Science fiction has been flourishing as a genre of both popular and literary culture in unprecedented ways. It can be utopian or dystopian, invoke the weird biology hidden in ecosystems, critique political life from an alternate world, and say much about how we understand bodies, objects, and information. This webinar will use four short texts … Continued
The influence of Melville’s iconic masterpiece permeates so broadly that critic Greil Marcus calls it “the sea we swim in.” Moby-Dick continues to reveal to generations of learners profound lessons about how fictional imagination is the foundation of Melville called the “great Art of Telling the Truth.” This webinar explores how the work’s varied quests … Continued
This talk will use as example SUSPECT RED, winner of the Grateful American Book Prize. Set during the Red Scare and Senator Joseph McCarthy whipping up Americans’ suspicion of one another, SUSPECT RED shows the trickle-down impact of national politics on two teenage boys and offers a contextual companion read for units on banned books, … Continued
Ernest Hemingway is as well known for his larger than life persona as for his writing, but living life “all the way up” was an essential part of his creative process. In this webinar, Associate Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project Verna Kale will take participants out in the Gulf Stream and on safari with … Continued
This webinar will consider some of the occult forces that were thought to influence and affect humans in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. These considerations will provide us with a context for new readings of three of Shakespeare’s plays: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and All’s Well That Ends Well. Keeping in mind that … Continued
Octavia E. Butler was the first female African-American writer to make science fiction her career. A shy, only child from Pasadena, California, she dreamed of ordinary people in extraordinary worlds, and extraordinary people in ordinary worlds, and put them on the page. Her stories brought the voice of woman of color to a genre traditionally … Continued
How should we read Jane Austen’s most famous novel more than 200 years on from its initial publication? This webinar is an inquiry into a division of opinion about Austen that has only grown more heated: whether we read her to flee modernity, or to understand it. We will consider what Austen’s novel has to … Continued
Teaching ethics in high school and college is a challenge: Students should be exposed to a range of contemporary moral problems and gain reasoning tools and discussion skills to address these problems. Short stories are a great tool for this: They transport the reader to the very core of the issues and raise pertinent questions. … Continued
Humans read and listen to stories not only to be informed but also as a way to enter worlds that are not like our own. A sense of the infinite possibilities inherent in fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction, comics, and graphic novels draws children, teens, and adults from all backgrounds to speculative fiction–also known as … Continued
Shakespeare became a nimble thinker through a fascinating array of intellectual exercises. This webinar revisits key facets of his education, with an eye towards how such practices might work for today’s students: commonplacing; imitation; translation; disputation; synonymy; recitation; invention. These rhetorical habits shaped the mindsets of powerful artists for generations—and can still help today’s young … Continued