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)

In 1667, John Milton published what he intended both as the crowning achievement of a poetic career and a justification of God’s ways to man: an epic poem which retold and reimagined the Biblical story of creation, temptation, and original sin. Even in a hostile political climate, Paradise Lost was almost immediately recognized as a classic, and one fate of a classic is to be rewritten, both by admirers and by antagonists. In this seminar, we will read Paradise Lost alongside works of 20th century fantasy and science fiction which rethink both Milton’s text and its source.
Students should come to the seminar having read Paradise Lost straight through at least once; this can be accomplished by taking the IAP subject, Reading Paradise Lost (21L.995), or independently. Twentieth century authors will include C. S. Lewis (Perelandra, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials), as well as assorted criticism. Each week, one class meeting will focus on Milton, and the other on one of the modern novels.

What does the Genesis story of creation and temptation tell us about gender, about heterosexuality, and about the origins of evil? What is the nature of God, and how can we account for that nature in a cosmos where evil exists? When is rebellion justified, and when is authority legitimate? These are some of the key questions that engaged the poet John Milton, and that continue to engage readers of his work.

As part of the Worcester State University OER initiative in Spring 2017, Dr. Elizabeth Osborne created and translated course materials for her SP 322, Advanced Spanish Composition II, course. Materials have been divided into peer review (revisión por pares) handouts, close reading activities (actividades de lectura detallada) and other miscellaneous materials. The materials included here are by no means exhaustive, but they serve as a starting point to making education affordable and to filling the gap in Spanish-language OER for upper division courses.

How do you read a poem? Intuition is not the only answer. In this class, we will investigate some of the formal tools poets use—meter, sound, syntax, word-choice, and other properties of language—as well as exploring a range of approaches to reading poetry, from the old (memorization and reading out loud) to the new (digitally enabled visualization and annotation). We will use readings available online via the generosity of the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. We will also think collectively about how to approach difficult poems.

Three hundred and eighty years after his death, William Shakespeare remains the central author of the English-speaking world; he is the most quoted poet and the most regularly produced playwright — and now among the most popular screenwriters as well. Why is that, and who “is” he? Why do so many people think his writing is so great? What meanings did his plays have in his own time, and how do we read, speak, or listen to his words now? What should we watch for when viewing his plays in performance? Whose plays are we watching, anyway? We’ll consider these questions as we carefully examine a sampling of Shakespeare’s plays from a variety of critical perspectives.

Born in 1940 in Calcutta, Bharati Mukherjee spent her childhood in India and Britain before moving to the United States. Her celebrated titles include 'Days and Nights in Calcutta' and 'The Middleman and Other Stories.' Clark Blaise has published numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including 'If I Were Me' and 'Lunar Attractions.' Both serve as faculty in Berkeley's English department, and they have been married to each other for 45 years. (54 minutes)

William Butler Yeats occupies a dominant position in the lives and work of the Irish poets who followed him. We will explore some of that poetry, and consider how later poets, especially female poets, tried to come to grips with, or escape from, that dominance. As a seminar, the subject will place special emphasis on student involvement and control. I will ask you to submit one ten-twelve page essay, two shorter (five page) essays, and to accept the role of “leadoff person,” perhaps more than once, That role will demand that you choose from among the assigned readings for that session the poem we should focus upon, and to offer either a provocative articulation of what the poem is about, or a provocative question which the poem confronts, and which we should grapple with, as well.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens foreshadows the events of the French Revolution throughout his novel. He uses symbolism to convey the dark future that the French Revolution will bring. This resource provides a detailed literary analysis on A Tale of Two Cities. In this video, we will go over the foreshadowing found in the 5th chapter.

This curriculum serves to assist middle schoolers develop and explore “femaleness” as a fluid construct of identity. Using literature and nonfiction text, students will be asked to critically analyze female characters, their roles and choices as presented. In New Haven, the current core text being used is The House on Mango Street (THOMS) by Sandra Cisneros, and while this curriculum uses THOMS as a “foundational” text, other texts could serve as viable options. The text serves as a launchpad for whole class and small group discussions. Having a common or a foundational text not only provides students with a shared literary experience from which they can develop a common language, but it also allows students to create a barrier of safety--a level of personal distancing. This personal distancing shifts classroom discussions away from individual experiences that may subject students to judgments that sometimes accompany discussions related to topics of gender and sexuality. Negative judgments would have a deleterious and stifling effect on not only classroom discussions but run contrary to what the curriculum hopes to achieve--a nonjudgmental exploration of women and their roles in the world.

Students will gain voice and language through exploration of the fluidity of the construct of femaleness. The curriculum attempts to expand initial literature inquiries into the female construct by providing students further opportunities to explore, discuss, synthesize and refine ideas using nonfiction texts concerning women, their roles and world placement using various sociological, economic and political lenses. Exposing students to a diversity of voices of and about women through both the dramatic narrative, essays and other multimedia concerning the economics, sociological and political aspects of womanhood should serve as a contextual backdrop which for some students may be a first inquiry into unquestioned acceptance of what it means to be female. The curriculum seeks to compel students to think critically about what it means to be female, look beyond traditional binary frameworks of male versus female, single versus married ideologies and seeks to have them reevaluate what may be familiar female images. It asks students to examine and question the possibility of limitations of their constructs of “femaleness.”

Using reflective writing, small and large group discussions, students will develop voice, and identity, appreciate the multi-dimensions and perspectives contained within the construct of the female and its intersections of sex, class and race. The curriculum forces students not only to gather information about women from fictional narratives and historical sociological, economic and psychological essays but it asks them expend synergistic energy to evaluate various expressions to develop agency, to not be victims and determine their role in the depicting what it means to be “female.”

This module is intended for adult learners with some previous high school education who are pursuing the completion of their GED. This lesson focuses on identifying and evaluating foreshadowing, targeting the Common Core Readiness Standards for ELA/Literacy 2. Adult learners will read, analyze, and evaluate foreshadowing in multiple examples. This module involves reading, viewing, and writing components.

This lesson asks students to dig into a select scene to examine the complex and stereotype-defying character of Lady Macbeth.

This lesson serves as a pre-reading activity for the play, Macbeth by William Shakespeare with a focus on gender roles and the portrayal of women in this famous play.

This unit will be geared toward my Advanced Placement Literature and Composition class, but could certainly be taught in any survey course of English literature, or a course that examines women’s literature.

One objective, part of the AP Literature curriculum, is to teach historical context. This is always important so that students realize that art is a response to real life, and characters’ lives represent real lives shaped by real events. I also want my students to see connections to their own lives, and that the struggles for equity are not futile, but ongoing and necessary. I would like students also to see that a society that suppresses a group of people, is weaker, not stronger, and oppression is something for all of us to fight. And, I would like to open up some dusty-shelf texts to high school teachers who might not consider teaching them.

This unit will ask students to examine the historical boundaries in law, society, and economics for women in medieval literature, and consider how females depicted in stories from these eras might reveal power and agency that is not revealed in laws or politics. The unit will include the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, poetry from Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and stories from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.