| English 140A | Chaucer: Canterbury Tales | Prof. Allen |
| Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: from the chivalric to the anal, to the oral, to the rooster's dream, to the sermon. |
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| English 147 | Inventing History in Medieval Britain: Foundational Stories Medieval Histories, Chronicles, and Records |
Prof. Fisher |
| It could be argued that to write history is to write about the inaccessible past, in the midst of an unknowable present, in the hope of shaping an unknown future. This course will consider the stories told about the past in medieval Britain, from the many different legendary founders of the island to strange two-headed creatures in Wales and Ireland. We will look at how the tradition of medieval history writing claimed privileged access to the beginnings of things, whether geographies, ethnicities, or texts.
Readings will include texts in Middle English as well as in translation. |
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| English 149 |
Hollywood Knights: Medieval Chivalry on the Modern Screen
Medievalisms |
Prof. Lecky |
| This course explores some modern Hollywood versions of the medieval knight. As popular culture translates antique concepts of chivalry for modernity, it preserves many of their fundamental tenets while adapting others. Since authors from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries continually restaged ideals of chivalry to suit their changing times, we are quite "medieval" in our revisions. This class will read Arthurian legends by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chrétien de Troyes, and compare them with later medieval knights in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale," Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, and Christine de Pizan's Joan of Arc. We also pair these and other medieval texts with films like "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," "The Knight's Tale," "Black Knight," "King Arthur," and "Dark Knight." Throughout, we'll focus on how medieval knights shape current conceptions of masculine sovereignty and artistic authority. We'll also ask why this medieval/postmodern knight continues to productively complicate stereotypes of class, gender, sexuality, and race. |
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| English 150A | Shakespeare: Poems and Early Plays |
Prof. Dickey |
| Intensive study of selected poems and representative comedies, histories, and tragedies through Hamlet. |
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| English 150B | Shakespeare: Later Plays |
Prof. Allen |
| The later (Jacobean) Shakespeare: from mad Lear via bloody Macbeth and gorgeous Cleo to the revenge of Prospero, and much else besides. |
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| English 153 |
Early Modern London Theatre and Shakespeare
The Theatrical Renaissance: Early Modern Texts and Performances
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Prof. Braunmuller |
| This class studies the professional English (mostly London) theatre of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – Shakespeare's competition. We will read plays by, for example, Marlowe Jonson, Webster, Marston, Middleton and Ford; we will discuss the theatre venues in which those plays were performed and we will examine the companies of actors who did the performing. Occasional quizzes, midterm, paper, final examination. |
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LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 1700-1850
| English 160B | Literature of Later 18th Century | Prof. Nussbaum |
| This course will consider "Literatures in English" of the later eighteenth century including novels, plays, and biography. This extraordinary period of time sees the birth of the novel, the newspaper, and autobiography. It also witnesses the growth of commerce and the middle class, the loss of the American colonies, the burgeoning empire in India, the French Revolution, the end of the slave trade, and the assertion of women's rights. To give us a sense of literary representations during such a complex era, we will focus on three topics: the emerging public and private spheres; the exotic and the Oriental; and attitudes toward luxury, credit, and human rights. Readings may include Samuel Johnson on taxing America, Oriental tales, Sarah Scott's proto-abolitionist transatlantic novel, Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative, and plays that raise critical issues about England's role as a free, maritime, Protestant, and imperial nation in relation to Europe, the Americas, and the East. Was the Enlightenment really so enlightened? Was the optimistic spirit of the age misplaced? What genres proved most appropriate for expressing the uncertainties Britons felt about the world in which they found themselves? |
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| English 163B | Transatlantic Romanticism |
Prof. Sanchez |
| Transatlantic studies, particularly as an emerging discipline in the humanities, has been central in generating new conceptual frameworks for thinking through the complex issues related to the interconnectedness of Atlantic rim cultures. Focusing on the ways in which cultures, ideologies, and political identities are reworked and reinscribed by the transatlantic movement of peoples, ideas, and cultural artifacts, this course will seek to expand our notions of romanticism (typically understood within exclusively British and US American contexts) to include transoceanic perspectives that understand early-nineteenth-century romantic literature as a transatlantic phenomenon. Topics for discussion will include literature and the transatlantic slave trade, travel and exploration, transatlantic revolution and independence movements, global feminisms, cosmopolitanisms, and other "contact zone" experiences created by travel, migration, and colonial enterprises across the Atlantic. In addition to Anglophone romantic literary works by writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman, Emerson, and Poe, we will consider hispanophone and continental writings by writers like José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi and Alexander von Humboldt. All texts are in English. |
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| English 164D |
The Global 19th Century
|
Prof. Sanchez |
| During the nineteenth century, Britain emerged as the world's most expansive planetary empire with a sphere of influence affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people and discrete communities. Although political historians are now seeking to understand the role of this vast empire in the development of a new global order beginning to take root in the nineteenth century, one of the main challenges for literary critics remains to determine the complex, and often vexed relations of global politics to the production of art, society, and culture at large. In this course we will seek to develop a greater understanding of nineteenth-century literature as a global phenomenon. This means not only attending to the relationship of literary works to Britain's colonial enterprise—paying attention, for example, to the particular ways in which poetry, novels, drama, and other imaginative works helped shape, reinforce, and critique British imperial ideology—but also its role in more broadly shaping nineteenth-century global formations, including international law and thought, ideas about political boundaries and state sovereignty, economic liberalism, and the place of war and violence in maintaining peace throughout the globe. As a result, some of the topics to be discussed will include the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and the following: transatlantic and worldwide commercial systems, the slave trade, travel and exploration, foreign wars and political revolutions, and the collision of regional environments, especially with respect to religious and cultural conflicts. We will also attend to recent work on global feminisms, cosmopolitanisms, and "contact zone" experiences created by travel, migration, and Britain's colonial enterprise. While key critical works will help us establish these geo-political frameworks, we will also read literature about Other places—including Ireland, India, the Middle-East, Africa, North America, Latin America, and Spain. |
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| English 166B | American Literature, 1776-1832 | Prof. Colacurcio |
| Beginning with the political literature of the Revolution, pausing to notice, thereafter, the first self-conscious efforts to produce a distinctively "American" form of belles letters, and ending with the first stirrings of an "American Renaissance": writers include, Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, the several authors off The Federalist; Freneau and the so-called "Connecticut Wits," Royal Tyler, Hannah Foster, Huh Henry Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown; Bryant, Poe, Child, Hawthorne. Extra class: Channing and Emerson. |
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LITERATURES IN ENGLISH 1850-PRESENT
| English M102B | Asian American Literature and the Question of Geography Contemporary Asian American Literary Issues and Criticism |
Prof. Ling |
| Course Description:This course examines a range of Asian American literary works through the lens of "geography," a conceptual category that can be understood as referring to any of the following: a mode of diasporic imagination, a representational method, or an interpretative strategy. We will look at real as well as metaphorical maps that become relevant in our reading of these works and explore how geography is deployed or redefined through experiences of race, gender, sexuality, or through critiques of the nation, empire, or patriarchy. Lectures and discussions will focus on making sense of text in contexts, with attention paid to how the literary voices of these works are constructed in particular historical and cultural milieus. Students' active participation in class discussion is expected.
Required Texts (will be on order at UCLA bookstore): Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee (Third Woman) Course Requirements: |
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| English M104A | Early African American Literature | Prof. Yarborough |
| Survey of African American literature from the 18th century to World War I, including oral and written forms (folktales, spirituals, sermons; fiction, poetry, essays). Authors covered include Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The class will focus both on the historical and cultural contexts for the literary works and also on strategies for engaging formal aspects of the assigned materials. |
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| English 130 |
Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures
|
Prof. Goyal |
| This course serves as an introduction to modern postcolonial literature and theory. Reading novels, short stories, and essays from postcolonial Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Britain, we examine the relationship between nationalism, migration, and literary form, tracking the shift from realism to postmodernism and magic realism. How do contemporary writers decolonize the mind? In a rapidly globalizing world, what place do national identities have, if any? How do we define 'traditional' and 'modern' in a time of fluid identities? How are these ideas of tradition gendered and why? We will also look at how postcolonial texts circulate in the West, as exotic commodities, or as sites of resistance, and explore how they challenge reductive discourses of the clash of civilizations and new forms of colonialism and racism.
Novels include Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. Assignments: Two papers and a Final Exam. |
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| English 139 | Henry James Individual Authors |
Prof. Dimuro |
| Though Henry James also wrote autobiographies, plays, and travel literature, this course focuses on his novels and short-stories from Daisy Miller (1878) to The Ambassadors (1903). We will study novels from each of James' three phases, including The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Other House (1896), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), and The Bostonians (1886). We will also shorter pieces including "The Pupil" and "The Beast in the Jungle," supplementing our investigation of James' narrative technique by reading some of his "Prefaces" and his essay "The Art of Fiction." We will concentrate on James's contributions to the genre of the novel and look at a variety of themes including: the "international theme," child abuse, sexuality, power, possession, renunciation, class, and the cost of experience. This course fulfills the 1850-present historical requirement or the genre requirement (novel) for the English major. It may also fulfill one of the five required American literature courses for the American Literature and Culture major. |
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| English 164D | The Global 19th Century |
Prof. Sanchez |
| During the nineteenth century, Britain emerged as the world's most expansive planetary empire with a sphere of influence affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people and discrete communities. Although political historians are now seeking to understand the role of this vast empire in the development of a new global order beginning to take root in the nineteenth century, one of the main challenges for literary critics remains to determine the complex, and often vexed relations of global politics to the production of art, society, and culture at large. In this course we will seek to develop a greater understanding of nineteenth-century literature as a global phenomenon. This means not only attending to the relationship of literary works to Britain's colonial enterprise—paying attention, for example, to the particular ways in which poetry, novels, drama, and other imaginative works helped shape, reinforce, and critique British imperial ideology—but also its role in more broadly shaping nineteenth-century global formations, including international law and thought, ideas about political boundaries and state sovereignty, economic liberalism, and the place of war and violence in maintaining peace throughout the globe. As a result, some of the topics to be discussed will include the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and the following: transatlantic and worldwide commercial systems, the slave trade, travel and exploration, foreign wars and political revolutions, and the collision of regional environments, especially with respect to religious and cultural conflicts. We will also attend to recent work on global feminisms, cosmopolitanisms, and "contact zone" experiences created by travel, migration, and Britain's colonial enterprise. While key critical works will help us establish these geo-political frameworks, we will also read literature about Other places—including Ireland, India, the Middle-East, Africa, North America, Latin America, and Spain. |
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| English 170B | American Literature, 1900-1945 | Prof. Lowenstein |
| This upper division course will approach the concept of American modernity as a diverse series of formal and intellectual responses to the historical, technological, social, and political conditions of the period spanning the turn of the century to 1945. Our readings will help us to consider the relationship among key events (U.S. imperialism, immigration, World Wars, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, the Jim Crow era); intellectual and scientific developments (relativity theory, psychoanalysis, the spread of consumer culture, the mechanization of society, the automobile, the radio, the birth of cinema, the skyscraper); and cultural production. Assigned readings will include novels, short stories, and poetry that reflect, on the one hand, a line of descent from realism and naturalism to the interrogation of literary conventions in the experimental modes of modernism(s). On the other hand, these texts will represent a thick cross-section of American voices rising in response to the transformations, trends, and tensions of the time—our readings will be rooted, in other words, in the demographic realities of class, race, gender, and region. Class meetings will combine lecture and discussion formats. Your participation is encouraged. |
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| English 170C | American Literature since 1945 |
Prof. Gudas |
| Historical survey of American drama, fiction, and poetry written since 1945. Authors include Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hayden, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, and Tenessee Williams. This course requires a great deal of student participation in both lecture and section meetings. Students will give presentations, lead discussion, and choose a work of contemporary American literature to read for the last week of class. |
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| English 171C | 20th-Century British Fiction |
Prof. Hornby |
| Survey of major British novelists and short story writers from 1900 to the present. |
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| English 173A |
American Poetry, 1900-1945
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Prof. North |
| Study of American poetry from beginning of 20th century to end of World War II. |
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| English 179 | American Literature and the Mass Media Topics in Literature, circa 1850-Present |
Prof. Burrows |
| An examination of the American novel from the 1920s through to the 1980s in the context of the rise of the mass media. We will trace how writers responded to what Philip Roth calls the daily diet of American life: "The fixes, the scandals, the insanity, the idiocy, the piety, the lies, the noise." Students will read various theoretical accounts of how the mass media has changed the way Americans perceive of themselves and the world alongside novels and short stories by writers such as Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Pynchon, Morrison, and DeLillo. Class presentation and final research paper required. |
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RACE AND ETHNICITY, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES
| English M102B | Asian American Literature and the Question of Geography Contemporary Asian American Literary Issues and Criticism |
Prof. Ling |
| Course Description:This course examines a range of Asian American literary works through the lens of "geography," a conceptual category that can be understood as referring to any of the following: a mode of diasporic imagination, a representational method, or an interpretative strategy. We will look at real as well as metaphorical maps that become relevant in our reading of these works and explore how geography is deployed or redefined through experiences of race, gender, sexuality, or through critiques of the nation, empire, or patriarchy. Lectures and discussions will focus on making sense of text in contexts, with attention paid to how the literary voices of these works are constructed in particular historical and cultural milieus. Students' active participation in class discussion is expected.
Required Texts (will be on order at UCLA bookstore): Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee (Third Woman) Course Requirements: |
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| English M104A | Early African American Literature | Prof. Yarborough |
| Survey of African American literature from the 18th century to World War I, including oral and written forms (folktales, spirituals, sermons; fiction, poetry, essays). Authors covered include Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The class will focus both on the historical and cultural contexts for the literary works and also on strategies for engaging formal aspects of the assigned materials. |
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| English M105A | Early Chicana/Chicano Literature (1400-1920) | Prof. Lopez |
| Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature from the poetry of the Triple Alliance and the Aztec Empire through the end of the Mexican Revolution (1920) including oral and written forms (poetry, corridos, testimonios, folklore, novels, short stories, and drama) by writers like Nezahualcoyotl (Hungry Coyote), Cabaza de Vaca, Lorenzo de Zavala, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Eusebio Chacón, Daniel Venegas, and Lorena Villegas de Magón. |
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| English M107B | Violence, Attraction, Identity: Key Concepts in Gender and Textual Study Studies in Gender and Sexuality |
Prof. Mesle |
| Most people agree that gender matters to the study of literature; more controversial is the question of how it matters. Tracing different ideas of three key concepts through 200+ years of popular literature, this class will ask: how does gender shape texts, even when it is not their explicit subject matter? How do different genders and sexualities matter differently, and how do other axes of analysis (race, class, geography) change the effects of gender? How has gender mattered differently, across time? This course aims to familiarize students with current debates about gender analysis in literary study, but it also seeks to encourage students to develop the critical tools needed to think about gender as it matters to the world around them. Thus this course will focus on theoretical and literary texts, but will make frequent reference to samples from popular culture in which gender emerges as a meaningful rubric for analysis. Students enrolling in this course should be prepared to read difficult theoretical texts and to think carefully about popular fictions written from 1803 to the present. Readings may include: texts by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Hannah Webster Foster, and Frederick Douglass; television shows like Friday Night Lights; and films such as Fight Club or Winter's Bone. |
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| English 108 |
Crossing Racial Boundaries in Post-Civil Rights Fiction and Film
Interracial Encounters |
Prof. Streeter |
| This course looks at literature and film depicting interracial sexuality and mixed race identities in the post-Civil Rights era. Course materials depict individuals and communities that trouble and challenge conventional ideas about racial categorization and the boundaries between groups. Texts represent a wide variety of ethnic and cultural perspectives. Books include Caucasia (Danzy Senna), A Feather on the Breath of God (Sigrid Nunez), Drown (Junot Diaz) and My Year of Meats (Ruth L. Ozeki). Movies include Diva (Jean-Jacques Beineix), Jungle Fever (Spike Lee) and The Wedding Banquet (Winston Chao). |
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| English M126 | Feminist and Queer Theory: Introductory Feminist and Queer Theory |
Prof. Lee |
| This course investigates key concepts and debates in the study of gender, sexuality, and kinship, focusing on their interrelated significance for the making of culture. Our interdisciplinary readings cover key frameworks (e.g., materialist feminism, standpoint epistemologies, psychoanalysis, feminine écriture, discourses of sexuality, and body technologies). In class discussion, we will pay attention to the debates addressed as well as generated by these theories. In addition, the readings will introduce students to the alternative rubrics, of gender, sexuality, race, and class, that challenge "feminism," and of knowledge, epistemology, and criticism, that challenge "theory." |
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| English 133 | Atlantic Slavery, Atlantic Freedom Transatlantic Literatures and Cultures |
Prof. Cohen |
| This course will introduce students to the literatures of slavery and antislavery in the Atlantic world, from the 18th century to the present. Our rubric will be the Atlantic Ocean, which we will consider as both a physical and imaginative space. The Atlantic was the stage for African slavery, a system that connected the peoples of four continents. On that stage, one of the major tragedies of Western history played out, in ways that continue to mark the world today. To understand this drama, we will read works from the Americas, Europe and Africa, the narratives of slaves, sailors, abolitionists, and twentieth and twenty-first-century authors seeking to understand the legacies of the first modern world system. Authors may include: Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson, Frederick Douglass, Mary Prince, Herman Melville, Aleksandr Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée, Michelle Cliff, Robert Hayden, M. NourbeSe Philips, Toni Morrison, and Marlon James. |
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IMPERIAL, TRANSNATIONAL, AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
| English M105A | Early Chicana/Chicano Literature (1400-1920) | Prof. Lopez |
| Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature from the poetry of the Triple Alliance and the Aztec Empire through the end of the Mexican Revolution (1920) including oral and written forms (poetry, corridos, testimonios, folklore, novels, short stories, and drama) by writers like Nezahualcoyotl (Hungry Coyote), Cabaza de Vaca, Lorenzo de Zavala, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Eusebio Chacón, Daniel Venegas, and Lorena Villegas de Magón. |
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| English 130 |
Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures
|
Prof. Goyal |
| This course serves as an introduction to modern postcolonial literature and theory. Reading novels, short stories, and essays from postcolonial Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Britain, we examine the relationship between nationalism, migration, and literary form, tracking the shift from realism to postmodernism and magic realism. How do contemporary writers decolonize the mind? In a rapidly globalizing world, what place do national identities have, if any? How do we define 'traditional' and 'modern' in a time of fluid identities? How are these ideas of tradition gendered and why? We will also look at how postcolonial texts circulate in the West, as exotic commodities, or as sites of resistance, and explore how they challenge reductive discourses of the clash of civilizations and new forms of colonialism and racism.
Novels include Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. Assignments: Two papers and a Final Exam. |
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| English 133 | Atlantic Slavery, Atlantic Freedom Transatlantic Literatures and Cultures |
Prof. Cohen |
| This course will introduce students to the literatures of slavery and antislavery in the Atlantic world, from the 18th century to the present. Our rubric will be the Atlantic Ocean, which we will consider as both a physical and imaginative space. The Atlantic was the stage for African slavery, a system that connected the peoples of four continents. On that stage, one of the major tragedies of Western history played out, in ways that continue to mark the world today. To understand this drama, we will read works from the Americas, Europe and Africa, the narratives of slaves, sailors, abolitionists, and twentieth and twenty-first-century authors seeking to understand the legacies of the first modern world system. Authors may include: Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson, Frederick Douglass, Mary Prince, Herman Melville, Aleksandr Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée, Michelle Cliff, Robert Hayden, M. NourbeSe Philips, Toni Morrison, and Marlon James. |
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| English 163B | Transatlantic Romanticism |
Prof. Sanchez |
| Transatlantic studies, particularly as an emerging discipline in the humanities, has been central in generating new conceptual frameworks for thinking through the complex issues related to the interconnectedness of Atlantic rim cultures. Focusing on the ways in which cultures, ideologies, and political identities are reworked and reinscribed by the transatlantic movement of peoples, ideas, and cultural artifacts, this course will seek to expand our notions of romanticism (typically understood within exclusively British and US American contexts) to include transoceanic perspectives that understand early-nineteenth-century romantic literature as a transatlantic phenomenon. Topics for discussion will include literature and the transatlantic slave trade, travel and exploration, transatlantic revolution and independence movements, global feminisms, cosmopolitanisms, and other "contact zone" experiences created by travel, migration, and colonial enterprises across the Atlantic. In addition to Anglophone romantic literary works by writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman, Emerson, and Poe, we will consider hispanophone and continental writings by writers like José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi and Alexander von Humboldt. All texts are in English. |
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| English 164D |
The Global 19th Century
|
Prof. Sanchez |
| During the nineteenth century, Britain emerged as the world's most expansive planetary empire with a sphere of influence affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people and discrete communities. Although political historians are now seeking to understand the role of this vast empire in the development of a new global order beginning to take root in the nineteenth century, one of the main challenges for literary critics remains to determine the complex, and often vexed relations of global politics to the production of art, society, and culture at large. In this course we will seek to develop a greater understanding of nineteenth-century literature as a global phenomenon. This means not only attending to the relationship of literary works to Britain's colonial enterprise—paying attention, for example, to the particular ways in which poetry, novels, drama, and other imaginative works helped shape, reinforce, and critique British imperial ideology—but also its role in more broadly shaping nineteenth-century global formations, including international law and thought, ideas about political boundaries and state sovereignty, economic liberalism, and the place of war and violence in maintaining peace throughout the globe. As a result, some of the topics to be discussed will include the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and the following: transatlantic and worldwide commercial systems, the slave trade, travel and exploration, foreign wars and political revolutions, and the collision of regional environments, especially with respect to religious and cultural conflicts. We will also attend to recent work on global feminisms, cosmopolitanisms, and "contact zone" experiences created by travel, migration, and Britain's colonial enterprise. While key critical works will help us establish these geo-political frameworks, we will also read literature about Other places—including Ireland, India, the Middle-East, Africa, North America, Latin America, and Spain. |
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| English 166B | American Literature, 1776-1832 | Prof. Colacurcio |
| Beginning with the political literature of the Revolution, pausing to notice, thereafter, the first self-conscious efforts to produce a distinctively "American" form of belles letters, and ending with the first stirrings of an "American Renaissance": writers include, Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, the several authors off The Federalist; Freneau and the so-called "Connecticut Wits," Royal Tyler, Hannah Foster, Huh Henry Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown; Bryant, Poe, Child, Hawthorne. Extra class: Channing and Emerson. |
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GENRE STUDIES, INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, CRITICAL THEORY
| English 111B | Christian Biblical Texts in Translation | Prof. Maniquis |
| In addition to the study of the structures of fundamental Christian texts (orthodox and heretical), detailed attention will be given to a dozen or so canonical passages that have occasioned major theological, political, and psychological controversies in Western literature. Requirements: a mid-term, a final examination, and a term paper. |
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| English 118B | Literature and Other Arts |
Prof. Hornby |
| This course looks at the shared history of literature and photography; how the invention of photography was imagined as writing; and how written culture was shaped by photography in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The starting point for the course will be William Henry Fox Talbot's Pencil of Nature (1844-1846), in which he announces the invention of photography in the pages of a book. This early publication links the history of photography not only to writing but also to the production of artists' books. The course will look at a corpus of materials and genres that elaborate on the complex intersections between word and image, including works of fiction that contain photographs, photo books, photo essays, and critical works on photography. |
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| English 121 | Modern and Contemporary Aesthetics and Critical Theory | Prof. Huehls |
| This course examines the development of literary theory and criticism in the twentieth century. We will examine dominant trends such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and poststructuralism; and we will also look at later theoretical developments such as feminism, postcolonialism, thing theory, and surface reading. In addition to examining primary theoretical texts, we will engage a body of literary criticism that will show us the different ways theory can be applied to literature. |
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| English 123 | Imagining the Past: Theorizing History, Memory, and Social Change Theories of History and Historicism |
Prof. Chism |
| This course explores theories of history and historicism that offer productive approaches to literary texts. How do theorists negotiate the space between abstract concepts of history and particular historical narratives that do social work? How are histories constructed and how is historical authority established? How do histories tell stories, transmit and alter traditions, describe truths about the past, constitute past and present in relationship to each other, or open possibilities for revolutionary change? How can we describe the interactions between literary texts and the authors, societies, and readers that produce and are produced by them?
We will begin with two stories by Jorge Luis Borges, and then proceed to Michel-Rolph Troillot's Silencing the Past, which uses the Haitian revolution to argue that articulating a certain historical narrative inevitably entails the silencing and forgetting of other perspectives, accounts, and voices. This will be followed by Susan Buck-Morss's recentering of Haiti in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. In the second module we will examine the literary troping of historical narratives in Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra, and explore Foucault's idea of more discontinuous genealogical narratives. The third module examines Marxist engagements with history and literary texts; we will read Raymond William's classic Marxism and History, along with several of Walter Benjamin's essays, including "Theses on a Philosophy of History," and excerpts from Pierre Macherey's A Theory of Literary Production. The last module will treat questions of historical continuity and change: cultural memory in theorists such as Pierre Nora, vs. counter-histories that decenter dominant historical teleologies from a variety of perspectives, including attempts to narratize the ongoing Arab spring. The class will end with the reading of Pat Barker's historical novel, Regeneration. Requirements: Weekly 2-3 pp. response papers to the theoretical reading: 60% |
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| English M126 | Feminist and Queer Theory: Introductory Feminist and Queer Theory |
Prof. Lee |
| This course investigates key concepts and debates in the study of gender, sexuality, and kinship, focusing on their interrelated significance for the making of culture. Our interdisciplinary readings cover key frameworks (e.g., materialist feminism, standpoint epistemologies, psychoanalysis, feminine écriture, discourses of sexuality, and body technologies). In class discussion, we will pay attention to the debates addressed as well as generated by these theories. In addition, the readings will introduce students to the alternative rubrics, of gender, sexuality, race, and class, that challenge "feminism," and of knowledge, epistemology, and criticism, that challenge "theory." |
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| English 129 |
Realism
Topics in Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Critical Theory |
Prof. Seltzer |
| This course will take up the ways in which the problem of "reality" emerges in our perpetually, and at times catastrophically, modernizing world. We will look at how our modernity, these catastrophes, and real life are staged in a sampling of literary realism, and some film, over the last century or so. Examples will range from social realism (Henry James and William Dean Howells) to forensic realism (Agatha Christie) to paranoid realism (Patricia Highsmith) to zombie realism (Tom McCarthy) to posthuman realism (Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro). Two papers (about 7 pages each) and regular participation in class discussion required. |
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| English 139 | Henry James Individual Authors |
Prof. Dimuro |
| Though Henry James also wrote autobiographies, plays, and travel literature, this course focuses on his novels and short-stories from Daisy Miller (1878) to The Ambassadors (1903). We will study novels from each of James' three phases, including The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Other House (1896), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), and The Bostonians (1886). We will also shorter pieces including "The Pupil" and "The Beast in the Jungle," supplementing our investigation of James' narrative technique by reading some of his "Prefaces" and his essay "The Art of Fiction." We will concentrate on James's contributions to the genre of the novel and look at a variety of themes including: the "international theme," child abuse, sexuality, power, possession, renunciation, class, and the cost of experience. This course fulfills the 1850-present historical requirement or the genre requirement (novel) for the English major. It may also fulfill one of the five required American literature courses for the American Literature and Culture major. |
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| English 147 | Inventing History in Medieval Britain: Foundational Stories Medieval Histories, Chronicles, and Records |
Prof. Fisher |
| It could be argued that to write history is to write about the inaccessible past, in the midst of an unknowable present, in the hope of shaping an unknown future. This course will consider the stories told about the past in medieval Britain, from the many different legendary founders of the island to strange two-headed creatures in Wales and Ireland. We will look at how the tradition of medieval history writing claimed privileged access to the beginnings of things, whether geographies, ethnicities, or texts.
Readings will include texts in Middle English as well as in translation. |
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| English 149 |
Hollywood Knights: Medieval Chivalry on the Modern Screen
Medievalisms |
Prof. Lecky |
| This course explores some modern Hollywood versions of the medieval knight. As popular culture translates antique concepts of chivalry for modernity, it preserves many of their fundamental tenets while adapting others. Since authors from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries continually restaged ideals of chivalry to suit their changing times, we are quite "medieval" in our revisions. This class will read Arthurian legends by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chrétien de Troyes, and compare them with later medieval knights in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale," Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, and Christine de Pizan's Joan of Arc. We also pair these and other medieval texts with films like "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," "The Knight's Tale," "Black Knight," "King Arthur," and "Dark Knight." Throughout, we'll focus on how medieval knights shape current conceptions of masculine sovereignty and artistic authority. We'll also ask why this medieval/postmodern knight continues to productively complicate stereotypes of class, gender, sexuality, and race. |
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| English 153 |
Early Modern London Theatre and Shakespeare
The Theatrical Renaissance: Early Modern Texts and Performances
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Prof. Braunmuller |
| This class studies the professional English (mostly London) theatre of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – Shakespeare's competition. We will read plays by, for example, Marlowe Jonson, Webster, Marston, Middleton and Ford; we will discuss the theatre venues in which those plays were performed and we will examine the companies of actors who did the performing. Occasional quizzes, midterm, paper, final examination. |
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| English 164D | The Global 19th Century |
Prof. Sanchez |
| During the nineteenth century, Britain emerged as the world's most expansive planetary empire with a sphere of influence affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people and discrete communities. Although political historians are now seeking to understand the role of this vast empire in the development of a new global order beginning to take root in the nineteenth century, one of the main challenges for literary critics remains to determine the complex, and often vexed relations of global politics to the production of art, society, and culture at large. In this course we will seek to develop a greater understanding of nineteenth-century literature as a global phenomenon. This means not only attending to the relationship of literary works to Britain's colonial enterprise—paying attention, for example, to the particular ways in which poetry, novels, drama, and other imaginative works helped shape, reinforce, and critique British imperial ideology—but also its role in more broadly shaping nineteenth-century global formations, including international law and thought, ideas about political boundaries and state sovereignty, economic liberalism, and the place of war and violence in maintaining peace throughout the globe. As a result, some of the topics to be discussed will include the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and the following: transatlantic and worldwide commercial systems, the slave trade, travel and exploration, foreign wars and political revolutions, and the collision of regional environments, especially with respect to religious and cultural conflicts. We will also attend to recent work on global feminisms, cosmopolitanisms, and "contact zone" experiences created by travel, migration, and Britain's colonial enterprise. While key critical works will help us establish these geo-political frameworks, we will also read literature about Other places—including Ireland, India, the Middle-East, Africa, North America, Latin America, and Spain. |
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| English 171C | 20th-Century British Fiction |
Prof. Hornby |
| Survey of major British novelists and short story writers from 1900 to the present. |
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| English 173A |
American Poetry, 1900-1945
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Prof. North |
| Study of American poetry from beginning of 20th century to end of World War II. |
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| English 179 | American Literature and the Mass Media Topics in Literature, circa 1850-Present |
Prof. Burrows |
| An examination of the American novel from the 1920s through to the 1980s in the context of the rise of the mass media. We will trace how writers responded to what Philip Roth calls the daily diet of American life: "The fixes, the scandals, the insanity, the idiocy, the piety, the lies, the noise." Students will read various theoretical accounts of how the mass media has changed the way Americans perceive of themselves and the world alongside novels and short stories by writers such as Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Pynchon, Morrison, and DeLillo. Class presentation and final research paper required. |
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CREATIVE WRITING
| English 136.1 | Creative Writing: Poetry Creative Writing Workshop |
Prof. Kevorkian |
| This class is a poetry writing workshop for which you write poems that the class discusses.
To apply for the workshop, please submit to me 3-5 poems of your own composition. With your submission include your name, email address, year, whether you've taken any previous writing workshops, what you hope to achieve by taking this one, and what poets you've read. Also say whether you are applying to any other workshops, whether poetry or fiction. Submissions may be put in my mailbox in the English Department Office in the Humanities Building no later than 4pm Tuesday, January 3, or emailed to me in a single file at kkevorkian@humnet.ucla.edu. Please write "workshop submission" in the subject line. Earlier admissions have priority. The class list will be posted in the English Department office on January 9, and I will notify enrolled students by email on Friday, January 6. For the course, you're required to write and turn in one poem a week, as well as to read and discuss the work of other poets. You are expected to continue working on your poems once they are turned in, and to meet with me at least twice during the quarter to discuss them. A portfolio of all poems, seriously revised, is turned in at the quarter's end. Other writing may be required for the class as well as attendance at outside poetry readings. Substantial class time is spent in discussion, to which you are expected to contribute. |
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| English 136.2 | Creative Writing: Poetry Creative Writing Workshop |
Prof. Yenser |
| Applicants must submit at least three poems. The poems must be accompanied by a cover sheet that includes the author's name, class standing, previous workshop experience (if any), email address, and a brief statement that outlines the student's goals for this workshop. Applicants must also indicate whether they are applying simultaneously to any other workshop in either poetry or fiction. No student may take more than one workshop for credit in any quarter. A student who is not committed to taking this course (or another workshop in the coming quarter) need not apply. To assure a full schedule, applicants should enroll for one more course than desired—which course can be dropped if the application is successful.
The course involves creative reading as well as creative writing, so we will read published work by established poets and will devote about half of every class to criticism of it. The other half of every class will be spent talking about the students' poems. At least a draft of one new poem is due each week, and all of the poems submitted during the quarter will undergo revision by quarter's end. Attendance from the first day is mandatory. Other desiderata are class participation and individual consultations. The term project is a chapbook of poems. No applications will be accepted after 4:00pm on Tuesday, January 3, and earlier submissions will have priority. They may be put in or sent to my mailbox in the main English Department office in 149 Humanities Building or e-mailed to me at yenser@humnet.ucla.edu. I will notify the enrolled students by email on Friday, January 6 and post the class list in the main English office on January 9. |
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| English 137.1 | Creative Writing: Short Story Creative Writing Workshop |
Prof. Ng |
| To be considered for the class, submit a sample work (no more than 10 pgs. double spaced). Please include a cover letter introducing yourself, your goals as a writer, what you've written, how long you've been writing, your favorite works and recent books read. Tell me what you want to accomplish in this class. Thanks!
DEADLINE: Please drop off your submission to the English Dept. office (149 Humanities Bldg.) by 4 PM Dec 9th. If you're submitting to both workshops, please indicate your first choice. Class list will be posted a week before the first class. |
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| English 137.2 | Creative Writing: Short Story Creative Writing Workshop |
Prof. Simpson |
| This course will be structured around the reading and writing about fiction. Students will develop a daily practice of reading and writing. Please apply to this course only if you have the time to begin a serious endeavor.
In order to be considered for admission please submit 10 pages of your recent work (fiction only please) to monasimpson@mac.com. In the subject line, please write application for 137 Winter 2012. Please also include a letter explaining your class rank, what writing workshops you've previously taken and the last five books you've read. Please also let me know whether or not you'll be applying to any other writing workshops and if so, which one is your first choice. Unfortunately, due to the volume of submissions, I'll be unable to meet with students to discuss their submissions. A list will be posted before the first week of Winter Quarter. DEADLINE: December 9 by 4:00 pm |
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SENIOR SEMINARS
| English 181A | Whitman and Dickinson Topics in Genre Studies |
Prof. Cohen |
| This seminar will study the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the two authors most commonly represented to be the yin and yang or the father and mother of American poetry. Whitman is the ebullient, masculine advocate of democracy, the open road, the American landscape and the American worker. Dickinson is the reclusive, solitary lyric poet, a feminist visionary at odds with the religious orthodoxy and bourgeois complacency of nineteenth-century culture. As we shall see, however, on closer reading the apparent familiarity of these authors recedes, and they appear far stranger and more elusive when the history of their poems is laid open to view. Our work will be to understand them, to locate them in nineteenth-century culture, and to trace out their critical legacy. To that end, we will read deeply in their poems and other related writings; we will chart out the textual history of their work, from manuscript to printed book to the internet; and we will become familiar with the critical heritage that has crafted them into iconic American poets. |
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| English 181B | Modern American Song Topics in Interdisciplinary Studies |
Prof. Goodwin |
| The interdisciplinary seminar "Modern American Song" involves a range of American literature and music, from canonical poetry and modern fiction to blues and folk traditions and to Broadway and popular song.
The literature for this seminar includes work by Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, Beat poetry and prose, an August Wilson drama, and fiction by Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Among the lyricists and composers we consider are Andy Razaf, Dorothy Fields, Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, and Bob Dylan. The seminar's approach to this material is based in ideas of performance, tradition, adaptation, and improvisation and in contexts of folklore, African-American heritage, and the music culture industry. Readings on these ideas and contexts are assigned from articles by Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, Susan McClary, LeRoi Jones, Albert Murray, Angela Davis, Gerald Early, and others. The playlist of music for the course includes, among many performing artists, the vocalists Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Diana Krall and the singer songwriters Woody Gutherie and Bob Dylan. |
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| English 181D | Black Atlantic Fictions Topics in Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies |
Prof. Goyal |
| In recent years, we have come to understand race as a global construct, characterized by the increased circulation of ideas, bodies, and objects. This course reads a range of literature from Africa, the Caribbean, Black Britain, and the United States outside of the confines of national borders, as part of what Paul Gilroy has termed the Black Atlantic. Focusing on the ways in which black writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Ama Ata Aidoo, Chris Abani, Paule Marshall, and Zakes Mda represent the experiences of slavery, migration, and colonialism, the course examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics, history and memory, and tradition and modernity. Readings include not only texts that highlight transnational mobility, but also those that take up the conceptual core of the idea of diaspora: the loss of home, the meaning of memory, and the struggle to find a usable past.
Requirements: Active class participation and two 7 pp. papers. |
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| English 182A | From Ancient Epic to Medieval Romance Topics in Medieval Literature |
Prof. Jager |
| In this course we will read, discuss, and write about a series of works illustrating the transformation of the ancient epic into the medieval romance, with an emphasis on themes such as war, justice, eros, spirituality, the city or the kingdom, and the quest. Works considered change year by year but are typically drawn from the following list: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Augustine's Confessions, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Chrétien de Troyes' Lancelot, The Romance of the Rose, The Lais of Marie de France, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur. Assigned work includes weekly reports and a (10-12 pp.) research essay due at the end and also to be adapted for presentation at a concluding mini-conference.
Students wishing to take this course should submit a résumé of literature courses taken so far, along with a brief (3-5 pp) writing sample from a previous course (hardcopy only), to the instructor's mailbox in 149 Humanities. Admission by instructor's permission (PTE) only. |
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| English 182B.1 | Tudor Poetry and the Book Topics in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature |
Prof. Braunmuller |
| This seminar places Shakespeare's verse (sonnets and narrative poems) in two contexts: Tudor poetry by his predecessors (Wyatt, Surrey) and contemporaries (Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton) and the making and marketing of the books through which those poems circulated. We will thus combine literary criticism with the history of the book and of reading. One or two class presentations; one lengthy term paper. Stratfordians welcome.
Permission of instructor required: please e-mail Prof. B. (barddoc@humnet.ucla.edu) listing relevant previous classes and your interests. |
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| English 182B.2 | Bad Shakespeare Topics in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature |
Prof. Cunningham |
| There is perhaps no more self-evident category of "the good" in literary studies than the works of Shakespeare. Yet traditionally many of the same plays are repeatedly staged, read, and taught while others of the extensive canon are consigned to a dust bin. In this seminar we'll study nine of Shakespeare's plays that are not usually performed or taught--those that are by implication "bad Shakespeare." The course will be customized to fit the reading experience of those who enroll: on the first day we'll determine which of Shakespeare's plays have been read least or not at all by our group, and we'll our craft our syllabus from among those. While we will deal directly with the important questions of textual and theatrical analysis that make up the regular Shakespeare courses, we'll also attempt to think about the implications of identifying Shakespeare with a limited number of plays and of overlooking others.
Requirements will include active participation, readings from selected critical essays, and a culminating research paper. |
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| English 182B.3 | Shakespeare on Page in his Age Topics in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature |
Prof. Post |
| Shakespeare on Page in his Age, the Ahmanson undergraduate seminar for winter, 2012, will be directed by Jonathan Post, English, UCLA. Sessions will be held off campus at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library on Wednesdays, from 1 p.m. to 3:50 p.m. Enrollment is limited to ten participants, and those who successfully complete course requirements will receive an award of $1000.
It's a little known but glorious fact that the Clark Library holds a substantial collection of materials relating to Shakespeare—plays and poems that he wrote and matter that he read. The latter has been considerably augmented of late by the library's recent acquisition of the Paul Chrzanowski Collection. So, for instance, we can now read Romeo and Juliet not only as it might have looked to someone in 1632, the date of the publication of the Second Folio, which includes Shakespeare's famous play. We can also read and visualize (as it appeared to Shakespeare) one of the play's original sources, Rhomeo and Juiletta, published in 1567. This course will be modeled around the idea of imagining and understanding Shakespeare in his age by way of the page. In reading his works, we will make extensive use of the Clark's printed material relating to selective aspects of his life and writings. Readings will include his poems—the sonnets as well as the spicy narrative poems—some of his plays, their sources, and their edited afterlife. By examining representative period title pages, frontispieces, commendatory poems, and engravings, we will also attend to the emergence of the author as subject, Shakespeare especially. Students will be asked to give one oral report and write one research paper. During the week of December 5, 2011, Professor Post will conduct interviews with students who wish to enroll in this course. Prospective students should submit the following documents: a letter explaining their reasons for wanting to enroll in the class, a copy of their DPR, and a resume containing contact information. The document should be submitted to Professor Post in the English Department Main Office by November 21, 2011. For more information: http://www.c1718cs.ucla.edu/content/ugrad-sup.htm |
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| English 182D | The Poetry and Art of William Blake Topics in Romantic Literature |
Prof. Maniquis |
| Study and discussion of lyrical and epic works of William Blake. Enrollment is limited to 15 participants. Active participation in discussion and seminar presentations is required. An extensive research and critical essay will be due at the end of the quarter. |
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| English 182F | Contemporary British Fiction Topics in 20th and 21st-Century Literature |
Prof. North |
| A survey of fiction written in Great Britain in the last twenty years or so. We will try to cover as many different kinds of novels as possible, including examples from writers such as Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Mitchell, Tom McCarthy, and Jackie Kay. |
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| English 183C | Pornography and the Politics of Sexual Representation Topics in 20th and 21st-Century American Literature |
Prof. Mott |
| For various cultural reasons, sexuality is a particularly sensitive political subject. Indeed, sexual representation remains one of the few cultural forms that is guaranteed to elicit a strong response. Our class will focus on the causes and effects of those responses. More specifically, we will examine sexual representations in terms of the shaping force they have in our lives. To explore a culture force is to investigate a problematic of power, to interrogate the power at work in sexual representation. In other words, we seek to interpret and explicate representations of sexuality in terms of their manipulation of power. To achieve these ends, we will have to use clear definitions of self or subjectivity, liberation, and oppression, as well as the core concepts that inform each of these ideas (e.g., subjectivity as a function of discourse, the problematic of agency, etc.). |
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| English M191A | Contemporary African American Poets Topics in African American Literature |
Prof. Mullen |
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This course focuses on contemporary collections by ten poets of African descent: Kwame Dawes, Camille T. Dungy, Nikky Finney, Vievee Francis, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Akilah Oliver, Carl Phillips, and Tracy K. Smith. Although most of the books are slender, this course requires constant reading, writing, and active participation in class discussion. Each student should keep a reader's journal. Instead of lecture, the class format is student-centered discussion, based on your journal entries, in-class writing assignments, and oral presentations, which will include close readings of poems, questions for discussion, aesthetic and cultural perspectives on the poets' work. Poets and works were chosen for accomplishment, diversity, and influence on American poetry. |
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| English M191B | Latino Voices of the Tropics Topics in Chicana/Chicano and/or Latina/Latino Literature |
Prof. Boria-Rivera |
| The purpose of this course is to give you an in-depth look into Latino/a Literature of the Caribbean at the advanced undergraduate level. Our engagement with literary renderings of the Latino experience will be informed by a recurrent emphasis on representations of history and issues of migration, terms that can be understood culturally, economically, racially, and geographically. As we shall see, writers seeking to reflect and inform the US immigrant experience from the Hispanophone Caribbean have seized on the expressive and critical power of memoir, bildungsroman, historical fiction, and revolution narratives. Reading the literary output of late twentieth century Latinos of Cuban, Dominican, Haitian, and Puerto Rican origin will help us to see how immigration and circular migration inform issues of gender, race, history, language, and narrative. |
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