Lower Division Courses in English (Freshman, Sophomore)
Please note that these courses are intended as preparation for the major in American Literature and Culture. Limited space may be available for students wishing to take these courses for GE or Diversity credit.
Critical Reading and Writing
English 4HW; English 4W
| Introduction to literary analysis, with close reading and carefully written exposition of selections from principal modes of literature: poetry, prose fiction, and drama. Minimum of 15 to 20 pages of revised writing. Satisfies Writing II requirement.
This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major. Please note that specifically marked sections may be reserved for Dept. of English majors and minors. All other sections are open to students of all majors.
English 4HW confers College Honors credit. Students participating in the College Honors program may contact a Dept. of English advisor to request a seat in the class. |
Neither English 11 nor English 87 will be offered in Spring 2024. Students in the American Literature and Culture major may take English 100 – 119 before completing their required lower-division prep coursework.
Upper Division Writing, Research, and Practicum Opportunities
Please note that these courses do not satisfy any ALC major requirements; however, they are valuable opportunities for upper-division credit that ALC students may wish to explore.
The Literary Essay
Variable Topics in Professional Writing
English 110V.1 / Prof. Cohen
| This writing-intensive course will focus on the literary essay. Students will study examples of the essay across the history of literature in English, and we will practice writing essays in a variety of styles and genres, from personal and reflective to moral, descriptive, social, and political.
English 110V qualifies as an elective for the Professional Writing Minor. |
Life in Books: Memoirs in Reading and Writing
Variable Topics in Professional Writing
English 110V.2 / Prof. Stephan
| In this writing-intensive course, students will consider the art and craft of memoir writing, with a specific focus on memoirs about reading and writing. What happens when authors use their own lives as readers and writers as a frame for larger stories about being human? Who gets to tell these stories, and how? Students will engage with 20th- and 21st-century examples of the form by reading them critically, writing about them analytically, and using them as models for their own work. Constructive participation in peer workshops, substantial revision of their own work, and active consideration of the writing process will all be important aspects of the class. Authors may include Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Mary Karr, Annie Dillard, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Bechdel, Maggie Nelson, Joan Didion, Hilary Mantel, Elif Batuman, Alberto Manguel, Haruki Murakami, and Margo Jefferson.
English 110V qualifies as an elective for the Professional Writing Minor. |
Westwind Journal
Undergraduate Practicum in English
English M192.1 / Prof. Wilson
| This course is for the staff of Westwind, UCLA’s Journal for the Arts. If you are interested in joining the Westwind staff, please familiarize yourself with the journal at www.westwind.ucla.edu, and come to the first Spring meeting (time and day posted in the Schedule of Classes.) |
Upper Division Courses in English
Courses that meet the American Literature and Culture major requirement for pre-1848 material are marked with brackets.
ORIGINS – Beginnings, Events, and Trajectories
Ways of Reading Race
English 100 / Prof. Perez-Torres
| Introduction to interdisciplinary study of race and ethnicity, with primary focus on literature. Through examination of institutions that form understanding of race—citizenship, nationalism, class, gender, and labor—interrogation of how we come to think of ourselves and others as having race, and effects of such racialized thinking. Course is not about any particular racial or ethnic group, but highlights creation of ethnic categories and their effects on cultural production. |
American Literature, 1832-1865
English 166C / Prof. Colacurcio
| Historical survey of American literatures from Jacksonian era to end of Civil War, including emergent tradition of American Romanticism, augmented and challenged by genres of popular protest urging application of democratic ideals to questions of race, gender, and social equality. |
IDENTITIES – Places, Communities, and Environments
Ways of Reading Race
English 100 / Prof. Perez-Torres
| Introduction to interdisciplinary study of race and ethnicity, with primary focus on literature. Through examination of institutions that form understanding of race—citizenship, nationalism, class, gender, and labor—interrogation of how we come to think of ourselves and others as having race, and effects of such racialized thinking. Course is not about any particular racial or ethnic group, but highlights creation of ethnic categories and their effects on cultural production. |
Secret Lives: The Closet and Queer Desire in Literature
Queer Literatures and Cultures, 1850 to 1970
English M101B / Prof. Russell
| This course will track queerness across a range of writers in Britain and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A guiding thread of our exploration will be the question of the closet: the hidden queer worlds that existed within and against normative mainstream culture. We will consider queer desire as a mode of reading and being read, and question its changes and transformations over the time period. What did it mean to be queer then, and how does this meaning affect our culture now? Authors under consideration will include Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, and John Rechy. We will draw on critical ideas from queer theory, psychoanalysis, race theory and sociology. |
Contemporary Asian American Prose
Contemporary Asian American Literary Issues and Criticism
English M102B / Prof. Wang
| This course examines the dynamic array of voices, forms, and styles in Asian American prose from the 2000s to the present day. We will consider how work (including short fiction, memoir, essays, and comic novellas) by Jhumpa Lahiri, Anthony Veasna So, Nami Mun, Charles Yu, and others grapple with issues of cultural identity, displacement, and stereotypes, utilizing distinct narrative techniques and perspectives. By critically engaging with this increasingly complex body of writing, we will explore and challenge prevailing notions surrounding race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and the immigrant experience. |
Contemporary African American Literature
English M104D / Prof. McMillan
| In her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, novelist Toni Morrison dissected the “Africanist” presence haunting American literature, particularly the latter’s dependence on polarities of black and white. This course, while keeping Morrison’s edict in mind, moves at a different angle. Principally, what unites contemporary black diasporic writers? Taking the contemporary as a starting place, rather than a fait accompli, and understanding Blackness in a fluid, Black Atlantic sense—rather than a strictly Black American one—this course seeks to unearth different rubrics for examining and understanding what strands of thought unite the contemporary in Black literatures. In doing so, we not only examine a set of protagonists with disparate interests but also travel to markedly different spatio-temporal zones, including 1920s and present-day Harlem and 1980s Los Angeles. |
Politics in 20th-Century African American Fiction
Topics in African American Literature and Culture
English M104E / Prof. Yarborough
| Black writers in the United States have long used fiction as an artistic venue for directly engaging political issues. In this class, we will read texts ranging from the turn of the 20th century through the 1970s that treat such topics as the legacies of slavery in the post-Reconstruction era, gender hierarchy and power, the impact of Marxist thought on Black radicalism in the 1930s, racial violence, and the Civil Rights and Black Nationalism movements of the 60s. We will focus not just on the historical contexts of the works but also on the strategies employed by the authors in their attempts to shape reader attitudes even as they wrestle with complex political questions resistant to simple resolution. Writers to be covered include Pauline Hopkins, George Schuyler, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker.
Requirements: midterm examination, term paper, final examination |
Early Chicana/o Literature, 1400 – 1920 [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
English M105A / Prof. Lopez
| Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature from poetry of Triple Alliance and Aztec Empire through end of Mexican Revolution (1920), including oral and written forms (poetry, corridos, testimonios, folklore, novels, short stories, and drama) by writers such as Nezahualcoyotl (Hungry Coyote), Cabaza de Vaca, Lorenzo de Zavala, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Eusebio Chacón, Daniel Venegas, and Lorena Villegas de Magón.
This course fulfills a pre-1848 requirement for the American Literature and Culture major. Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature and Culture majors on first pass, and will open up to all majors on second pass. |
Refugee Literature Then and Now
Literary Cities–Service Learning
English 119XP / Prof. Weaver
| Over 100 million people are currently displaced by violence and environmental destruction. This course will focus on their stories. Throughout the quarter, we will work with community organizations in greater Los Angeles to support recently resettled refugees as well as immigrant rights more broadly. At the same time, we will read contemporary stories of exile and migration alongside 19th-century slave narratives and medieval accounts, pushing back at the notion that there has ever been a nation “apart.” As we will see, much medieval English literature was resolutely engaged with enduring questions of displacement and hospitality, while ongoing projects like Refugee Tales evoke a deep archive of Anglophone writing by and about asylum seekers. Please note: This is a community-engaged course and requires 20 hours of volunteering off-campus with an assigned community partner. |
American Poetry, 1900 to 1945
English 173A / Prof. Stefans
| This course explored works from the “Modernist” Era, considered to last from the late 19th century to the period just after WWII, when poets, painters, composers and others were experimenting wildly with new modes of making art. In additional to reading work by “major” American poets of the time — including Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stein, Hughes, etc. — we’ll explore how the poets were responding to developments in other arts, especially music, painting, and fiction. Short weekly assignments, some creative, and a final paper are required. |
The Love Story, So-Called
American Fiction since 1945
English 174B / Prof. Simpson
| In this course, we’ll examine the structure and techniques of the love story, by reading short stories that span the 20th and 21st century, from around the globe. We’ll consider the biography of the writers as well as the cultures of the communities they lived in, their society’s expectations for dating, courtship, marriage and sex. We’ll interrogate the pleasures afforded by the love story and consider whether a contemporary American love story is possible, within the realist tradition. |
The American 1920s
Interdisciplinary Studies in American Culture
English 177 / Prof. Dimuro
| This course focuses on innovative works of modernist prose fiction, painting, and music by American artists in the decade following World War One. Selected readings reintroduce students to a variety of narrative techniques, visual representations, and stylistic innovations demonstrated in the writing of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner between 1919 and 1929. We will contextualize the work of these writers in the history and visual culture of their time, including avant-garde artistic movements, new technologies, forms of sound reproduction, early cinema, and other representational media. |
MEDIA – Aesthetics, Genres, and Technologies
American Poetry, 1900 to 1945
English 173A / Prof. Stefans
| This course explored works from the “Modernist” Era, considered to last from the late 19th century to the period just after WWII, when poets, painters, composers and others were experimenting wildly with new modes of making art. In additional to reading work by “major” American poets of the time — including Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stein, Hughes, etc. — we’ll explore how the poets were responding to developments in other arts, especially music, painting, and fiction. Short weekly assignments, some creative, and a final paper are required. |
The Love Story, So-Called
American Fiction since 1945
English 174B / Prof. Simpson
| In this course, we’ll examine the structure and techniques of the love story, by reading short stories that span the 20th and 21st century, from around the globe. We’ll consider the biography of the writers as well as the cultures of the communities they lived in, their society’s expectations for dating, courtship, marriage and sex. We’ll interrogate the pleasures afforded by the love story and consider whether a contemporary American love story is possible, within the realist tradition. |
The American 1920s
Interdisciplinary Studies in American Culture
English 177 / Prof. Dimuro
| This course focuses on innovative works of modernist prose fiction, painting, and music by American artists in the decade following World War One. Selected readings reintroduce students to a variety of narrative techniques, visual representations, and stylistic innovations demonstrated in the writing of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner between 1919 and 1929. We will contextualize the work of these writers in the history and visual culture of their time, including avant-garde artistic movements, new technologies, forms of sound reproduction, early cinema, and other representational media. |
Psychoanalysis, Film, and Literature
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature
English 118A / Prof. Russell
| This course will study some of the major concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, as they are explored, challenged and even reinvented in works of film and literature. Psychoanalytic concepts under consideration will include: paranoia, depression (melancholia), the uncanny, hysteria, transference and dream work. We will look at the primary texts of Freud closely. In the film and literature we study, we will in particular attend to how certain genres – especially horror and science fiction – have lent themselves to psychoanalytic theory. Authors to be studied may include Henry James, Shirley Jackson and Octavia Butler. Films may include The Day the Earth Stood Still (Dir. Wise, 1951), Melancholia (dir. Von Trier, 2011) and Hereditary (Dir. Aster, 2018) |
e.g.: Experimental Games
Topics in Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Critical Theory
English 129 / Prof. Snelson
| For example, e.g., consider Dungeons & Dragons. This once-fringe role-playing game has remained a pervasive force in tabletop gaming since its publication in 1974. However, in recent years, its popularity has skyrocketed across a range of media through edited podcasts (The Adventure Zone), streaming actual plays (Critical Role), video games (Baldur’s Gate 3), movies (Honor Among Thieves), and TV series (Stranger Things), among other genres from fan fiction and xerox zines to social media art and webcomics. In the lineage of transmedia storytelling, this seminar will consider ten games “exempli gratia” (e.g., or, for example) in emergent genres. Potential examples will be collectively determined and may include: AI Dungeon, What Remains of Edith Finch, Super Mario, the historical avant-gardes, Beat Saber, Grand Theft Auto, the Oulipo, Alan Wake, Queers in Love at the End of the World, Katamari Damacy, Elden Ring, Surrealism, Dialect, Final Fantasy, Roblox, Disco Elysium, and unexpected works that may emerge over the quarter and in collaborative conversations. Each example will spur a range of critical and scholarly experiments into the form, format, genre, and framework of each game. No previous experience with games or expanded media necessary.
A portion of ENGL 129 seats will be made available to Digital Humanities minors. DH students should contact undergraduate advisor Deanna Finlay at deanna@humnet.ucla.edu.
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Senior/Capstone Seminars
Flyover Counter: 100 Years of Middle-American Literature
Capstone Seminar
English 184.4 / Prof. Huehls
| “Flyover Country” refers to the interior parts of the country that one flies over when traveling from one cost to the other, usually from one densely populated urban center (like southern California) to another (like the northeastern “Megalopolis” of Boston/New York/Philadelphia/Washington DC). The term also implies a general neglect and ignorance of this wide swath of U.S. territory. Given that it’s an election year, when “flyover states” will play a crucial role in choosing our next president, this seminar explores the 20th and 21st-century literature of “flyover country.” What histories, logics, and values shape this literature? What challenges might this literature pose for the assumptions that status quo, center-left discourse makes about the world? What counts as politics in “flyover country”? Or are these places and peoples really as different as we’ve been led to believe? Readings will include novels from Sherwood Anderson, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, and Marilynne Robinson.
Reserved for American Literature & Culture majors only on first pass. Open to English majors on second pass. |