CoursesSenior Seminars

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 provide students with the research and analytical tools to investigate the causes and effects of those personal and political responses. More specifically, we will use contemporary gender, race, class, and sexuality theories (among others) to help us examine sexual representations in terms of the shaping force they have in our lives. Our examination of a cultural force involves defining key terms, such as “power,” to interrogate how details of key representations manifest their cultural and personal work (effects on people’s values and conditions of existence, for example), on social justice. In other words, students will learn to interpret and explicate representations of sexuality in terms of their manipulation of power. Students will learn to define key terms and interpret cultural representation in an academic dialogue with their peers and with scholars in their field.

By the end of the course students will have initiated and executed a research plan that explores an issue based on the student’s personal interest

 

By the end of the course students will understand and use productively the rhetoric of scholarship, the ways of enriching, honing, and bolstering an interpretation by way of secondary sources

 

By the end of the course students will know how to provide helpful feedback about their peers’ works-in-progress; as authors, they will know how to assess and make use of the feedback they receive

 

By the end of the course students will demonstrate–in a 12-15 pp essay–effective organizational strategies leading to a coherent and compelling large-scale argumentative analysis.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English juniors/seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

From border corridos to the Nuyorican Poets Café’s poetry slams, Latinx poetry has a long tradition of performance. In this class, we will consider how these traditions of performance manifest in Latinx poetry of the 21^st century. Together, we will explore how contemporary Latinx poetry offers its own theories of embodiment, as well as how the body has been and remains central to the ways in which Latinx literature continues to reckon with history and disrupt national spaces. To do so, we will examine poems that reside in various ways at the intersection of the page and the stage. Among the poets we will consider are Elizabeth Acevedo, Aracelis Girmay, J. Michael Martinez, and Oliver Baez Bendorf. Each week, we will read a poetry collection and discuss its performance poetics to ask not what contemporary Latinx poetry is, or what it means, but rather to develop our own theory of what the poetry can do as a performance in and of itself.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English juniors/seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

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 provide students with the research and analytical tools to investigate the causes and effects of those personal and political responses. More specifically, we will use contemporary gender, race, class, and sexuality theories (among others) to help us examine sexual representations in terms of the shaping force they have in our lives. Our examination of a cultural force involves defining key terms, such as “power,” to interrogate how details of key representations manifest their cultural and personal work (effects on people’s values and conditions of existence, for example), on social justice. In other words, students will learn to interpret and explicate representations of sexuality in terms of their manipulation of power. Students will learn to define key terms and interpret cultural representation in an academic dialogue with their peers and with scholars in their field.

By the end of the course students will have initiated and executed a research plan that explores an issue based on the student’s personal interest

 

By the end of the course students will understand and use productively the rhetoric of scholarship, the ways of enriching, honing, and bolstering an interpretation by way of secondary sources

 

By the end of the course students will know how to provide helpful feedback about their peers’ works-in-progress; as authors, they will know how to assess and make use of the feedback they receive

 

By the end of the course students will demonstrate–in a 12-15 pp essay–effective organizational strategies leading to a coherent and compelling large-scale argumentative analysis.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This course traces the evolution of the ancient Mediterranean epic into the medieval romance, with a focus on character types, narrative patterns, imagery and themes — especially war, eros, justice, spirituality, the city or the kingdom, and the personal quest.  The books 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. Assignments include weekly reports presented in class and a (10-12 pp.) research essay due at the end and presented at a concluding tenth-week mini-conference.

 

Admission by instructor’s permission (PTE) only.  Applicants should submit a list of literature courses taken so far, a brief (100-200 word) description of their educational goals, and 5-10 pp. writing sample from a previous course.  Materials may be delivered to the English Department Main Office (149 Kaplan) or sent via email to <ejager@humnet.ucla.edu>.  PDF attachments only; no Google.docs!

Seminar in the history and practice of writing for an informed public audience, introducing students to different prose styles suited for publication in literary journals, etc., and helping them develop their own voice. Seminar includes a deep-dive into important texts in the history of modern criticism, beginning with Samuel Johnson and including William Hazlitt, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Parker, James Baldwin, Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Andrea Long Chu, and others.

 

Enrollment is restricted to senior English majors during first pass. Junior English majors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This seminar is eligible for capstone credit toward the Professional Writing and Creative Writing minors. Limited seats are available and priority will go to students graduating in Winter 2025 who have not yet completed their minor capstone. Please contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu for enrollment information.

We live in a world of systems and networks, ceaseless communications and social media.

But what that means, and what it looks like, and feels like, may be another story—or range of stories.

 

This course will look at some contemporary novels, and visual culture, that stage those stories, and consider how we live in and with these circuits and networks today.

 

Readings will include recent novels by, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ling Ma, Cormac McCarthy, Rachel Cusk, Sayaka Murata, and China Miéville–accompanied by film and anime.

 

As a capstone course, participation is mandatory.  Students will briefly present on the texts and on their projects related to the course; and engage in shared discussions.  The final required project may take the form of a term paper or presentation.

 

Enrollment is restricted to senior English majors during first pass. Junior English majors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

From border corridos to the Nuyorican Poets Café’s poetry slams, Latinx poetry has a long tradition of performance. In this class, we will consider how these traditions of performance manifest in Latinx poetry of the 21^st century. Together, we will explore how contemporary Latinx poetry offers its own theories of embodiment, as well as how the body has been and remains central to the ways in which Latinx literature continues to reckon with history and disrupt national spaces. To do so, we will examine poems that reside in various ways at the intersection of the page and the stage. Among the poets we will consider are Elizabeth Acevedo, Aracelis Girmay, J. Michael Martinez, and Oliver Baez Bendorf. Each week, we will read a poetry collection and discuss its performance poetics to ask not what contemporary Latinx poetry is, or what it means, but rather to develop our own theory of what the poetry can do as a performance in and of itself.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English juniors/seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.