, explore in different ways epic notions of American identity. Focusing on Melville’s Typee (1846), Moby-Dick (1851), and The Confidence-Man (1857) and Morrison’s Sula (1973), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998), the class will address their common concerns with issues of gender, race, language, and nationhood. Be prepared to read deeply (i.e. a small number of texts with considerable care), to draw on a variety of sources in different media, and to employ them in creative research, writing, and multimedia projects.

At this distance Oscar Wilde seems not only to be on the threshold between centuries and between cultural-systems: in many ways he seems to be the threshold. His aesthetics look backwards to the aestheticism of Pater and the moral sensibility of Ruskin, and they look forward to Modernism. His antecedents are 18th century playwrights, and he opened a path of irony and structural self-reflexivity that leads to Beckett and Tom Stoppard. He was Irish but achieved his great successes in England. Arguably, his greatest success was his greatest public failure: in his scandalous trials he shaped 20th century attitudes toward homosexuality and toward theatricality and toward performativity. His greatest performance was the role of “Oscar Wilde”: in that sense he taught the 20th century how to be itself.

This subject traces the history of the European novel by studying texts that have been influential in connection with two interrelated ideas. (1) When serious fiction deals with matters of great consequence, it should not deal with the actions of persons of consequence—kings, princes, high elected officials and the like—but rather with the lives of apparently ordinary people and the everyday details of their social ambitions and desires. To use a phrase of Balzac’s, serious fiction deals with “what happens everywhere”. (2) This idea sometimes goes with another: that the most significant representations of the human condition are those dealing with persons who try to compel society to accept them as its destined agent, despite their absence of high birth or inheritance.

This class does intensive close study and analysis of historically significant media “texts” that have been considered landmarks or have sustained extensive critical and scholarly discussion. Such texts may include oral epic, story cycles, plays, novels, films, opera, television drama and digital works. The course emphasizes close reading from a variety of contextual and aesthetic perspectives. The syllabus varies each year, and may be organized around works that have launched new modes and genres, works that reflect upon their own media practices, or on stories that migrate from one medium to another. At least one of the assigned texts is collaboratively taught, and visiting lectures and discussions are a regular feature of the subject.

This subject is an introduction to poetry as a genre; most of our texts are originally written in English. We read poems from the Renaissance through the 17th and 18th centuries, Romanticism, and Modernism. Focus will be on analytic reading, on literary history, and on the development of the genre and its forms; in writing we attend to techniques of persuasion and of honest evidenced sequential argumentation. Poets to be read will include William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and some contemporary writers.

This subject follows a course of readings in lyric poetry in the English language, tracing the main lines of descent through literary periods from the Renaissance to the modern period and concentrating mostly on English rather than American examples.

Recent decades have seen a sharp increase in critical interest in Marguerite de Navarre and her work. This society website is dedicated to the study of Marguerite, her network, and her historical and cultural influence. The main goals are to facilitate scholarly exchange, to encourage collaboration, and to make digital resources available to the wider community. The society seeks to bring together the multiple lines of inquiry which inspire our understanding and appreciation of Marguerite, and to inspire new ones.
The Marguerite de Navarre Society website is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA) International license.

This website is designed to introduce students to Marguerite de Roberval and the sixteenth-century texts she inspired. The site includes extensive bibliographies, teaching ideas, lists of modern and Renaissance versions of her story, information about Captain Roberval and his company, early exploration of Canada, images, and other media.
The Marguerite de Roberval website is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA) International license.

The word slavery is synonymous with the Civil War.  While slavery was at the forefront of the war, there were many other factors that created tension between the Northern and the Southern states.  This seminar will focus on the Northern Market Revolution prior to and during the war.StandardsCC.1.2.9-10 Read, understand, and respond to informational text – with emphasis on comprehension, making connections among ideas and between texts with focus on textual evidence  

The course explores the literary masterworks of three of the most celebrated authors of the Middle Ages in their original literary and historical contexts. The various themes they take up - the importance of writing in the vernacular; the discourse of love as a form of discipline practised upon the self; the personal and political aspirations of the self in society; the constitution of ideal forms of social organization; the role of religion in the life and works of lay authors - transformed the course of much of Western literature for the next five centuries. Readings will include the entire Divine Comedy, generous selections from the Decameron, and all of Troilus and Criseyde in the original Middle English, together with samplings from the Troubadour tradition and the dolce stil nuovo.

As a quasi-historical, quasi-legendary figure of consistently great popularity, King Arthur has been subject to an extraordinary amount of reinvention and rewriting: as a Christian hero and war-leader; as an ineffective king and pathetic cuckold; and as a tragic figure of noble but doomed intentions. As we trace Arthur’s evolution and that of principal knights, we will ask what underlies the appeal of this figure whose consistent reappearance in western culture has performed the medieval prophecy that he would be rex quondam et futurus: the once and future king.

It is easy to think of love as a “universal language” - but do ideas about love translate easily across history, culture, and identity? In this course, we will encounter some surprising, even disturbing ideas about love and sex from medieval writers and characters: For instance, that married people can never be in love, that the most satisfying romantic love incorporates pain and violence, and that intense erotic pleasure can be found in celibate service to God. Through Arthurian romances, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, love letters, mystical visions, and more, we will explore medieval attitudes toward marriage, sexuality, and gender roles. What can these perspectives teach us about the uniqueness of the Middle Ages—and how do medieval ideas about love continue to influence the beliefs and fantasies of our own culture?