CoursesCourses for the English Major

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.

Survey of major writers and genres, with emphasis on tools for literary analysis such as close reading, argumentation, historical and social context, and critical writing. Minimum of three papers (three to five pages each) or equivalent required.

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

Survey of major writers and genres, with emphasis on tools for literary analysis such as close reading, argumentation, historical and social context, and critical writing. Minimum of three papers (three to five pages each) or equivalent required.

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

Designed to introduce fundamentals of creative writing and writing workshop experience. Emphasis on poetry, fiction, drama, or creative nonfiction depending on wishes of instructor(s) during any given term. Readings from assigned texts, weekly writing assignments (multiple drafts and revisions), and final portfolio required. Satisfies Writing II requirement.

Enrollment by instructor consent and NOT by enrollment pass time: Interested students should apply by 8 pm on February 27. Applications received after this date will be considered only if additional space should become available and may not receive a full review or response. Enrollment preference for English 20W will be given to first and second-year students. Approved applicants will receive a PTE directly from the instructor.

To apply, please prepare a brief (no more than 250 words) note explaining why you wish to take this course, and what previous experience you have with creative writing courses (if any—none required!).

Applications may be submitted through our approved web form, which you can access HERE beginning February 20. Students applying to English 20W should enroll in an alternate course during their February enrollment passes, and should not assume that they will be admitted.

Please note that due to the volume of submissions, only students selected for the class will receive notification. Please do not email the instructors requesting status updates, as this will only delay the selection process. Questions should be directed to the English Undergraduate Advising Offices via MyUCLA MessageCenter.

Introduction to prose narrative, its techniques and forms. Analysis of short and long narratives and of critical issues such as plot, characterization, setting, narrative voice, realistic and nonrealistic forms.

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.)

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. This course counts as an elective for the Professional Writing Minor.

 

English 110V qualifies as an elective for the English major and the Professional Writing Minor.

We will read and discuss a selection of English poetry and prose from before the Norman Conquest of 1066, including the complete Beowulf and other heroic poetry, works featuring women, saints, scops (bards) and Vikings, and an early romance that predates the well -known “courtly love” of later medieval literature.  All texts are in translation, but we will practice reading Old English aloud.  We will also study the history of the English language from its Indo-European origins and trace how early English literature developed in a Roman Britain conquered by Germanic invaders and came to embody diverse political, religious and literary influences.  Requirements: regular reading quizzes, a short imaginative essay and a longer research paper.

 

This class will be reserved for senior English majors on first pass, and will open up to non-seniors on second pass.

In Invisible Cities Italo Calvino allows Kublai Khan, emperor of virtually the whole of thirteenth-century Asia, to experience “the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin.” To this exhaustion of empire, the possible solution becomes a survey of cities presented by Marco Polo, the Khan’s Italian servant and ambassador. This course examines medieval cities as physical and figurative terrains for crystallizing cultural difference and cultural intelligibility.  We begin with questions of how we perceive and inhabit cities, in China Miéville’s speculative The City and the City, and then explore two medieval texts that inhabit imagined cities of the past (Troy) and the future (City of Women) in Chaucer and Christine de Pizan. The class proceeds to Asian travel narratives in which African and Asian cities operate as open cosmopolitan flows or defensible fortresses or palimpsests of history in Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, and Rabbi Pesachia of Regensburg.  We will end with Italo Calvino’s fabulous takeoff on Marco Polo, Invisible Cities, an urban mood-poem that explores the affective regimes cities urge on their inhabitants. We will also read theories of space and place, the surrealist derive, performative walking, and urban cultural histories by Yu Fu Tuan, Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau, Colin MacFarlane, and Lin Zhang.

Requirements:

1. Path A: Two 2000-word papers OR Path B: One class project (group or lone, analytical or creative hybrid), with prospectus, 1000-word analytical debrief, and class presentation (online or in-class) (50%);
2. weekly 1 p. response papers (30%);
3. optional class presentation (replaces one of the papers in Path A and shares the class project in Path B) and lively class participation (20%).

 

This class will be reserved for senior English majors on first pass, and will open up to non-seniors on second pass.

Intensive study of selected poems and representative comedies, histories, and tragedies through Hamlet.

 

This class will be reserved for senior English majors on first pass, and will open up to non-seniors on second pass.

This is a survey of colonial American literatures and cultures. Although most of the texts on the syllabus were written in colonies that would eventually become part of the United States, the course itself is not designed to be a literary history of the US. Instead, we will consider these texts in their local, regional, and Atlantic contexts, and study the theological, political, and literary issues that framed the colonial experiences they describe. We will examine major concepts and themes that include indigeneity, exploration and captivity, puritan theology, and the parallel rise of Atlantic enlightenment and slavery. Our investigations will push us to test the conceptual limits of these categories as we trace their roles in shaping the modern language of community and nation.

 

Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.

 

This class will be reserved for senior English majors and American Literature & Culture majors on first pass, and will open up to non-seniors on second pass.

The word “citizen” is absent from the Bill of Rights. Instead, the document enumerates rights more broadly in terms of the “person.” What is the relationship between personhood and citizenship, and how were these important concepts imagined in the early United States? What role did literature play in shaping ideas about personhood and rights? This class offers an interdisciplinary survey of representations of personhood and rights in the century after the American Revolution. It invites students to understand fiction and literature broadly not as mere reflections of history, but as impactful cultural expressions that shape and challenge perceptions of personhood, citizenship, and rights. We will read fiction, essays, as well as select legal and political document. Readings will include selections by Phillis Wheatley Peters, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Washington Irving, William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony.

Exploration of poetry and prose of perhaps greatest satirist in history of English literature, Anglo-Irish Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Since Swift endures not just as influential writer whose Gulliver’s Travels has achieved myth status, but also as character who starred in novels and plays by likes of Edith Sitwell and William Butler Yeats, study also of his literary afterlife. Students sample range of critical responses to Swift from William Makepeace Thackeray to George Orwell to Edward Said, who insightfully described Swift as writer proleptically aware of himself as “a problem for the future.”

This course centers on Phillis Wheatley: her life, her poetry, her community, and her legacy. Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved Black woman and poet who was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and brought to New England when she was only seven years old. In our class, we’ll explore Wheatley’s writing by centering the insights of Black feminist scholars and makers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (from whose recent book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, our course title is drawn). We’ll dive deeply into Wheatley’s writing and neoclassical influences to understand how her work grapples with structures of oppression in often coded ways. And we’ll follow Hartman, whose notion of “critical fabulation” provided Jeffers with the conceptual tools for developing alternate ways of honoring and amplifying Wheatley’s world and work.

Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.

Intensive study of writings by Byron, Keats, Percy Shelly, and Mary Shelley, with collateral readings from such authors as Hazlitt, Hunt, Landor, Clare, Moore, Peacock, Landon, Aikin, Hemans, and Prince.

Coverage of six novels of Jane Austen, as well as literary works that most influenced her: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of Rights of Woman, Gothic novel, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.

Historical survey of American literatures from Revolution through early republic, with emphasis on genres that reflect systematic attempts to create representative national literature and attention to American ethnic, gender, and postcolonial perspectives.

 

Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.

Study of American poetry from Puritan period through end of 19th century.

The title of the course begs for interrogation: what is a “major” writer–by what standards do we measure major and minor (implied) writers? Historically, who has been excluded from the ranks of major writers and why have they been excluded? Is this even an academic, let alone equitable, way to measure the value a writer contributes to us? And speaking of us, who is American?

Some say hip hop was born just over fifty years ago when a creative kid with a big sound system threw a back-to-school party in the Bronx. But hip hop as we know it today is at once much older and much younger than that. This class will center on one facet of hip hop—the lyric performance of rap artists—against the backdrop of its expansive culture. We’ll consider dozens of artists, from Tupac and Biggie to Kendrick and Drake, MC Lyte and Ms. Lauryn Hill to Doechii and Rapsody. The goal of the course is (1) to build a literary-critical vocabulary for discussing rap’s poetics and (2) to gain a greater appreciation for the art and science of rapping to a beat.

Gothic conventions—crumbling castles, supernatural villains, damsels in distress, dark doubles—have survived, thrived, and evolved in British popular fiction over the course of three centuries. In this course, we will explore examples of Gothic and Gothic-influenced fiction from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. We will consider its historical and cultural contexts as well as its enduring mass appeal. Texts will include Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as shorter works by Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Angela Carter, and others.

We might begin by asking, what is not algorithmic literature today? Or: how can literary and aesthetic interventions aid the emerging field of “Critical AI” studies? Rather than introduce algorithmic literature or “algo-lit” as a distinct literary category, this course wonders if it’s still possible to consider literature beyond the algorithmic conduits that characterize the networked present. The creation and study of literature today is facilitated by a range of digital formats and networked consoles, each of which introduce new practices of production, circulation, reception, and reading. Alongside these transformations, we’ll explore a range of new literary genres inhabiting, for example, computer scripts, image macros, social media, sound releases, interactive applications, video games, and print-on-demand books. Thinking through the present, this introduction examines the history and future of literature through the everyday experience of the algorithms that run computers and electronic devices. From the history of digital poetics to recent internet publications, we’ll track the development of literature under the influence of algorithmic computation up to works published in the present, as they emerge throughout the quarter. In lockstep, the course considers the category of “algorithmic literature” as a way to think about historical works remediated to the internet, in a wide range of (post-)digital and generative AI formats. The course requires short weekly critical experiments in an open format, as well as a final project, which may be critical or creative in form, developed in conversation with the instructor. No previous experience in programming, poetry, or literature is required.

Approaches to literary studies often favor national, ethnic, and/or historical approaches. Postcolonial Studies expanded this approach by theorizing literature in relationship to histories of empire and violence at a worldly, transnational scale. What would it mean to reframe a postcolonial/decolonial approach to literature and the arts through the lens of militarism, especially in relationship to the environment? This class engages these questions by turning to literary works from Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania/the Pacific and South Asia to examine their histories of empire as well as how creative practitioners from these regions have engaged the vexed representations and experiences of militarism, particularly in regards to gender. Topics to explore include nuclearization as well as multi-scalar concerns from climate change to intimacies with more-than-human others. Reading materials will be interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretical. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a presentation, and a final essay/project.

 

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to pursue departmental honors.

 

This course is eligible for credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. Currently declared minors should contact Stephanie Bundy (stephanie@english.ucla.edu) for enrollment assistance.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” T.S. Eliot wrote toward the end of his modernist poem, “The Waste Land.” Testing the relationship between form, fragmentation, and destruction, this course looks at a number of literary, critical, and philosophical texts whose defining feature is the fragment. This may take the form of notes, aphorisms, elisions, lists, incompletion, or absence. We will consider writing by H.D, Roland Barthes, Moyra Davey, Teju Cole, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Trinh T Minh Ha, Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, and Harryette Mullen, among others.

Most representations of nuclear weapon history focus on the American attacks on Japan, but during the subsequent five decades the U.S., France, and the U.K. detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons in the atolls and islands of the Pacific. The scale of atomic weapon detonations have often been described as “unrepresentable,” posing a particular challenge to literature and the arts in determining what narrative forms, genres, and modes of representation are adequate to representing these ongoing legacies of the Cold War. While nuclear detonations are often figured by their destructive ‘flash’ in history, many creative practitioners, activists, historians, and exposed communities have emphasized what Rob Nixon has termed the ‘slow violence’ of irradiation, which often has no temporal limits and is deeply embodied. We will explore the work of Indigenous writers, filmmakers, and artists from  Aotearoa/New Zealand, Samoa, Tahiti (French Polynesia), Hawai`i, and other areas of Oceania to engage how the violence of nuclear colonialism has been represented, contested, and embodied. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a short presentation, and a final essay/project.

 

This course is eligible for credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. Currently declared minors should contact Stephanie Bundy (stephanie@english.ucla.edu) for enrollment assistance.

James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, is widely regarded as one of the most significant works of world literature and the game-changing novel of the twentieth century. In this class we will reading Ulysses in its entirety, and lay the foundation for deeper engagement with literary research and various histories that contextualize the book.

 

Not open for credit to students who took ENGL 179R with Prof. Jaurretche in Spring 2024, or ENGL 139.1 with Prof. Jaurretche in Fall 2021.

Study of American poetry from Puritan period through end of 19th century.

The title of the course begs for interrogation: what is a “major” writer–by what standards do we measure major and minor (implied) writers? Historically, who has been excluded from the ranks of major writers and why have they been excluded? Is this even an academic, let alone equitable, way to measure the value a writer contributes to us? And speaking of us, who is American?

This course is about American writers in the decade following World War One. Our goal is to understand these modernist works as products of a creative ferment in the art and culture of the 1920s. That ferment had to do with the remaking of older forms of artistic expression, the result of changing economic circumstances, post-war malaise, speculation, and new technologies of image and sound reproduction. We will examine the multiple contexts out of which these literary works emerged, including modern painting, art photography, early cinema, atonal musical composition, avant-garde poetry, and abstract sculpture. The texts we read will focus upon new narrative techniques, controversial subject matter, and the formal innovations that distinguish the prose of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, and Willa Cather between the years 1919 and 1929. Because these works respond to the transformations brought about by the post-war era, we will read sections of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory for historical context.

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously taken ENGL 177 on the topic of The American 1920s with Prof. Dimuro.

This course will look at crime fiction—primarily novels, some films—over the past century or so. Mystery, crime, and suspense stories have a long history but a special place in a modern world.

What can such stories tell us about how we experience our personal lives and our public life?

What form do these stories take?  Why do we like them?   How can they help us understand the ways in which we work and play today?

Readings will include writers such as Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, James M. Cain, Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tom McCarthy, and Natsuo  Kirino.

Focused literary analysis will center the course discussions and the required papers.

 

Not open for credit who have previously taken ENGL 179 on the same topic with Prof. Seltzer.

Both funny and avant-garde, no work has inspired as much doubt about its readability as James Joyce’s final book, Finnegans Wake.   Literary and popular culture abound in famous remarks about its lack of linear plot, its verbal complexity, and its all-around difficulty.  This class won’t make that list go away, but it will give you various frameworks for understanding the book, including challenging what it means to “read” a book in the first place. We’ll take a look at several famous set pieces, as well as chapters and long sections.  As with various Wake group reading practices, our approach will be interactive and reliant upon individual research to uncover Joyce’s strategies for character, plot, and language.  In lieu of a long final paper, there will be several shorter ones throughout the term that will build skills for reading the book.

Some say hip hop was born just over fifty years ago when a creative kid with a big sound system threw a back-to-school party in the Bronx. But hip hop as we know it today is at once much older and much younger than that. This class will center on one facet of hip hop—the lyric performance of rap artists—against the backdrop of its expansive culture. We’ll consider dozens of artists, from Tupac and Biggie to Kendrick and Drake, MC Lyte and Ms. Lauryn Hill to Doechii and Rapsody. The goal of the course is (1) to build a literary-critical vocabulary for discussing rap’s poetics and (2) to gain a greater appreciation for the art and science of rapping to a beat.

This course troubles dominant conceptions of “science fiction” by reading Indigenous horror, science fiction, fantasy, comics, and speculative storytelling through decolonial, feminist, and queer frameworks. We will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres by reading late 20^th and early 21^st century Indigenous non-realist texts. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous Wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use “wonder” to subvert genre conventions, challenge heteropatriarchal and anti-queer colonial violence, and imagine healing futures for human and more-than-human communities and ecologies. Our course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.

This course focuses on voices of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Black Atlantic. Drawing primarily from Anglophone texts written by authors of African and European descent, we will try to define what we mean by voice in a literature class, and what we understand the relation between voice and narrative to be. Our work will be driven by a number of intellectual and ethical questions: how do we recognize diverse voices in the historical archives? How do we recover them for twenty-first-century audiences? What is at stake in this recovery? These questions will push us to think carefully about the nature of our reading practices, particularly as we look to the past. Together, we will strive to imagine the modes of literacy and illiteracy that we bring to our encounters with materials from the past and we will continue to ask ourselves what we mean by voice, by speech, by silence, and by authority—particularly as these relate to a broad constellation of forms, genres, and modes of mediation.

 

Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.

Reserved for Senior American Literature and Culture majors on first pass. All other Dept. of English majors and minors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

Exploration of poetry and prose of perhaps greatest satirist in history of English literature, Anglo-Irish Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Since Swift endures not just as influential writer whose Gulliver’s Travels has achieved myth status, but also as character who starred in novels and plays by likes of Edith Sitwell and William Butler Yeats, study also of his literary afterlife. Students sample range of critical responses to Swift from William Makepeace Thackeray to George Orwell to Edward Said, who insightfully described Swift as writer proleptically aware of himself as “a problem for the future.”

This course centers on Phillis Wheatley: her life, her poetry, her community, and her legacy. Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved Black woman and poet who was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and brought to New England when she was only seven years old. In our class, we’ll explore Wheatley’s writing by centering the insights of Black feminist scholars and makers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (from whose recent book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, our course title is drawn). We’ll dive deeply into Wheatley’s writing and neoclassical influences to understand how her work grapples with structures of oppression in often coded ways. And we’ll follow Hartman, whose notion of “critical fabulation” provided Jeffers with the conceptual tools for developing alternate ways of honoring and amplifying Wheatley’s world and work.

Coverage of six novels of Jane Austen, as well as literary works that most influenced her: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of Rights of Woman, Gothic novel, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.

This course troubles dominant conceptions of “science fiction” by reading Indigenous horror, science fiction, fantasy, comics, and speculative storytelling through decolonial, feminist, and queer frameworks. We will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres by reading late 20^th and early 21^st century Indigenous non-realist texts. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous Wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use “wonder” to subvert genre conventions, challenge heteropatriarchal and anti-queer colonial violence, and imagine healing futures for human and more-than-human communities and ecologies. Our course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.

Approaches to literary studies often favor national, ethnic, and/or historical approaches. Postcolonial Studies expanded this approach by theorizing literature in relationship to histories of empire and violence at a worldly, transnational scale. What would it mean to reframe a postcolonial/decolonial approach to literature and the arts through the lens of militarism, especially in relationship to the environment? This class engages these questions by turning to literary works from Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania/the Pacific and South Asia to examine their histories of empire as well as how creative practitioners from these regions have engaged the vexed representations and experiences of militarism, particularly in regards to gender. Topics to explore include nuclearization as well as multi-scalar concerns from climate change to intimacies with more-than-human others. Reading materials will be interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretical. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a presentation, and a final essay/project.

 

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to pursue departmental honors.

 

This course is eligible for credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. Currently declared minors should contact Stephanie Bundy (stephanie@english.ucla.edu) for enrollment assistance.

Most representations of nuclear weapon history focus on the American attacks on Japan, but during the subsequent five decades the U.S., France, and the U.K. detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons in the atolls and islands of the Pacific. The scale of atomic weapon detonations have often been described as “unrepresentable,” posing a particular challenge to literature and the arts in determining what narrative forms, genres, and modes of representation are adequate to representing these ongoing legacies of the Cold War. While nuclear detonations are often figured by their destructive ‘flash’ in history, many creative practitioners, activists, historians, and exposed communities have emphasized what Rob Nixon has termed the ‘slow violence’ of irradiation, which often has no temporal limits and is deeply embodied. We will explore the work of Indigenous writers, filmmakers, and artists from  Aotearoa/New Zealand, Samoa, Tahiti (French Polynesia), Hawai`i, and other areas of Oceania to engage how the violence of nuclear colonialism has been represented, contested, and embodied. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a short presentation, and a final essay/project.

 

This course is eligible for credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. Currently declared minors should contact Stephanie Bundy (stephanie@english.ucla.edu) for enrollment assistance.

This course focuses on voices of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Black Atlantic. Drawing primarily from Anglophone texts written by authors of African and European descent, we will try to define what we mean by voice in a literature class, and what we understand the relation between voice and narrative to be. Our work will be driven by a number of intellectual and ethical questions: how do we recognize diverse voices in the historical archives? How do we recover them for twenty-first-century audiences? What is at stake in this recovery? These questions will push us to think carefully about the nature of our reading practices, particularly as we look to the past. Together, we will strive to imagine the modes of literacy and illiteracy that we bring to our encounters with materials from the past and we will continue to ask ourselves what we mean by voice, by speech, by silence, and by authority—particularly as these relate to a broad constellation of forms, genres, and modes of mediation.

 

Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.

Reserved for Senior American Literature and Culture majors on first pass. All other Dept. of English majors and minors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This course centers on Phillis Wheatley: her life, her poetry, her community, and her legacy. Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved Black woman and poet who was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and brought to New England when she was only seven years old. In our class, we’ll explore Wheatley’s writing by centering the insights of Black feminist scholars and makers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (from whose recent book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, our course title is drawn). We’ll dive deeply into Wheatley’s writing and neoclassical influences to understand how her work grapples with structures of oppression in often coded ways. And we’ll follow Hartman, whose notion of “critical fabulation” provided Jeffers with the conceptual tools for developing alternate ways of honoring and amplifying Wheatley’s world and work.

Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.

This is a survey of colonial American literatures and cultures. Although most of the texts on the syllabus were written in colonies that would eventually become part of the United States, the course itself is not designed to be a literary history of the US. Instead, we will consider these texts in their local, regional, and Atlantic contexts, and study the theological, political, and literary issues that framed the colonial experiences they describe. We will examine major concepts and themes that include indigeneity, exploration and captivity, puritan theology, and the parallel rise of Atlantic enlightenment and slavery. Our investigations will push us to test the conceptual limits of these categories as we trace their roles in shaping the modern language of community and nation.

 

Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.

 

This class will be reserved for senior English majors and American Literature & Culture majors on first pass, and will open up to non-seniors on second pass.

Some say hip hop was born just over fifty years ago when a creative kid with a big sound system threw a back-to-school party in the Bronx. But hip hop as we know it today is at once much older and much younger than that. This class will center on one facet of hip hop—the lyric performance of rap artists—against the backdrop of its expansive culture. We’ll consider dozens of artists, from Tupac and Biggie to Kendrick and Drake, MC Lyte and Ms. Lauryn Hill to Doechii and Rapsody. The goal of the course is (1) to build a literary-critical vocabulary for discussing rap’s poetics and (2) to gain a greater appreciation for the art and science of rapping to a beat.

Starting in the Late Antique period with the sayings of the Christian desert fathers (and mothers) in the Egyptian and Syrian deserts, the course traces the traditions of desert spirituality, poverty, hospitality, and asceticism through early monasticism and up to the modern period, the latter including work by Flaubert, Eliot, Perse, Jabès, Baudrillard, and Deleuze.

Limited seats will be held for Study of Religion majors/minors. SoR majors/minors should contact Beth Kraemer at bdkraemer@humnet.ucla.edu to place an enrollment request.

Gothic conventions—crumbling castles, supernatural villains, damsels in distress, dark doubles—have survived, thrived, and evolved in British popular fiction over the course of three centuries. In this course, we will explore examples of Gothic and Gothic-influenced fiction from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. We will consider its historical and cultural contexts as well as its enduring mass appeal. Texts will include Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as shorter works by Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Angela Carter, and others.

This course troubles dominant conceptions of “science fiction” by reading Indigenous horror, science fiction, fantasy, comics, and speculative storytelling through decolonial, feminist, and queer frameworks. We will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres by reading late 20^th and early 21^st century Indigenous non-realist texts. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous Wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use “wonder” to subvert genre conventions, challenge heteropatriarchal and anti-queer colonial violence, and imagine healing futures for human and more-than-human communities and ecologies. Our course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.

We might begin by asking, what is not algorithmic literature today? Or: how can literary and aesthetic interventions aid the emerging field of “Critical AI” studies? Rather than introduce algorithmic literature or “algo-lit” as a distinct literary category, this course wonders if it’s still possible to consider literature beyond the algorithmic conduits that characterize the networked present. The creation and study of literature today is facilitated by a range of digital formats and networked consoles, each of which introduce new practices of production, circulation, reception, and reading. Alongside these transformations, we’ll explore a range of new literary genres inhabiting, for example, computer scripts, image macros, social media, sound releases, interactive applications, video games, and print-on-demand books. Thinking through the present, this introduction examines the history and future of literature through the everyday experience of the algorithms that run computers and electronic devices. From the history of digital poetics to recent internet publications, we’ll track the development of literature under the influence of algorithmic computation up to works published in the present, as they emerge throughout the quarter. In lockstep, the course considers the category of “algorithmic literature” as a way to think about historical works remediated to the internet, in a wide range of (post-)digital and generative AI formats. The course requires short weekly critical experiments in an open format, as well as a final project, which may be critical or creative in form, developed in conversation with the instructor. No previous experience in programming, poetry, or literature is required.

Eating can be a fraught undertaking. As the food studies scholar Maggie Kilgour points out: “Eating depends upon and enforces an absolute division between inside and outside; but in the act itself that opposition disappears, dissolving the structure it appears to produce.” Troubling the divide between within and without, and between material and figurative, food offers a lens for interrogating the ideologies that shape our tastes, and the often overlooked ways in which we are connected to food systems. In this course, we will study a range of texts – including a novel, poetry, life writing, critical essays, and films – that grapple with the complicated issues surrounding food, appetite, hunger, and taste.

 

This course fulfills an upper-division requirement for the Literature & the Environment minor. Students in the minor may contact Steph Bundy (stephanie@english.ucla.edu) to enroll.

This course surveys influential cultural and political theorists, beginning with Marx and moving forward into the twenty-first century. With a particular focus on the literary and aesthetic implications of their ideas, we will read the foundational works in theoretical fields including but not limited to Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, cultural studies, biopolitics, and new materialism.

 

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to pursue departmental honors.

Approaches to literary studies often favor national, ethnic, and/or historical approaches. Postcolonial Studies expanded this approach by theorizing literature in relationship to histories of empire and violence at a worldly, transnational scale. What would it mean to reframe a postcolonial/decolonial approach to literature and the arts through the lens of militarism, especially in relationship to the environment? This class engages these questions by turning to literary works from Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania/the Pacific and South Asia to examine their histories of empire as well as how creative practitioners from these regions have engaged the vexed representations and experiences of militarism, particularly in regards to gender. Topics to explore include nuclearization as well as multi-scalar concerns from climate change to intimacies with more-than-human others. Reading materials will be interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretical. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a presentation, and a final essay/project.

 

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to pursue departmental honors.

 

This course is eligible for credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. Currently declared minors should contact Stephanie Bundy (stephanie@english.ucla.edu) for enrollment assistance.

The word “citizen” is absent from the Bill of Rights. Instead, the document enumerates rights more broadly in terms of the “person.” What is the relationship between personhood and citizenship, and how were these important concepts imagined in the early United States? What role did literature play in shaping ideas about personhood and rights? This class offers an interdisciplinary survey of representations of personhood and rights in the century after the American Revolution. It invites students to understand fiction and literature broadly not as mere reflections of history, but as impactful cultural expressions that shape and challenge perceptions of personhood, citizenship, and rights. We will read fiction, essays, as well as select legal and political document. Readings will include selections by Phillis Wheatley Peters, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Washington Irving, William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” T.S. Eliot wrote toward the end of his modernist poem, “The Waste Land.” Testing the relationship between form, fragmentation, and destruction, this course looks at a number of literary, critical, and philosophical texts whose defining feature is the fragment. This may take the form of notes, aphorisms, elisions, lists, incompletion, or absence. We will consider writing by H.D, Roland Barthes, Moyra Davey, Teju Cole, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Trinh T Minh Ha, Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, and Harryette Mullen, among others.

Most representations of nuclear weapon history focus on the American attacks on Japan, but during the subsequent five decades the U.S., France, and the U.K. detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons in the atolls and islands of the Pacific. The scale of atomic weapon detonations have often been described as “unrepresentable,” posing a particular challenge to literature and the arts in determining what narrative forms, genres, and modes of representation are adequate to representing these ongoing legacies of the Cold War. While nuclear detonations are often figured by their destructive ‘flash’ in history, many creative practitioners, activists, historians, and exposed communities have emphasized what Rob Nixon has termed the ‘slow violence’ of irradiation, which often has no temporal limits and is deeply embodied. We will explore the work of Indigenous writers, filmmakers, and artists from  Aotearoa/New Zealand, Samoa, Tahiti (French Polynesia), Hawai`i, and other areas of Oceania to engage how the violence of nuclear colonialism has been represented, contested, and embodied. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a short presentation, and a final essay/project.

 

This course is eligible for credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. Currently declared minors should contact Stephanie Bundy (stephanie@english.ucla.edu) for enrollment assistance.

Exploration of poetry and prose of perhaps greatest satirist in history of English literature, Anglo-Irish Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Since Swift endures not just as influential writer whose Gulliver’s Travels has achieved myth status, but also as character who starred in novels and plays by likes of Edith Sitwell and William Butler Yeats, study also of his literary afterlife. Students sample range of critical responses to Swift from William Makepeace Thackeray to George Orwell to Edward Said, who insightfully described Swift as writer proleptically aware of himself as “a problem for the future.”

Coverage of six novels of Jane Austen, as well as literary works that most influenced her: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of Rights of Woman, Gothic novel, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.

Study of American poetry from Puritan period through end of 19th century.

This course is about American writers in the decade following World War One. Our goal is to understand these modernist works as products of a creative ferment in the art and culture of the 1920s. That ferment had to do with the remaking of older forms of artistic expression, the result of changing economic circumstances, post-war malaise, speculation, and new technologies of image and sound reproduction. We will examine the multiple contexts out of which these literary works emerged, including modern painting, art photography, early cinema, atonal musical composition, avant-garde poetry, and abstract sculpture. The texts we read will focus upon new narrative techniques, controversial subject matter, and the formal innovations that distinguish the prose of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, and Willa Cather between the years 1919 and 1929. Because these works respond to the transformations brought about by the post-war era, we will read sections of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory for historical context.

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously taken ENGL 177 on the topic of The American 1920s with Prof. Dimuro.

This course will look at crime fiction—primarily novels, some films—over the past century or so. Mystery, crime, and suspense stories have a long history but a special place in a modern world.

What can such stories tell us about how we experience our personal lives and our public life?

What form do these stories take?  Why do we like them?   How can they help us understand the ways in which we work and play today?

Readings will include writers such as Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, James M. Cain, Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tom McCarthy, and Natsuo  Kirino.

Focused literary analysis will center the course discussions and the required papers.

 

Not open for credit who have previously taken ENGL 179 on the same topic with Prof. Seltzer.

**Not open for credit to students who have previously completed ENGL 136A or ENGL 136B.

 

Course Description:

This course will explore how all types of different visual and performing arts can serve as inspiration for crafting poetry. Students will learn to engage paintings, photographs, movies, dance, and music in our poetry, identify poetic moments in artistic expression, and translate them into written form. Students will learn to enhance their ability to connect with art and world cultures and discover new sources of inspiration for their writing.

How to Apply:

Enrollment is by instructor consent. If admitted, you must attend the first class.

To apply for the course, submit by e-mail a Google Docs link containing up to two of your best poems. Make sure access to the document is open for everyone. 

In the body of the e-mail, provide your name, UID number, major, class level, and a brief note about your experiences with poetry, your favorite poets, and why you would like to take this class.

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Smith 136A.1) and it should be sent to yahyaashour98@gmail.com AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 14, 2025.

 

Acceptance Notifications:

Accepted students will be notified by e-mail.

Due to the volume of submissions, the professor is unable to provide feedback or suggestions regarding the students’ submitted work.

Course Description:

In this advanced poetry workshop, you’ll write a new poem each week, and can expect many of the same experiences you’d have in any other writing course: discussion of exemplary published work, group work, and peer critique. You’ll also be expected to write a review of a recent single-author book of poems, and submit a collection of your revised poems at the end of the quarter.

How to Apply:

Enrollment is by instructor consent. If admitted, you must attend the first class.

To apply for the course, submit by e-mail attachment three to five of your best poems. In the body of the e-mail, provide your name, UID number, major, class level, and a brief note (no more than 250 words) about your experiences with poetry, your favorite literary poets (especially contemporary poets), any other creative writing courses you may have taken (none required!), and any other creative writing courses to which you are applying this quarter.

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Smith 136B.1) and it should be sent to rwilson@english.ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu. Accepted students will be notified by e-mail.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 21, 2025.

 

Acceptance Notifications:

Accepted students will be notified by e-mail.

Due to the volume of submissions, the professor is unable to provide feedback or suggestions regarding the students’ submitted work.

 

Course Description:

This class is an intensive workshop on the reading and writing of short literary fiction.

We will consider the short story form, studying one or more great short stories weekly which the students will take turns presenting to the class. All students will be expected to read these stories multiple times and annotate them to identify the mechanics and the magic.

Students will write one short story every week for the first five weeks. After that, they will write two slightly longer stories and work on revisions. The goals of the class are 1) to help the students develop a regular practice of writing, 2) to learn the craft of writing fiction, and 3) to develop useful editorial skills.

Emphasis will be on developing the student writer’s individual voice and writing ability.

How to Apply:

Please submit no more than 5 (double-spaced) pages of your FICTION (Please don’t send in plays, screenplays, or poems) and list any workshops you’ve taken in the past. Please list your three favorite short stories and their authors. Also, tell me your class standing (sophomore, junior, etc.)

If you are applying to more than one workshop and have a preference, please indicate that preference so we can try to accommodate it.

Submissions must be e-mailed to huneven@me.com When e-mailing submissions, please put your last name and the course and section number in the subject line (example: Smith 137B.)

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2025.

 

Acceptance notifications:

You will be notified if you are accepted before classes begin.

Due to the volume of submissions, the professor is unable to provide feedback or suggestions regarding the students’ submitted work.

Course Description:

In this workshop devoted to narrative nonfiction, we will study short samples of the genre, and students will write their own pieces to be shared and discussed in class.  Assignments will include first-person pieces (e.g., memoir), profiles based on interviews, and fact pieces or features incorporating library and internet research.  The course is not limited to English majors and has enrolled many students from across the humanities as well as in the physical and social sciences.

How to Apply:

Enrollment requires a PTE, and interested students should submit (1) a 250-word personal statement about their writing goals and interests, (2) a list of ALL undergraduate courses taken so far, and (3) a 5-10 page double-spaced nonfiction writing sample.  Please submit all applications via email to <ejager@humnet.ucla.edu>.

Acceptance Notifications:

Accepted applicants will be notified by email before the start of classes.

Unfortunately, due to the volume of submissions, the professor will be unable to provide feedback or suggestions on the students’ submitted work.

 

This class is an eligible non-fiction topic for the Professional Writing minor.

 

Course Description:

This creative writing course explores new genres of writing on the internet. We follow emerging trends in digital poetics to develop new ways of creating works that are equally likely to appear on Instagram, through digital video games, in a chat story, generated with LLMs, or even printed on demand in paper format. Studying digital platforms and formats alongside contemporary art and letters, we’ll reimagine experimental writing practices through today’s emerging genres. How might social media platforms facilitate serial narratives? What do games demand of poetry? To what literary purposes might we direct webcomics, memes, or Twitch streams? Using a collective workshop format, we’ll engage in a series of writing experiments that attempt to find some of our own poetic responses to today’s technological environment. No previous training in creative writing or new media is required.

How to Apply:

Please submit a cover letter introducing yourself and a sample of your writing or creative work in any format (no more than five pages, links to online work in any genre encouraged). In your cover letter, please include the following: your student identification number, email address, year of graduation, and a brief statement that addresses your interest in the course and any relevant coursework or creative practices—and finally, mention some of your favorite works on the internet.

Please email your submission in PDF to dsnelson@humnet.ucla.edu and creativewriting@english.ucla.edu. Please title your PDF starting with your last name, i.e.: lastname_spring-www_submission.pdf.

 

Acceptance Notifications:

Accepted applicants will be notified by email before the start of classes.

Unfortunately, due to the volume of submissions, the professor will be unable to provide feedback or suggestions on the students’ submitted work.

In this seminar we try to answer two basic questions that should be of interest all students of literature and culture: what is a novel, and why does it matter? We will approach these large questions from two related areas of inquiry, including (1) the novel’s historical emergence as a massively popular cultural phenomenon over hundreds of years of its development, and (2) the novel as a distinct literary genre with its own narrative conventions, techniques, standards of truth and value, as well as conceptions of human character. Both of these areas have been the subject of intense theoretical speculation. Seminar students will read the most provocative and engaging statements about the novel from important writers over the last hundred years or so, and will use their insights to analyze two or three novels from different historical time periods. Requirements include oral presentations, group work, class discussion, short papers, and a longer final paper.

The division and contention between the country and the city is the source of one of the greatest political chasms of our moment.  What might the history of fiction set in the countryside have to tell us about this conflict, and the way in which rural life has portrayed and understood in our increasingly urbanized world? Agriculture is where nature meets culture: what is the result for fiction? What makes a novel (or a life) rural as opposed to urban or suburban?  Does it have to be about farming? Why is rural fiction so often penned by city dwellers, and how does that matter? Why is the contemporary rural novel so frequently a study of poverty rather than an idyllic pastoral life?   Why do so many universities have departments of urban studies, and so few of rural studies? Questions such as these will motivate our reading, which will primarily be concerned with the American fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Authors to be studied may include Cather, Steinbeck, Kingsolver, Wilson, Ward, among others. Long distance readers only need apply.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

In this course, we’ll take a deep dive into a text that is one of the longest novels written the English language: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, first published in 1748. Though we’ll be focusing on a single text, the reading for this course will be substantial – the Penguin edition we’ll be using comes to 1499 pages, and they are large pages.

The course will toggle between formalist and political analysis – since Richardson’s novel is remarkable, not least, as an expansive account of threats to bodily and sexual autonomy. (The novel remains all too apt in our present moment). We’ll find together that Richardson’s vast novel opens up a variety of topics for research and discussion, including gender and sexuality, media theory, the rise of the novel, the history of capitalism, and the relationship between literature and philosophy. Our encounters with the novel will be enriched by visits to the Clark Library, where students will work with archival materials that will help us flesh out the world of the text.

Students who complete the seminar successfully are awarded a $1000 scholarship. Subsidies for use of Lyft are provided for student transportation to and from the Clark Library.

This class is limited in size. To apply, please fill out the form at https://bit.ly/4g7xNBk by Friday, February 7.

This course is the annual Ahmanson seminar, and will be held in part at the Clark Library. An application is required (see details above.)

In this seminar we will study together the work of one of the great novelists of the nineteenth century in Britain, George Eliot. Eliot, whose real name was Marianne Evans,  wrote fiction that was able to distil and explore major ideas in philosophy, ethics, science, history, aesthetics and politics. The central questions of her work include how people live meaningful and creative lives, and how people ought to treat one another. In examining these questions, we will focus in particular on Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch (1871-3), which manages to be both the story of ordinary life in a small town, and an inquiry into some major historical and philosophical ideas. (It’s also very funny). We will also look at some of the major artistic and philosophical sources that were important to Eliot. The aim of the seminar will be to study Eliot’s writings slowly and carefully, and in the process to learn a lot about the culture of the nineteenth century, as well as the vast range of Eliot’s ideas that are still relevant to our lives today.

The Basques were the first people to settle central Europe.  They have a unique language and the rarest blood type in the world.  This course examines the culture and history of the Basques and their immigration to the American West.  In this seminar, we will read a broad sampling of Basque American literature, including memoirs, novels and poetry, cookbooks, travel guides, children’s books, language instruction manuals, and detective fiction, as well as Basque literature in English translation—all of which documents the unusual and mysterious nature of this immigrant group.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

The unlikely story of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, has fascinated scholars and general readers alike—how could it be that not one or two but three authors whose works would live on after their untimely deaths could emerge from a single family in an isolated Yorkshire village? Indeed, the legend of the Brontës is always in danger of eclipsing the works themselves. In this capstone seminar, we will read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). We will consider these novels in their social, historical, and artistic contexts, examining each through a variety of critical lenses, and will discuss how the mystique of the Brontë family story and its r/Romantic backdrop has shaped our expectations as 21^st-century readers of these novels.

Variable specialized studies course in African American literature. Topics may include Harlem Renaissance, African American literature in Nadir, black women’s writing, contemporary African American fiction, African American poetry.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

This seminar considers the enmeshments of queerness, trans*ness, and Indigeneity in the contemporary Indigenous expressive cultures of North America. Reading fiction, poetry, visual media works, performance, and critical theory, we will trace the ways that artists and theorists craft decolonial conceptions of gender, sexuality, embodiment, sensation, kinship, and movement. Focusing on works published since 2012, we will follow the shifting contours of queer and gender-expansive Indigenous art and theory in the 21st century. We will also highlight the ways that writers imagine queer and trans* intimacies with the more-than-human world amidst world-ending structures and events. Our course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.