Fall 2023

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 certain designated sections are 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.

A ten-week sprint through almost a thousand years of literary history, this course offers an introduction to some of the greatest hits of British literature from the early Middle Ages through the 17th century, emphasizing connections among representative works, changes to the English language and literary forms, key themes, genres, and major authors. Along the way, there will be dragons; knights in shining armor; “boisterous” women; a very bad business agreement involving a pound of flesh; texts that probe medieval and early modern ideas about gender, sexuality, race, colonialism, and religious difference; proto-science fiction; riddles; and love poems (including one about a cat).

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 September 17, 2023. 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. Students applying to English 20W should enroll in an alternate course during their 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.

This course is a gateway to the American Literature and Culture major. In a time when ideas of American exceptionalism, supremacy, and justice are as contested as they have ever been, our goal will be to examine what “America” and what the “United States” mean in national, hemispheric, and global contexts. Using interdisciplinary approaches, we will consider the literary and cultural currents that shaped how those terms were used over five centuries of colonial history and how they continue to shape literary and cultural studies. The key terms that will shape our discussions are origins (the making of a colony; the making of a nation; the making of culture), identities (the relation between individual, community, and culture), and media (how we access the past and how we narrate for the future).

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the American Literature and Culture major. Non-majors seeking GE credit may enroll, space permitting, if they have completed the Writing II requirement.

Environmental issues are often envisioned as mainly questions of science, technology, and policy. The environmental humanities approach environmental problems instead as predominantly issues of cultures, histories, social structures, and values. This course will introduce you to the major concepts, narratives, and images that have shaped environmentalist thought in the United States since the 1960s and compare them to environmental thought, writing, and activism in other parts of the world. How do environmental problems such as pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, biodiversity loss or global warming change when they are seen through the lens of different histories, memories, languages, and cultures? How do particular media, storytelling templates, and images shape our thinking about such issues? How can we change existing stories and images? How do we best engage when fundamental differences in the framing of a particular ecological problem emerge?

We will explore these questions through a wide range of textual and visual works from environmental scholarship, nonfiction, and journalism to graphic novels, films, and videos. The course will also introduce you to the way in which humanists and social scientists in anthropology, geography, history, literary studies, and philosophy (among other disciplines) have engaged with environmental issues. We will explore how concepts such as pastoral, wilderness, toxicity, environmental justice, biodiversity and conservation, trash, and climate change, and the Anthropocene have shaped how different communities think about environmental issues, and how we might think about them differently.

English M30 is a required preparatory course for the Literature & Environment minor. L&E minors should contact the English undergraduate advising office for assistance with enrollment.

Study of how visual media, including advertising, still and moving images, and narrative films, influence contemporary aesthetics, politics, and knowledge

This course focuses on women writers and filmmakers who live in and write about Los Angeles. Ranging from the personal essay, memoir, and science fiction, as well as the romantic comedy, sitcom, and documentary, writers and filmmakers encountered in this course loiter in L.A.’s neighborhoods and their communities that expand, complicate, and enrich what we think we know about the City of Angels. We will focus on how gender, in relation to race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class inform one’s orientation to and mobility within the city. We will learn about the history of L.A., from its more visible areas on the west side, like Hollywood or Beverly Hills to its edges and outlying spaces like the San Fernando Valley, the Inland Empire, and East L.A. Students will think critically about how women’s accounts of living in L.A., moving to L.A., or even visiting for just a little while, have contributed to and intervened within the stories the city tells about itself.

After Ada Limón’s appointment to Poet Laureate of the United States in 2022, she remarked in an interview, “I’m very interested in what it is to have identity be a doorway, a place where we can open up to different possibilities. I didn’t sign up for anything limited when I chose poetry. I signed up for something that is about trying on some level to harness the unsayable.” This class takes Limón’s words as a cue to focus on a special topic within American culture: contemporary Latinx poetry dating from 2010 to the present. This class is designed to support students’ skills in reading and analyzing poetry in the context of current Latinx politics to understand how poets’ choices on the page respond to and influence our political world. Together, we will examine how poetry (re)imagine the ever-shifting demographics of Latinx populations. As Limón suggests, poetry opens onto difference and openness. Through readings by Raquel Salas Rivera, Javier Zamora, and Natalie Diaz among others, this class asks how this openness of poetry and poetics can theorize “Latinx,” and how poetry can attune us to what is still “unsayable.”

This course will be reserved for American Literature and Culture majors on first pass and during summer orientation. Non-majors hoping to take the course for GE or Diversity credit may enroll after September 13.

Not open for credit to English majors or students with credit for course 150A or 150B. Shakespeare’s command of the theater and our imagination, perhaps our “global” imagination is the centerpiece of our course. Our course is especially invested in helping students understand Shakespeare as a sign of cultural knowledge. Since at least the nineteenth century, if not before, to have culture (in Anglo-American societies and colonies) has gone hand-and-hand with “having” Shakespeare. Our course will explore some of the dimensions of the relationship between Shakespeare and culture as we carry out “close readings” of individual plays. Throughout, we will focus on a diversity of issues, ranging from formal literary ones to broader cultural ones, including genre, historiography, nationalism, race, sexuality, religion, and psychology. While our course is an introduction to Shakespeare, it does not reduce Shakespeare to oversimplification or platitudes. Our objective is to introduce students to the complexities, densities, beauty, elusiveness, and sometimes, yes, the startling simplicity of this playwright and phenomenon known as “Shakespeare.”

This course explores expanded forms of comics—from traditional graphic novels to the most recent experiments in text and image. Alongside a study of foundational works in comics and graphic novels, we’ll also survey recent publications in manga, webcomics, visual novels, and other experiments in graphic fiction. In each instance, this course attends to issues of representation in comics, including questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability in new modes of graphic storytelling. Students will also experiment with making their own critical comics and graphic narratives. Throughout, we will read many comics and related forms, including the work of Lynda Barry, Eleanor Davis, The Fullbright Company, Akiko Higashimuro, Satoshi Kon, Ilan Manouach, Matt Marden, David Mazzucchelli, Scott McCloud, Brian McDonald and Toby Cypress, Richard McGuire, Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, Trung Le Nguyen, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, Ben Passmore, Alec Robbins, Dan Salvato, Walter Kaheró:Ton Scott, David Sim, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, and Disa Wallander, among others—up to and including those we discover together in the course of our study.

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 Fall meeting (time and day posted in the Schedule of Classes)!

This course introduces students to basic concepts, theories, and methods in research on narrative across the media of fiction, nonfiction, fictional film, documentary film, videogames, graphic novels, and digital forms of narrative on and off social media. The class will explore storytelling situations, plot structure, character construction, fictionality and nonfictionality, cultural story templates, modes of reading/hearing narrative, image-text relations, and cross-media translation (text, film, games, Internet). It will survey different approaches to these issues, from structuralist and sociological approaches to narrative theory in the 1960s and 70s to recent ones that emphasize empirical study, quantitative tools, and digital media. Students will be encouraged to apply the theoretical and methodological tools to their own areas of interest and research.

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

A rattle bag of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow entertainments and edifications, the Canterbury Tales resist easy categorization. This quarter, we’ll engage Chaucer’s obsessive attention to how language functions and fails to function, how speech can instruct or mislead, educate or confuse, and how it can become more or less meaningful through repetition. Among other types of speech in the Canterbury Tales, we’ll encounter gossip, prophecy, prayer, promises of love, and oaths of friendship, and we’ll analyze their workings as they construct gender, faith, and sexuality over a number of the individual tales.

There will be a Middle English quiz, a creative translation project and accompanying short 2-page essay, and two papers: a 4-5 page paper and a final 10-12 page paper. Class participation is expected.

In this course, we will examine the intersection of commerce and literature in a number of the Canterbury Tales. We will close-read a number of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales including “The Reeve’s Tale,” “The Pardoner’s Tale,” “The Shipman’s Tale,” and “The Summoner’s Tale,” in light of thinking about “filthy lucre” (“turpe lucrum”) found in texts on avarice and the other capital sins as well as on money and financial speculation. In approaching these tales contextually, we will explore the extent to which the fraudster, trader and usurer frequently merge and become indistinguishable from each other. By reading Chaucer through the lens of “filthy lucre,” we will also understand the relationship between avarice and the other sins. Through this intensive study, you will become experts on sin—surely an enviable status—and also, not coincidentally, on a rich cultural and intellectual history.

Questing is central to many romances. Romance heroes and heroines seek fame, honor, inheritances, recognition, and knowledge, risking their survival while encountering strange lands and hostile challengers, at home and abroad. Many romances are circular there-and-back-again journeys, where the quest only becomes meaningful during the back-at-court debrief where public recognition is ratified. However other romance quests are one way, generating new relationships, new paradigms, and unintended world-transforming consequences. This class explores open-ended and unfinished romances that take a voyage out never to return. How do such quests critique normative social and political structures, subjectivities, and organizations of gender, race, and status? How does the formal suspense of a quest implicate operations of desire and invite authors and readers to experiment in new literary forms?

Texts may include: The Quest of the Holy Grail, Chretien de Troyes’ Percival and The Knight of the Cart, Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose, the Middle English Beves of Hampton, and Kyng Alisaunder and other Alexander romances, the Romance of Moraien, the Roman de Silence, and The Book of John Mandeville. Secondary texts may include Jacque Lacan Seminar VII, Susan Crane, Helen Cooper, and Marcel Elias.

Requirements: 1-2 pp. Weekly Response papers: 30%, Two 2000-word papers OR One 2000-word paper and a ten-minute class presentation OR a larger class project with class presentation and discussion: 40%; Class participation: 30%.

The Auchinleck manuscript was written in London in the 1330s. The codex contains a bewildering array of texts: saints’ lives, Arthurian romances, and history writing are set amidst satire, and social and political complaint. Working with the online digitized manuscript, as well as editions of the texts, we will consider the idea of the medieval book, both as a pre-print artifact and as a digital phenomena. We will also focus on the ways in which some of Auchinleck’s popular medieval texts explore issues of gender, race, and faith in their representations of domesticity, gendered medieval labor, and romance depictions of the “Tartar” east.

There will be a Middle English quiz, and two papers: a 4-5 page paper and a final 12-15 page paper. Class participation is expected.

A study of selected plays from the first half of Shakespeare’s career.

This course provides an upper-division introduction to Shakespeare’s plays by surveying a few of the plays we historically and contemporarily recognize as some of his most consequential plays. Drawing on dramatic works from the entirety of his career, this course emphasizes the formal and historical properties of Shakespeare’s plays (and stage) and the ways Shakespeare’s plays continue to engage questions of race (including whiteness), gender, sexuality, and class, as well as questions of religion, philosophy, and politics. How all these questions are embodied, put into bodies, signals for our course the way Shakespeare’s dynamic poetry has become essential hallmarks for defining both the modern and the global. Some of the possible texts for our course are A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Requirements for the course include class participation, a term paper, and a midterm and final exam.

Not open for credit to students who took English 150C with Prof. Little in Winter 2022.

Into the 20^th, Greco-Roman texts written between 750 BC and ca 200 AD dominated the curriculum from grade school through college in both England and America. These are works of extraordinary importance (e.g., the checks-and-balances structure of the American constitution comes from the 1^st century BC Greek historian, Polybius), and often of extraordinary beauty, variety, and intelligence. (Some of the stuff can also make one’s hair stand on end, but we’ll deal with that when the time comes.) The course focuses on English Renaissance translations of the classics because the Renaissance was the rebirth (the re-naissance) of classical learning and literature, and one of the foci will be the Tudor-Stuart contexts of these translations; but the class also provides a general introduction to the classical foundations on which virtually all English and American literature rest. Readings include selections from Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, Plutarch, Xenophon on topics as far-flung as love, duty, sex, science, and empire.

There will be a weekly short paper and a final project.

No late enrollments.

This course offers a survey of colonial American literatures and cultures. While many of our texts were written in colonies that would become part of the United States, the course is not a literary history of the U.S. Instead, we’ll read works from the Chesapeake, New England, and the Caribbean on their own terms, stressing their local, regional, and Atlantic contexts and recovering the contingencies that made the new nation far from inevitable. Each week will focus on a pair of typical early American figures: the explorer, the native, the castaway, the captive, the convert, the heretic, the preacher, the witch, the master, the slave. Tackling a range of genres—settlement reportage, sermons, natural histories, political pamphlets, slave narratives, poetry—we’ll explore themes of discovery, indigeneity, providentialism, imperialism, cultural exchange, and the parallel rise of Enlightenment and slavery. We’ll conclude with a 1767 novel whose mixed-race, gender-inverted retelling of Robinson Crusoe recaps these themes by reconvening the course’s key character types.

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

For most of the 19th century, London had a split identity: glittering districts alongside teeming slums; fashionable gentlemen and ladies living in close proximity to an underworld of rogues, vagabonds, prostitutes, conspirators, ballad singers and thieves. This course will explore literary accounts of London’s dual identity in this period and on into the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as the gradual attempt to bring to order and settle the turbulent urban space: to tame the many resorts of vagabonds, thieves, and outcasts, to “civilize” those regarded as racial others—a process that would continue following the absorption of a wave of South Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the 1950s and later, and as today’s fast-paced global metropolis continues to deal with stark disparities in wealth and income and bitter racial divisions. Readings will include fiction, poetry and the visual arts from the 18th century through the Victorian and on to more recent work such as Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners, Alan Moore’s From Hell and Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah.

Not open to students who have previously completed ENGL 119 under the same title and description with Professor Makdisi.

In this course, we’ll ask how colonial models of property and personhood shaped both the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the world we continue to inhabit today. Drawing on critical work in Indigenous Studies and Black Studies, we’ll examine the ways in which political and economic ideas associated with the Enlightenment helped to produce racialized and gendered subject positions that were coded as pathological and subordinate. Through readings of eighteenth-century fiction and poetry, political and philosophical treatises, and autobiographical narratives, we will explore how the notion of a “possessive individual” affected the lives of laborers, women, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans. In addition to our eighteenth-century texts, we’ll turn to a number of more recent “texts” (including podcasts and contemporary new media) as a way of grappling with the ongoing reality of settler colonial histories. Throughout the class, we will look to find ways of moving beyond representations of violence and conquest.

Earns pre-1848 credit for the American Literature and Culture major.

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.”

Not open to students who completed ENGL 139 with Prof. Deutsch in Spring 2023.

This course will consider some of the greatest essays of nineteenth-century Britain, with particular attention to the ways they relate debates about art and beauty to hopes for a better or fairer society. Along the way, we will explore questions of what it means to live a cultured life, and what the criticism of art and literature might have to do (if anything) with the criticism of society. Against the backdrop of a historical period which saw massive social change, the rise of democracy, and utopian dreams, we will study the capacities of the short essay form, in contrast to the novel and poetry, for handling the big ideas of their times. We will read prose by authors including William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, William Morris, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee. A coda on later responses to the nineteenth century will include James Baldwin, John Berger and Susan Sontag.

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? That identity has been scrutinized for several decades now, perhaps as part of an examination of the ideology of American exceptionalism, perhaps as part of a critique of colonial displacement and erasure of identity. This course will continue to investigate the marker. We will also put pressure on “writer” by reading texts not usually considered part of a literary canon. “Writer,” though gives us a bit of carte blanche to explore all kinds of writing that allows us to pursue some of the questions about “major” and “American.”

This course is motivated by two realities: the enormous popularity of true crime stories and police procedurals in contemporary media and the simultaneous fact of the U.S.’s status as the world’s largest jailor. Prison abolitionists working today emphasize the importance of understanding that the prison itself has a history: it is a product of human design, rather than a natural part of society. In this course, we’ll focus on the prison system’s inception in eighteenth-century Europe, when incarceration was first theorized as a more humane form of punishment than alternatives such as execution or transportation. In doing so, we’ll follow the lead of prison abolitionists to highlight incarceration’s non-inevitability. Our readings will be guided by some key questions: Why has criminality been such a popular subject for mass culture, both today and in the past? What role have cultural objects played in the transformation of institutions like the modern prison? And, finally, how might writing—and the arts broadly—help us to both imagine and build a more just world?

This course focuses on queer literature, art, film, and performance made in and about the 1990s in the U.S. What was happening in the 90s that both necessitated and made possible queer innovation and experimentation with style, aesthetics, medium, and genre? How are the 90s remembered, imagined, and historicized as a decade instrumental to the emergence of a transformative queer politics, but also of queer culture and queer theory? In the midst of the global AIDS crisis, and the heightened consolidation of U.S. neoliberalism and U.S. neoconservatism, as well as U.S. imperialism and military expansion abroad, what did queerness aim to disrupt and destroy, but also enable and create? We will consider how deviance, stigma, and bad taste were recuperated and reappropriated in queer culture and queer studies in the 90s for the means of claiming and constructing a critical queerness as something that felt different, radical, and new. We will ask how the queer 90s sheds light on our contemporary moment, and how it is that the recent queer past informs our sense of queerness in the present.

This course examines a range of Asian American literary works—autobiography, the realist novel, modernist narrative, short fiction, manifesto, and theatrical performance, among others—that depict Asians’ experiences in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1980s. Issues to look at include colonial subjugation and displacement, trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic migration, imperial wars, racialization, generational conflict, social activism, and identity formations along gender or class lines. Lectures will emphasize making sense of texts in contexts, with an emphasis on the narrative voice, thematic investment, and formal property of the texts examined as products of the interplay between evolving ethnic authorship and social and cultural constraints on Asian American creative expression as a minoritarian discourse.

Survey of African American literature from the 18th century to World War I, including oral and written forms (folktales, spirituals, sermons; fiction, autobiography, poetry). 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 on the historical and cultural contexts of the works as well as on diverse strategies for engaging formal aspects of the assigned materials. Requirements include attendance and participation in section, a term paper, and a final exam.

Fifty years ago this fall, during a back-to-school party put on by two teenagers at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the South Bronx, hip hop was born. It’s a serviceable origin story, a blend of myth and fact that marks the public emergence of a deeply-rooted culture. In recognition of hip hop’s first half-century, this course will chart its past, present, and possible futures through close attention to the language of rap lyrics. Along the way, we’ll be asking a number of questions, including: How does rap extend the Western poetic tradition and how does it complicate it? What does virtuosity look and sound like in rap? How has rap changed over the past decade? How has poetry changed because of rap? Among the performers we’ll consider are: Kendrick Lamar, 2Pac, Nas, Megan thee Stallion, Mac Miller, Ice Spice, Nipsey Hussle and many more.

This class is a survey of Chicanx literature from the 1960s to the present. Organized chronologically, this class will explore how various works of Chicanx literature can enrich, complicate, and deepen our understanding of the histories and meanings of the term “Chicanx.” By exploring a range of genres—novels, short stories, plays, and poetry—we will analyze the formal interventions and innovations of Chicanx literature. We will also consider how these writers engage histories of coloniality in the political and social climates of the late twentieth century. In this way, we will seek to understand how literature responds to and shapes the political and social realities of Chicanx people. With attention to Chicanx interventions in social inequalities—including, but not limited to, race, gender, sexuality, and class—we will explore how Chicanx Literature speaks to both the past and the future.

This class examines life narratives, fiction, film and popular cultural materials depicting interracial relationships and mixed-race identities in the United States. We pay particular attention to how writers engage intersecting categories of social identity, including gender, ethnicity, sexuality and economic class in plots and characters. The class also looks at how imaginative literature intersects with historical conditions, contemporary society and personal experience in its representation of racial crossing and mixing. The books we read include The Color of Water by James McBride, Caucasia by Danzy Senna, When Half is Whole by Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez, and Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience, edited by Chandra Prasad. Films include Multi-facial (Vin Diesel), The Rachel Divide (Laura Brownson), and Daughter from Danang (Vicente Franco and Gail Dolgin).

What’s so funny about the college campus? In recent years, campuses have emerged as sites for contesting urgent political and social issues: racial justice, gender identity and expression, disability rights, labor relations, and more. No wonder that satire—as both a literary genre and as an expressive mode—is everywhere these days, on page and screen. The college campus is an ideal environment for satire because it offers a nexus of social relations: courtship, custom, identity formation, instruction, service, competition, and hierarchy. It’s governed by a seasonal calendar, marked by periods of intense activity and of rest. In this course, we’ll consider recent works of campus satire that confront matters of racial and gender identity. Among our readings and viewings will be Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation (2022), Julia May Jonas’ Vladimir (2022), Freeform’s Grown-ish (2018-present), and Netflix’s The Chair (2021).

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.

In this course we will study one of the most popular genres in literature, beginning with the British murder mystery. We will then trace the genre as it mutates over time to include American noir, suspense and horror, the historical Gothic romance, international police procedurals, and literature versus genre writing. In addition, we will be visited by a local mystery writer who will talk about the process of writing and how to break into the publishing industry. Course requirements include regular attendance, participation in class discussion, occasional pop quizzes, and a final paper due on the last day of class.

We might begin by asking, what is not electronic literature today? Rather than introduce electronic literature or “e-lit” as a distinct literary category, this course wonders if it’s still possible to consider literature beyond the electronic circuits 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, Bandcamp 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 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 computation up to works published in the present, as they emerge throughout the quarter. In lockstep, the course considers the category of “electronic literature” as a way to think about historical works remediated to the internet, in a wide range of (post-)digital formats. The course requires short weekly critical experiments in an open format, as well as a mid-term and final assignment, which may be critical or creative in form, developed in conversation with the instructor. No previous experience in programming, poetry, or literature is required.

California has always been a land of contestation, ruled by different nations and colonial empires; populated by various races, cultures, religious institutions, and commercial enterprises, each with its own conflicting claims to the region. The literature about California falls into one of two categories. Some works feature a utopian narrative, presenting California as a region with an ideal climate, valuable natural resources, and liberal attitudes—the site of the entertainment industry, a place where dreams come true. Other works feature a dystopian narrative, noting that the “real” California has been occupied by a succession of foreign oppressors, and remains a state divided by race wars and debates over immigration. According to this narrative, California is associated with overpriced real estate and superficial celebrities. It is also afflicted by droughts, earthquakes, and other forms of apocalyptic weather. The works in this course reflect one or both of these narratives, which have continued over time, from the original settlement of the region until today. Class requirements include regular attendance, participation in class discussion, occasional pop quizzes, and a final paper due on the last day of class.

For most of the 19th century, London had a split identity: glittering districts alongside teeming slums; fashionable gentlemen and ladies living in close proximity to an underworld of rogues, vagabonds, prostitutes, conspirators, ballad singers and thieves. This course will explore literary accounts of London’s dual identity in this period and on into the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as the gradual attempt to bring to order and settle the turbulent urban space: to tame the many resorts of vagabonds, thieves, and outcasts, to “civilize” those regarded as racial others—a process that would continue following the absorption of a wave of South Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the 1950s and later, and as today’s fast-paced global metropolis continues to deal with stark disparities in wealth and income and bitter racial divisions. Readings will include fiction, poetry and the visual arts from the 18th century through the Victorian and on to more recent work such as Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners, Alan Moore’s From Hell and Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah.

Not open to students who have previously completed ENGL 119 under the same title and description with Professor Makdisi.

Chicago occupies a central position in the geography and literary history of the United States, both as a thoroughfare for the nation’s goods and a crossroads for its cultural energies. This course traces how writers have responded to the rapidly changing urban environment, engaging with the meaning and consequences of the world’s first skyscrapers and elevated railroads, extreme racial and economic inequality, a growing middle class and proliferation of multi-ethnic neighborhoods, as well as the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South. From its crude beginnings in the 1830s as a Western trading post to its hosting of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Chicago experienced exponential growth as the nation’s second-largest city. Poised between the regional and the cosmopolitan, the rawness of capitalism and the aspirations of high culture, the city of Chicago produced an astonishing diversity of literature over the course of its development. Some of the writers we consider in the context of urbanization, class, money, crime, and power include Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Sandra Cisneros, and several others over the last 150 years.

Using a variety of written and visual texts, this course explores the meaning of “culture,” a word with a complex history and one that continues to have currency in literary, political, and critical discourse. We will trace the term’s anthropological, sociological, and ideological meanings as they developed over the last two centuries. Topics include cultural capital, popular culture, the culture wars, conspicuous consumption, and culture as a regulatory system. Readings may include Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, essays of T.S. Eliot, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, essays of Clifford Geertz, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ German Ideology, and other theorists. We will read literary works by Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather. The goal is to use the idea of culture as a critical framework to interpret literary texts in ways that amplify the skills of close reading. Requirements: short essays, quizzes, a longer paper, and a comprehensive final examination.

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to apply to the departmental honors program.

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, Cormac McCarthy, Natsuo Kirino, Rachel Cusk, Tom McCarthy , Sayaka Murata, and China Miéville, accompanied by film and anime.

Not open for credit to students who completed English 179.3 with the same title in 21W.

This course will consider some of the greatest essays of nineteenth-century Britain, with particular attention to the ways they relate debates about art and beauty to hopes for a better or fairer society. Along the way, we will explore questions of what it means to live a cultured life, and what the criticism of art and literature might have to do (if anything) with the criticism of society. Against the backdrop of a historical period which saw massive social change, the rise of democracy, and utopian dreams, we will study the capacities of the short essay form, in contrast to the novel and poetry, for handling the big ideas of their times. We will read prose by authors including William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, William Morris, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee. A coda on later responses to the nineteenth century will include James Baldwin, John Berger and Susan Sontag.

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? That identity has been scrutinized for several decades now, perhaps as part of an examination of the ideology of American exceptionalism, perhaps as part of a critique of colonial displacement and erasure of identity. This course will continue to investigate the marker. We will also put pressure on “writer” by reading texts not usually considered part of a literary canon. “Writer,” though gives us a bit of carte blanche to explore all kinds of writing that allows us to pursue some of the questions about “major” and “American.”

In this class we will read major British poets from 1900 to the present. We’ll begin with study of Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and incorporate the poets of World War I. The greater part of the course will be given over to detailed study of the writings of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Our term will conclude with introduction to contemporary British poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and others. The class will have two examinations, and require one paper.

This course examines recent trends in contemporary US fiction, focusing in particular on the past 20-25 years of literary output from US novelists. As this literary period is nascent and in constant flux, we’ll be particularly interested in establishing its thematic and formal departures from postmodernism. The class will examine the period’s critique of its postmodern predecessors and will then investigate various themes and techniques that contemporary authors engage to distinguish themselves and their literary moment. Readings include work by Colson Whitehead, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Paul Beatty, and Ling Ma. Not open for credit to students who completed course 174C in spring 2016, fall 2017, or spring 2021 titled What’s Happening Now? U.S. Fiction since 1990s.

We examine the intersection of family and ethnicity as staged in comedy and drama in order to consider how literary and TV expressions of laughter, love, and emotional conflict have both reinforced the nuclear family ideal and challenged it by reimagining the American family variously (as single-parent and female-headed; as multi-generational and ethnic). We ask if there’s more to comedy than how many times it makes you laugh, or if accounting for changing times and mores can somehow compensate for jokes that age badly. Situation comedies include Father Knows Best, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Fresh Off the Boat, and Black-ish; TV dramedies include Girls and Louie. Dramatic fiction and autobiography (The Godfather, The Woman Warrior, Autobiography of Malcolm X) will be paired with comic novels (Portnoy’s Complaint, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, The Sellout). Telenovela-inspired Chicana literature (Caramelo and So Far from God) will be read alongside TV comedy and drama adapted from Latin American telenovelas (Ugly Betty, Jane the Virgin, Queen of the South).

This class provides the opportunity explore some of the most influential British writers of children’s fiction from the 1860s to the 1920s. The syllabus begins with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) before turning to Oscar Wilde’s fairy stories from the 1880s and E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899). The course then examines Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905), J. M. Barrie’s stories about Peter Pan, and A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926).

NOT open for credit to students having completed previous offerings of 179 with same title in 15F or 20W or titled “Victorian and Edwardian Children’s Literature” (14S).

This course focuses on queer literature, art, film, and performance made in and about the 1990s in the U.S. What was happening in the 90s that both necessitated and made possible queer innovation and experimentation with style, aesthetics, medium, and genre? How are the 90s remembered, imagined, and historicized as a decade instrumental to the emergence of a transformative queer politics, but also of queer culture and queer theory? In the midst of the global AIDS crisis, and the heightened consolidation of U.S. neoliberalism and U.S. neoconservatism, as well as U.S. imperialism and military expansion abroad, what did queerness aim to disrupt and destroy, but also enable and create? We will consider how deviance, stigma, and bad taste were recuperated and reappropriated in queer culture and queer studies in the 90s for the means of claiming and constructing a critical queerness as something that felt different, radical, and new. We will ask how the queer 90s sheds light on our contemporary moment, and how it is that the recent queer past informs our sense of queerness in the present.

Focusing on queer (non-normative) sexualities and genders, and the genre of the short story (itself a nineteenth-century American invention), this course will ask what their historical relationship has been. Is there something queer, as such, about the short story? It seems to be the case that the genre offered something like a literary laboratory in which queer genders and sexualities—queer identities, but also queer places, attachments, and things—could be explored, perhaps more freely than in, say, the novel. For example, the anonymous 1857 tale, “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” depicted a person we would now call a trans woman, but at the time there was no such label; and this fact about the main character was, perhaps surprisingly for that time, treated without alarm or negative judgment. Other writers we will encounter include some famous, and some not: Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Constance Fenimore Wilson, Octave Thanet, Herman Melville, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sui Sin Far, Charles W. Chesnutt, Louisa May Alcott, Sadakichi Hartmann, and Kate Chopin. Students will do original research in digital archives to discover—and share with the rest of the class—additional American short stories that may, under a broad definition, be claimed as “queer.”