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 2-3 designated sections are 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.

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 & Culture 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 15. 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 June 26. Students applying to English 20W should enroll in an alternate course during their enrollment passes, and should not assume that they will be admitted.

Questions should be directed to the English Undergraduate Advising Offices via MyUCLA MessageCenter.

Students who are interested in taking English 20W in lieu of English 4W while working on their preparatory requirements should contact a Dept. of English advisor.

Environmental issues are often envisioned as mainly questions of science, technology, and policy. The Environmental Humanities approach environmental problems instead in terms of cultures, histories, social structures, and values. This course will introduce you to the major concepts, narratives, and images that have shaped environmentalist thought, writing, and activism in the United States and compare them to environmental movements 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 languages, histories, and cultures? How do particular media, narratives, and images shape our thinking about such issues? How can we change existing stories and images? How do we engage with differences in the framing of ecological problems? We will explore these questions through research publications, nonfiction, and journalism as well as graphic novels, films, and videogames.

 

This course fulfills a lower-division for the Literature & the Environment minor.

The ghazal is a classical verse form known for its rhyming couplets and focus on ishq (love). Initially the mainstay of Arabic, Persian and Urdu poetry, ghazals became a staple genre of world poetry after the rise of colonialism. This survey course explores how competing interpretations of ishq (religious, colonial, queer, revolutionary) have revitalized the genre across space and time. How do the “timeless tropes” of ishq (rose, wine, nightingale) periodically generate new ideas about the individual and the society? Our poets will include Sufi rebels, Orientalist colonizers, anticolonial fighters, European modernists, and feminists. Simultaneously, we will also survey the long tradition of ghazal criticism. What distinguishes ghazals from lyrics, odes, and sonnets? And why do ghazals still trigger newer debates about reading practices (should we read these poems lyrically? or historically?) Each week will sample the rich history of ghazal’s performance cultures (traditional mushairas, classical music, modern slams, and other youth subcultures).

Not open for credit to English majors or students with credit for any courses in 170 series. Development, with emphasis on form, of American novel from its beginning to present day. Includes works of such novelists as Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison.

This seminar explores a range of literary and media forms related to the themes of bodies, health, and illness, including but not limited to memoirs, graphic novels, podcasts, film, and poetry. There will be at least one field trip to historical archives and/or local museums. Students will learn about the field of health humanities, and the power of narrative in capturing and embodying human conditions associated with health and illness. We also will discuss the value and limits of categories such as normality and wellness. This course will highlight universal creative expression and engage a diverse set of writers, scholars, and creatives. This class will be largely discussion based, and students will be able to choose a final project in a genre that interest them.

 

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 16.

Not open for credit to English majors or students with credit for course 150A or 150B. Survey of Shakespeare’s plays, including comedies, tragedies, and histories, selected to represent Shakespeare’s breadth, artistic progress, and total dramatic achievement.

The course tracks conceptual changes in theatrical tradition with respect to space, spectatorship, and the body of the performer. Moving away from traditional components of theatre production, we will explore how the mis-en-scene of theatre, as well as its performative space, has historically evolved. We will study the ‘performative turn’ of theatre not merely as a work of art, but also as an ‘event’. Theatrical landscape in that manner is unapologetically political in nature blurring the line between actor and spectator and embodying narratives that impact both in their social reality. Topics of study include works by individual theatre artists (Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet), and community-based and socially engaged theater traditions, including the shadow puppetry of China, the Balinese Theatre, the Theatre of the Earth, and the Nukkad Natak (Street Theatre) of India.

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 Fall meeting as listed in the Schedule of Classes!

In this course, designed specifically for English majors but now open to students from all majors, you will learn to build on your skills and abilities as a writer of literary and cultural analyses. You’ll find ways to ask richer literary questions, develop more nuanced analyses of complex texts, and shape your own voice as a writer. We’ll focus on literary arguments and begin with this basic question: what constitutes a good, rich, complex question in literary analysis? What makes a substantial topic that might lead to a top-notch persuasive argument? Because good writing (and thus good argumentation) is also a process, we will practice creation, revision, contemplation, and editing, as well as seeking and giving feedback. Throughout the course, we will workshop writing exercises with the goal of making ourselves and others more comfortable and more successful as writers of good academic prose.

 

This course counts as an elective for the Professional Writing minor. The course requisite is ENGL 4W. Students in the Professional Writing minor who have completed alternate Writing II credit may contact the English undergraduate advising office to enroll.

 

Not open to students who previously completed ENGL 110T with Prof. Stephan.

This course will prepare students who want to submit first-person writings to journals and magazines that publish works by and for young adults.  Examples of such works include memoirs, humor, opinion pieces, and cultural criticism.  We will study the marketplace to discover which outlets appeal to students, how to submit to those publishers, how to write a cover letter, and how to develop relationships with editors.  Most importantly, we will spend the quarter writing and revising potential submissions, with the goal of submitting a piece to the students’ chosen venues by the end of the quarter.  Requirements include attendance and participation, as well as a final revised piece of writing.

 

This course counts as an elective for the Professional Writing minor. The course requisite is ENGL 4W. Students in the Professional Writing minor who have completed alternate Writing II credit may contact the English undergraduate advising office to enroll.

We will read selections from Chaucer’s famous anthology of romances, comic stories, saints’ lives and cautionary tales as told by a motley crew — pilgrims on the road to Canterbury in the tumultuous 1380s amid social corruption, threats of war, popular revolt, and plague. We will read the tales in Middle English, with regular quizzes and exams, a substantial research paper, and a required recitation of the 18-line proem to the General Prologue.

Fraudsters, traders, and usurers have been with us ever since humans were infected by what in the Middle Ages was called “filthy lucre.” In this course, we will learn not just about the tricks of their trade but also about the intersection of commerce and literature in texts ranging from the medieval to the early modern. On the medieval side, our readings include some of Chaucer’s works such as “The General Prologue,” “The Shipman’s Tale,” “The Merchant’s Tale,” “The Pardoner’s Tale,” and “The Summoner’s Tale,” excerpts from Piers Plowman, and several Robin Hood narratives such as A Gest of Robyn Hode, Robin Hood and the Potter; on the early modern side, our readings include Gerard Malynes’s Saint George for England, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Thomas Wilson’s Discourse on Usury, and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. We will read our literary texts in light of premodern thinking about “filthy lucre” (“turpe lucrum”) found in treatises on usury, equitable exchange, and simony as well as on exchange-rate, the just price and proportion.

 

Not open for credit to students who will be taking ENGL 184.1 with Prof. Thomas in Fall 2025.

 

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

Intensive study of representative problem plays, major tragedies, Roman plays, and romances.

This course will focus on a single work by Milton: Paradise Lost, his most famous — and most epic — poem. Adapting (primarily) the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis into over 10,000 lines of blank verse, Paradise Lost is not for the faint of heart. Over the course of the quarter, we will work our way through the entire poem at a pace that should make it feel more manageable — we will be reading around 600 lines of Paradise Lost for each class meeting. This practice of careful and close reading will allow us to give Milton’s challenging poem the attention it so richly deserves.

After a brief survey of the literatures of discovery and exploration, a close look at the motives and forms of Puritan writing, from Bradford to Edwards, ending with its challenge from Franklin and other texts of foreign-sourced Enlightenment. Regular quizzes, two papers, ID final. OLD SCHOOL: Not for the casual or the credit-motivated.

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.

During her relatively short lifetime, Jane Austen wrote only six novels, which sold modestly well. Austen died, at the age of forty-one, a rather moderate literary success. In the two hundred or so years since her death, however, Austen has become a literary celebrity, household name, and object of worldwide fan adoration. What is it about Austen’s fiction that still captivates readers? How have her handful of novels — set in the early nineteenth century, mostly in small English villages — spawned so many adaptations, rewritings, sequels, conventions, merchandise, and even action figures? These are some of the questions we will ask over the course of “Jane Austen: Then and Now.” We will be reading some of Austen’s juvenilia and at least two of her novels. We will also watch screen adaptations of Austen’s writing (and life) and take adaptation seriously as a mode of cultural critique.

This class focuses on a range of critical and political debates about slavery, sexual equality, the meaning of work, the factory system, disability, socialism, prostitution, and aesthetics from the 1830s through the 1890s in Britain. Writers include Mary Prince, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Caroline Norton, and W. T. Stead.

In this course, we will explore in depth Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a means to think about the novel as an art form and about the history of the British Victorian period when it was published. This novel experiments dramatically with form. It alternates between omniscient and first-person narration. Half is written in the past tense, half in the present. And its monthly serialization gets enfolded into its story. You will learn to think critically about literary form in this course, and we will engage some literary theory to help us to do so. You will also think about the historical period depicted and what it means to you. Dickens’ story takes us into traumatic conflicts concerning class and gender, philosophical questions of justice, the power of bureaucratic institutions, and much more. Please be aware that there is a very heavy reading and writing load in this course.

This course offers a survey of major American authors whose works have shaped a national literature over the last two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and demographic diversity, all these novelists grapple with issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each transformed literary conventions to express their visions of the place of America in the world. We will read the following works from different stages in this literary history, including Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; Chopin’s The Awakening; Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets; Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; and short stories by Cather, James, and Hemingway.

Survey of African American literature from the 18th century to World War I, including both oral and written modes (folktales, spirituals, sermons; fiction, autobiography, poetry).  Among the authors covered are Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois.  M104A focuses on the historical and cultural contexts of the works as well as on diverse strategies for engaging formal aspects of the assigned material.  The class will be conducted in lecture format with TA-led discussion sections.  Requirements include the following: attendance and participation in section, a midterm exam, a term paper, and a final exam.

This course examines African diaspora theater concerned with questions of liberation, decolonization, and revolution. We begin with a history of African Americans in theater, considering lively debates about aesthetics and politics from the era of slavery and emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. We then turn to the development of revolutionary theater in the 1960s, animated by decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, and the proliferation of the Black Arts Movement in the United States. We end with a look at developments in contemporary theater that continue to expand the boundaries of race, performance, and spectacle. Readings may include Amiri Baraka, Aimé Césaire, Lorraine Hansberry, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature since 1970s, with particular emphasis on how queer and feminist activism as well as Central and South American migration have shaped 21st-century chicanidad. Oral, written, and graphic fiction, poetry, and drama by writers including John Rechy, Gloria Anzaldúa, Los Bros Hernández, Ana Castillo, and Dagoberto Gilb guide exploration of queer and feminist studies, Reagan generation, immigration debates, and emerging Latina/Latino majority.

This course will examine how British women writers develop and construct complex – even transgressive – female characters throughout the long nineteenth century. In the various literatures of the period, concerns about women’s changing roles in culture and society gave rise to a wide range of representations of evil and destructive women. Both male and female authors relied on the figure of the dangerous woman or femme fatale to express broader social and cultural anxieties, but our study of novels, short stories, and poetry will focus on the work of women writers, using a variety of critical lenses to reveal their experimentation with (and challenges to) this trope. Authors considered will include (but are not limited to) Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Vernon Lee.

In this course, we will study the origins of the mystery genre, the rise of the British tradition, American hard-boiled detective fiction and noir, as well as other sub-genres, including horror, suspense, the police procedural, the supernatural, and the courtroom thriller. The authors we will read include Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Daphne du Maurier, and Patricia Highsmith. We will also listen to one true-crime podcast. Requirements include class attendance and participation, two pop quizzes, and a 10-15 page paper.

Science fiction is a tool for thinking about our relationship to natural and technological environments now and in the future. This course will focus on real and imagined nature in SF from different regions and languages to explore how the genre portrays environmental crises, and what solutions it envisions. Are human bodies and societies seen as part of nature or outside of it, and how does that affect what “being human” means? How do the activities of humans, animals, aliens, machines, and natural forces transform environments? How do social inequalities shape visions of nature? What work do genres such as apocalyptic narrative, disaster film, cli-fi and utopia do? Do visions of our environmental future have to be bleak, or are there optimistic possibilities? Readings will include novels, graphic novels/comics, short stories, and films by Bacigalupi, Dick, LeGuin, Miyazaki, Okorafor, Robinson, Yamashita, among others, and critical essays on science fiction.

 

This course is eligible for credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. L&E minors may contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu to request enrollment.

Chicago is central to 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 from different periods in the city’s history have responded to its urban landscape and the meaning of its built environment, as well as to its racial and economic inequalities. From its humble beginnings as a frontier trading post, to hosting the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Chicago experienced exponential growth to become the nation’s second-largest and most important modern city. Poised between the regional and the cosmopolitan, commercialism and high culture, Chicago produced an astonishing array of writers like Henry B. Fuller, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Willa Cather, and Stuart Dybek. Using William Cronon’s acclaimed eco-history of the city, as well as Erik Larson’s best-selling Devil in the White City as a starting point, the class will explore some of the best works of fiction from Chicago writers over the last 150 years or so.

Using the city of Dublin as our locus, students in this course will read a variety of major works written by Dublin writers such as Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, and more. A grounding in Dublin geography, urban study, and history will prepare students to consider various dimensions of Irish experience in the twentieth-century, from its status as a country under British rule through its fight for independence, and ultimate autonomy.

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.

In recent years, literary studies has experienced a dramatic rise of “affect theory.” The crisis of “late capitalism,” it is now widely argued, has called forth a new set of ugly, ambivalent, and ordinary feelings. While discussing contemporary theory (Ngai, Berlant, Jameson), this course introduces students to a preceding era, when struggles against colonialism and capitalism produced a catalog of extraordinary feelings (anger, love, ressentiment, sacrifice, hope, shame). How did art in colonial societies codify these classical passions? And how did these passions inculcate new ideas of subjectivity and transformative behavior in popular classes? We will also consider the historical decline of these feelings, as well as the limits, often dangers, of simply imitating them in contemporary times. Readings may include Bhagat Singh’s prison diary, Fanon’s case studies in psychology, bell hooks on love, the stories of Ismat Chugtai, Mohammed Iqbal’s critique of Sufism, anticolonial cultures of propaganda, and the rise of personality cults in the socialist bloc.

 

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

Black Writers in Great Britain, in the last half of the twentieth century, contributed to a library that complicated ideas about the postcolonial as a subject and condition. At least two things are true at the same time: first, the literary production maps the movement of people from independent or near-independent colonies to the colonizing center of Great Britain; and second, the writings chart what life is like for black people living in the heart of the former colonial power.

 

We read and discuss key texts from that productive period in relation to other arts – painting, sculpture, installations, music, digital, film – made by blacks in Britain. We include the essays of critical thinkers who provide the context of forces in British culture and history that helped shape those creative arts. We describe the possible futures inherent in that era of creative and critical ferment.

Requirements: Weekly response papers (400 words) of the week’s course work. A final essay (3000 words) based on three or more encounters with the course work. Full attendance and contribution to class discussion and group work.

This course will explore how poetry has been integral to constructing what we now think of as “the Americas.” Beginning with the colonial period, we will develop a working poetic lineage of the Americas by exploring literary renderings of key historical moments. While we will attend to the role of poetry in history—including the recording of the Popol Vuh during crisis, and the hemispheric movements of poetry in the 19th century—our emphasis will be on 20th- and 21st-century poetry. What can poetry tell us about how the Americas have been, and still are, imagined? Further, does poetry offer a different construction of the Americas? These are some of the questions we will ask as we address topics such as New World “discovery” and conquest, settler colonialism, borderlands, enslavement and revolution, translation, and the endurance of colonial pasts in the present. We will consider the geographic divisions of the Americas—North, South, Central, and Caribbean—and the ways in which poetry probes geographies and histories of the hemisphere.

This class focuses on a range of critical and political debates about slavery, sexual equality, the meaning of work, the factory system, disability, socialism, prostitution, and aesthetics from the 1830s through the 1890s in Britain. Writers include Mary Prince, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Caroline Norton, and W. T. Stead.

In this course, we will explore in depth Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a means to think about the novel as an art form and about the history of the British Victorian period when it was published. This novel experiments dramatically with form. It alternates between omniscient and first-person narration. Half is written in the past tense, half in the present. And its monthly serialization gets enfolded into its story. You will learn to think critically about literary form in this course, and we will engage some literary theory to help us to do so. You will also think about the historical period depicted and what it means to you. Dickens’ story takes us into traumatic conflicts concerning class and gender, philosophical questions of justice, the power of bureaucratic institutions, and much more. Please be aware that there is a very heavy reading and writing load in this course.

This course offers a survey of major American authors whose works have shaped a national literature over the last two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and demographic diversity, all these novelists grapple with issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each transformed literary conventions to express their visions of the place of America in the world. We will read the following works from different stages in this literary history, including Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; Chopin’s The Awakening; Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets; Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; and short stories by Cather, James, and Hemingway.

Historical survey of American literature from end of Civil War to beginning of 20th century, including writers such as Howells, James, Twain, Norris, Dickinson, Crane, Chesnutt, Gilman, and others working in modes of realist and naturalist novel, regional and vernacular prose, and poetry.

This course will primarily—but not exclusively—focus on younger voices in the contemporary poetry scene, including writers who have only recently published their first books. We will also read established poets who either live in Southern California or have some connection to the region, including selected Mexican poets in translation.

Course requirements include:

• Weekly writing assignments (e.g., short analytical essays, creative exercises, etc.)
• A group presentation on a poet or poetry-related topic
• A final project: either a short research paper or a creative work, due during finals week

Class sessions will primarily be discussion-based, with a focus on close reading of individual poems. Occasionally, short lectures will supplement our discussions. Additionally, 2–3 poets will be invited to visit the class—either in person or virtually—to read their work and engage with student questions.

This course examines recent trends in contemporary American fiction, focusing in particular on the past thirty years of literary output from U.S. 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, Jennifer Egan, and Tao Lin.

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 course studies U.S. culture through literature produced during a period of significant turmoil and crisis. Historically, this period is framed by two controversial figures emblematic of a kind of American repression: Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Focusing on literature, we will consider how music, visual arts, and media engage the socio-political conditions that shape U.S. society. This is a period where the US walks both in the shadow of nuclear annihilation and toward a hope for humanity’s progress. Race as a technology of modern social order proves central since the United States has played a unique role among nations in its struggles over the role race has played in the conflicts and hopes of U.S. social organization. While our focus will be on literature, we will approach the literary as one manifestation of cultural expression. We will analyze a variety of cultural texts – musical, visual, and mediatized – in order to assess their various meanings and significances.

 

The goals of the class will be: 1) to practice speaking and writing in clear and organized ways; 2) to analyze cultural texts critically; 3) to generate original ideas by synthesizing different critical thoughts and analyses; 4) to learn about U.S. life and culture in the post-war era. A large part of the class involves discussion and in-class writing, so attendance is required.

 

Not open for credit to students who completed ENGL 177 with Prof. Perez-Torres in 21F or 23W.

Some of the most notoriously challenging—and funny–writing of the twentieth-century emerges from the imagination of Samuel Beckett.  The hallmark of his presentation of the human condition is his preoccupation with states of being (or non-being) and decay—including sexual and scatological—and his concomitant desire to invite empathy as well as laughter. This class examines the span of Beckett’s corpus, beginning with his early essays and stories, progressing through major novels such as Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and culminating with his principal plays, including Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and shorter drama.  Our focus will be on understanding Beckett in the context of the main intellectual and aesthetic traditions from which his work is drawn. Topics of inquiry will range from ancient philosophy to modern linguistics as we pursue the mind-body questions at the heart of Beckett’s nothingness. To this end, our course will introduce research strategies necessary for successful writing about modern and post-modern works by teaching students to navigate field-specific databases, identify major critical traditions, and engage one or more methods of research.  Our course will conclude with a reading of Flann O’Brien’s comic novel The Third Policeman.  A masterpiece in its own right, the novel not only spans the greater part of Beckett’s career with its dates of composition and publication (1939 and 1968), but also recapitulates some of his themes while satirizing academic research and methodologies.

Autobiography has been essential to the emergence of queer identities in the modern world. Autobiographies, memoirs, and other genres of self-writing have to do with selfhood and subjectivity; gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual and other queer forms of selfhood and subjectivity have often been articulated in such forms and even, it can be argued, were substantially created by autobiographical forms. This course will explore various self-authoring forms (including several diaries, a travel narrative, several memoirs, a medical case study, a graphic novel, and a film). Some of them are queer in ways anyone would recognize, such as Mary MacLane’s remarkable I Await the Devil’s Coming (first published in 1902 under a more innocuous title, The Story of Mary MacLane), Ralph Werther’s Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918), Jonathan Caouette’s film Tarnation (2003), and Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). Others will test the boundaries of what we mean by “queer,” for example the Diary of Michael Wigglesworth (1653-1657) and Margaret J. M. Sweat’s autobiographical novel, Ethel’s Love-Life (1859). Careful attention will be given to the ways in which queer gender and sexuality intersect with experiences of race, ethnicity, class, and nationality.

 

Texts:

Wigglesworth, Michael. The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653-1657.
Sweat, Margaret J. M. Ethel’s Love-Life. 1859.
Whitman, Walt. Memoranda During the War. 1875-76.
MacLane, Mary. The Story of Mary MacLane. 1902.
Werther, Ralph. Autobiography of an Androgyne. 1922.
Arenas, Reinaldo. Before Night Falls: A Memoir. 1992.
Caouette, Jonathan. Tarnation. 2004.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. 2006.

Survey of African American literature from the 18th century to World War I, including both oral and written modes (folktales, spirituals, sermons; fiction, autobiography, poetry).  Among the authors covered are Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois.  M104A focuses on the historical and cultural contexts of the works as well as on diverse strategies for engaging formal aspects of the assigned material.  The class will be conducted in lecture format with TA-led discussion sections.  Requirements include the following: attendance and participation in section, a midterm exam, a term paper, and a final exam.

This course examines African diaspora theater concerned with questions of liberation, decolonization, and revolution. We begin with a history of African Americans in theater, considering lively debates about aesthetics and politics from the era of slavery and emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. We then turn to the development of revolutionary theater in the 1960s, animated by decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, and the proliferation of the Black Arts Movement in the United States. We end with a look at developments in contemporary theater that continue to expand the boundaries of race, performance, and spectacle. Readings may include Amiri Baraka, Aimé Césaire, Lorraine Hansberry, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature since 1970s, with particular emphasis on how queer and feminist activism as well as Central and South American migration have shaped 21st-century chicanidad. Oral, written, and graphic fiction, poetry, and drama by writers including John Rechy, Gloria Anzaldúa, Los Bros Hernández, Ana Castillo, and Dagoberto Gilb guide exploration of queer and feminist studies, Reagan generation, immigration debates, and emerging Latina/Latino majority.

This course will examine how British women writers develop and construct complex – even transgressive – female characters throughout the long nineteenth century. In the various literatures of the period, concerns about women’s changing roles in culture and society gave rise to a wide range of representations of evil and destructive women. Both male and female authors relied on the figure of the dangerous woman or femme fatale to express broader social and cultural anxieties, but our study of novels, short stories, and poetry will focus on the work of women writers, using a variety of critical lenses to reveal their experimentation with (and challenges to) this trope. Authors considered will include (but are not limited to) Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Vernon Lee.

This course explores three quintessential New World experiences: being shipwrecked in an unfamiliar environment, becoming the captive of a foreign culture, and converting to a new religion. These experiences are frequently linked in early American literature. Castaways are taken captive; captives are forcibly relocated; and those who endure such traumas use new spiritual frameworks to make sense of them. We’ll examine both the castaway episodes and Native American captivities experienced by European settlers and the dislocation and enslavement they inflicted on Indigenous and African people. And we’ll compare European conversion experiences with those of non-Europeans, for whom Christianity could seem either to sanction an oppressive status quo or to offer new sources of dignity and power. Reimagining colonial America as a space of spectacular suffering and personal transformation, we’ll consider Christianity’s paradoxical take on liberty and slavery; the connections between castawayism and colonialism; and the role of gender, faith, and race in narrating tragedy.

 

Not open for credit to students who took ENGL 87 with Prof. Mazzaferro in Spring 2021.

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.

Black Writers in Great Britain, in the last half of the twentieth century, contributed to a library that complicated ideas about the postcolonial as a subject and condition. At least two things are true at the same time: first, the literary production maps the movement of people from independent or near-independent colonies to the colonizing center of Great Britain; and second, the writings chart what life is like for black people living in the heart of the former colonial power.

 

We read and discuss key texts from that productive period in relation to other arts – painting, sculpture, installations, music, digital, film – made by blacks in Britain. We include the essays of critical thinkers who provide the context of forces in British culture and history that helped shape those creative arts. We describe the possible futures inherent in that era of creative and critical ferment.

Requirements:

Weekly response papers (400 words) of the week’s course work. A final essay (3000 words) based on three or more encounters with the course work. Full attendance and contribution to class discussion and group work.

This course will explore how poetry has been integral to constructing what we now think of as “the Americas.” Beginning with the colonial period, we will develop a working poetic lineage of the Americas by exploring literary renderings of key historical moments. While we will attend to the role of poetry in history—including the recording of the Popol Vuh during crisis, and the hemispheric movements of poetry in the 19^th century—our emphasis will be on 20^th– and 21^st-century poetry. What can poetry tell us about how the Americas have been, and still are, imagined? Further, does poetry offer a different construction of the Americas? These are some of the questions we will ask as we address topics such as New World “discovery” and conquest, settler colonialism, borderlands, enslavement and revolution, translation, and the endurance of colonial pasts in the present. We will consider the geographic divisions of the Americas—North, South, Central, and Caribbean—and the ways in which poetry probes geographies and histories of the hemisphere.

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 course studies U.S. culture through literature produced during a period of significant turmoil and crisis. Historically, this period is framed by two controversial figures emblematic of a kind of American repression: Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Focusing on literature, we will consider how music, visual arts, and media engage the socio-political conditions that shape U.S. society. This is a period where the US walks both in the shadow of nuclear annihilation and toward a hope for humanity’s progress. Race as a technology of modern social order proves central since the United States has played a unique role among nations in its struggles over the role race has played in the conflicts and hopes of U.S. social organization. While our focus will be on literature, we will approach the literary as one manifestation of cultural expression. We will analyze a variety of cultural texts – musical, visual, and mediatized – in order to assess their various meanings and significances.

 

The goals of the class will be: 1) to practice speaking and writing in clear and organized ways; 2) to analyze cultural texts critically; 3) to generate original ideas by synthesizing different critical thoughts and analyses; 4) to learn about U.S. life and culture in the post-war era. A large part of the class involves discussion and in-class writing, so attendance is required.

 

Not open for credit to students who completed ENGL 177 with Prof. Perez-Torres in 21F or 23W.

This course examines African diaspora theater concerned with questions of liberation, decolonization, and revolution. We begin with a history of African Americans in theater, considering lively debates about aesthetics and politics from the era of slavery and emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. We then turn to the development of revolutionary theater in the 1960s, animated by decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, and the proliferation of the Black Arts Movement in the United States. We end with a look at developments in contemporary theater that continue to expand the boundaries of race, performance, and spectacle. Readings may include Amiri Baraka, Aimé Césaire, Lorraine Hansberry, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature since 1970s, with particular emphasis on how queer and feminist activism as well as Central and South American migration have shaped 21st-century chicanidad. Oral, written, and graphic fiction, poetry, and drama by writers including John Rechy, Gloria Anzaldúa, Los Bros Hernández, Ana Castillo, and Dagoberto Gilb guide exploration of queer and feminist studies, Reagan generation, immigration debates, and emerging Latina/Latino majority.

This course explores three quintessential New World experiences: being shipwrecked in an unfamiliar environment, becoming the captive of a foreign culture, and converting to a new religion. These experiences are frequently linked in early American literature. Castaways are taken captive; captives are forcibly relocated; and those who endure such traumas use new spiritual frameworks to make sense of them. We’ll examine both the castaway episodes and Native American captivities experienced by European settlers and the dislocation and enslavement they inflicted on Indigenous and African people. And we’ll compare European conversion experiences with those of non-Europeans, for whom Christianity could seem either to sanction an oppressive status quo or to offer new sources of dignity and power. Reimagining colonial America as a space of spectacular suffering and personal transformation, we’ll consider Christianity’s paradoxical take on liberty and slavery; the connections between castawayism and colonialism; and the role of gender, faith, and race in narrating tragedy.

 

Not open for credit to students who took ENGL 87 with Prof. Mazzaferro in Spring 2021.

One of the harsher words for an outsider or outcast in English, “pariah,” comes from Tamil. Its disputed origins are said to lie in the caste word for drum-beaters, in the Sanskrit word for people from the hills, and in an insulting name for native Buddhists. So how did the word enter English? And how has that shaped what it means today? This course is an invitation to consider the surprising multilingual journeys of the English language. From Hobson Jobson and Côté ci Côté la to African American Vernacular English, Tex Mex, and Cockney Rhyming Slang, students will consider the history and politics of the English language as it has been defined by its many social complexities and cultural encounters. The course will examine case studies of other Englishes in literature and film. Assignments will include creative translation exercises that activate the hybridity of the English language.

Using the city of Dublin as our locus, students in this course will read a variety of major works written by Dublin writers such as Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, and more. A grounding in Dublin geography, urban study, and history will prepare students to consider various dimensions of Irish experience in the twentieth-century, from its status as a country under British rule through its fight for independence, and ultimate autonomy.

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.

In recent years, literary studies has experienced a dramatic rise of “affect theory.” The crisis of “late capitalism,” it is now widely argued, has called forth a new set of ugly, ambivalent, and ordinary feelings. While discussing contemporary theory (Ngai, Berlant, Jameson), this course introduces students to a preceding era, when struggles against colonialism and capitalism produced a catalog of extraordinary feelings (anger, love, ressentiment, sacrifice, hope, shame). How did art in colonial societies codify these classical passions? And how did these passions inculcate new ideas of subjectivity and transformative behavior in popular classes? We will also consider the historical decline of these feelings, as well as the limits, often dangers, of simply imitating them in contemporary times. Readings may include Bhagat Singh’s prison diary, Fanon’s case studies in psychology, bell hooks on love, the stories of Ismat Chugtai, Mohammed Iqbal’s critique of Sufism, anticolonial cultures of propaganda, and the rise of personality cults in the socialist bloc.

 

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

The refugee has become one of the world’s most powerful metaphors for modernity. From the image of a child washed up on a beach to the electoral politics of wall-building and the spectre of mass-displacement due to war and environmental disaster, the refugee’s negotiation of buffer zones, barbed wire fences, temporary camps, treacherous seas and militarised checkpoints are compelling figures for the failure of the “world” as a place of transnational solidarity. But who counts as a refugee? This course takes the legal redefinition of the refugee after the Second World War as its point of departure to explore how this figure has come to embody issues of narrative credibility, social identity, cultural difference, testimony, styles of storytelling and legal audience. The course will survey novels, poetry, legal materials and journalistic reporting by and about refugees. Students will also have the opportunity to watch films and engage visual culture on the topic. Primary materials will be supplemented by theoretical readings.

 

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

Black Writers in Great Britain, in the last half of the twentieth century, contributed to a library that complicated ideas about the postcolonial as a subject and condition. At least two things are true at the same time: first, the literary production maps the movement of people from independent or near-independent colonies to the colonizing center of Great Britain; and second, the writings chart what life is like for black people living in the heart of the former colonial power.

 

We read and discuss key texts from that productive period in relation to other arts – painting, sculpture, installations, music, digital, film – made by blacks in Britain. We include the essays of critical thinkers who provide the context of forces in British culture and history that helped shape those creative arts. We describe the possible futures inherent in that era of creative and critical ferment.

 

Requirements:

Weekly response papers (400 words) of the week’s course work. A final essay (3000 words) based on three or more encounters with the course work. Full attendance and contribution to class discussion and group work.

This course will explore how poetry has been integral to constructing what we now think of as “the Americas.” Beginning with the colonial period, we will develop a working poetic lineage of the Americas by exploring literary renderings of key historical moments. While we will attend to the role of poetry in history—including the recording of the Popol Vuh during crisis, and the hemispheric movements of poetry in the 19^th century—our emphasis will be on 20^th– and 21^st-century poetry. What can poetry tell us about how the Americas have been, and still are, imagined? Further, does poetry offer a different construction of the Americas? These are some of the questions we will ask as we address topics such as New World “discovery” and conquest, settler colonialism, borderlands, enslavement and revolution, translation, and the endurance of colonial pasts in the present. We will consider the geographic divisions of the Americas—North, South, Central, and Caribbean—and the ways in which poetry probes geographies and histories of the hemisphere.

After a brief survey of the literatures of discovery and exploration, a close look at the motives and forms of Puritan writing, from Bradford to Edwards, ending with its challenge from Franklin and other texts of foreign-sourced Enlightenment. Regular quizzes, two papers, ID final. OLD SCHOOL: Not for the casual or the credit-motivated.

Autobiography has been essential to the emergence of queer identities in the modern world. Autobiographies, memoirs, and other genres of self-writing have to do with selfhood and subjectivity; gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual and other queer forms of selfhood and subjectivity have often been articulated in such forms and even, it can be argued, were substantially created by autobiographical forms. This course will explore various self-authoring forms (including several diaries, a travel narrative, several memoirs, a medical case study, a graphic novel, and a film). Some of them are queer in ways anyone would recognize, such as Mary MacLane’s remarkable I Await the Devil’s Coming (first published in 1902 under a more innocuous title, The Story of Mary MacLane), Ralph Werther’s Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918), Jonathan Caouette’s film Tarnation (2003), and Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). Others will test the boundaries of what we mean by “queer,” for example the Diary of Michael Wigglesworth (1653-1657) and Margaret J. M. Sweat’s autobiographical novel, Ethel’s Love-Life (1859). Careful attention will be given to the ways in which queer gender and sexuality intersect with experiences of race, ethnicity, class, and nationality.

 

Texts:

Wigglesworth, Michael. The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653-1657.

Sweat, Margaret J. M. Ethel’s Love-Life. 1859.

Whitman, Walt. Memoranda During the War. 1875-76.

MacLane, Mary. The Story of Mary MacLane. 1902.

Werther, Ralph. Autobiography of an Androgyne. 1922.

Arenas, Reinaldo. Before Night Falls: A Memoir. 1992.

Caouette, Jonathan. Tarnation. 2004.

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. 2006.

This course examines African diaspora theater concerned with questions of liberation, decolonization, and revolution. We begin with a history of African Americans in theater, considering lively debates about aesthetics and politics from the era of slavery and emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. We then turn to the development of revolutionary theater in the 1960s, animated by decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, and the proliferation of the Black Arts Movement in the United States. We end with a look at developments in contemporary theater that continue to expand the boundaries of race, performance, and spectacle. Readings may include Amiri Baraka, Aimé Césaire, Lorraine Hansberry, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

This course focuses on the orality of myths and mythic traditions from diverse ancient cultural landscapes. The migratory nature of narratives and counter narratives will highlight myths from Native American, ancient Near Eastern, Hindu, Africa and from North-East India. The course will delve deep on creation myths, dynastic political myths, religious myths and urban myths to discuss contemporary discourses of cultural hegemony. Thinking through works of Carl Jung, Claude Lewis-Strauss, Mircea Eliade and many more, the course will conceptualise myth and mythologies as a form of language to communicate with the past and the present.

This courses is eligible for foreign literature in translation credit on the English and American Literature & Culture majors. Please note that this course may satisfy EITHER foreign lit OR Breadth/Elective, but not both.

In this course, we will study the origins of the mystery genre, the rise of the British tradition, American hard-boiled detective fiction and noir, as well as other sub-genres, including horror, suspense, the police procedural, the supernatural, and the courtroom thriller. The authors we will read include Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Daphne du Maurier, and Patricia Highsmith. We will also listen to one true-crime podcast. Requirements include class attendance and participation, two pop quizzes, and a 10-15 page paper.

Science fiction is a tool for thinking about our relationship to natural and technological environments now and in the future. This course will focus on real and imagined nature in SF from different regions and languages to explore how the genre portrays environmental crises, and what solutions it envisions. Are human bodies and societies seen as part of nature or outside of it, and how does that affect what “being human” means? How do the activities of humans, animals, aliens, machines, and natural forces transform environments? How do social inequalities shape visions of nature? What work do genres such as apocalyptic narrative, disaster film, cli-fi and utopia do? Do visions of our environmental future have to be bleak, or are there optimistic possibilities? Readings will include novels, graphic novels/comics, short stories, and films by Bacigalupi, Dick, LeGuin, Miyazaki, Okorafor, Robinson, Yamashita, among others, and critical essays on science fiction.

 

This course is eligible for credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. L&E minors may contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu to request enrollment.

One of the harsher words for an outsider or outcast in English, “pariah,” comes from Tamil. Its disputed origins are said to lie in the caste word for drum-beaters, in the Sanskrit word for people from the hills, and in an insulting name for native Buddhists. So how did the word enter English? And how has that shaped what it means today? This course is an invitation to consider the surprising multilingual journeys of the English language. From Hobson Jobson and Côté ci Côté la to African American Vernacular English, Tex Mex, and Cockney Rhyming Slang, students will consider the history and politics of the English language as it has been defined by its many social complexities and cultural encounters. The course will examine case studies of other Englishes in literature and film. Assignments will include creative translation exercises that activate the hybridity of the English language.

Chicago is central to 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 from different periods in the city’s history have responded to its urban landscape and the meaning of its built environment, as well as to its racial and economic inequalities. From its humble beginnings as a frontier trading post, to hosting the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Chicago experienced exponential growth to become the nation’s second-largest and most important modern city. Poised between the regional and the cosmopolitan, commercialism and high culture, Chicago produced an astonishing array of writers like Henry B. Fuller, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Willa Cather, and Stuart Dybek. Using William Cronon’s acclaimed eco-history of the city, as well as Erik Larson’s best-selling Devil in the White City as a starting point, the class will explore some of the best works of fiction from Chicago writers over the last 150 years or so.

Using the city of Dublin as our locus, students in this course will read a variety of major works written by Dublin writers such as Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, and more. A grounding in Dublin geography, urban study, and history will prepare students to consider various dimensions of Irish experience in the twentieth-century, from its status as a country under British rule through its fight for independence, and ultimate autonomy.

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.

A historical survey of literary theory and aesthetic philosophy stretching from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This course covers influential theorizations of literary and aesthetic value. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Sidney, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche.

 

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

In recent years, literary studies has experienced a dramatic rise of “affect theory.” The crisis of “late capitalism,” it is now widely argued, has called forth a new set of ugly, ambivalent, and ordinary feelings. While discussing contemporary theory (Ngai, Berlant, Jameson), this course introduces students to a preceding era, when struggles against colonialism and capitalism produced a catalog of extraordinary feelings (anger, love, ressentiment, sacrifice, hope, shame). How did art in colonial societies codify these classical passions? And how did these passions inculcate new ideas of subjectivity and transformative behavior in popular classes? We will also consider the historical decline of these feelings, as well as the limits, often dangers, of simply imitating them in contemporary times. Readings may include Bhagat Singh’s prison diary, Fanon’s case studies in psychology, bell hooks on love, the stories of Ismat Chugtai, Mohammed Iqbal’s critique of Sufism, anticolonial cultures of propaganda, and the rise of personality cults in the socialist bloc.

 

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

The refugee has become one of the world’s most powerful metaphors for modernity. From the image of a child washed up on a beach to the electoral politics of wall-building and the spectre of mass-displacement due to war and environmental disaster, the refugee’s negotiation of buffer zones, barbed wire fences, temporary camps, treacherous seas and militarised checkpoints are compelling figures for the failure of the “world” as a place of transnational solidarity. But who counts as a refugee? This course takes the legal redefinition of the refugee after the Second World War as its point of departure to explore how this figure has come to embody issues of narrative credibility, social identity, cultural difference, testimony, styles of storytelling and legal audience. The course will survey novels, poetry, legal materials and journalistic reporting by and about refugees. Students will also have the opportunity to watch films and engage visual culture on the topic. Primary materials will be supplemented by theoretical readings.

 

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

This course will explore how poetry has been integral to constructing what we now think of as “the Americas.” Beginning with the colonial period, we will develop a working poetic lineage of the Americas by exploring literary renderings of key historical moments. While we will attend to the role of poetry in history—including the recording of the Popol Vuh during crisis, and the hemispheric movements of poetry in the 19^th century—our emphasis will be on 20^th– and 21^st-century poetry. What can poetry tell us about how the Americas have been, and still are, imagined? Further, does poetry offer a different construction of the Americas? These are some of the questions we will ask as we address topics such as New World “discovery” and conquest, settler colonialism, borderlands, enslavement and revolution, translation, and the endurance of colonial pasts in the present. We will consider the geographic divisions of the Americas—North, South, Central, and Caribbean—and the ways in which poetry probes geographies and histories of the hemisphere.

During her relatively short lifetime, Jane Austen wrote only six novels, which sold modestly well. Austen died, at the age of forty-one, a rather moderate literary success. In the two hundred or so years since her death, however, Austen has become a literary celebrity, household name, and object of worldwide fan adoration. What is it about Austen’s fiction that still captivates readers? How have her handful of novels — set in the early nineteenth century, mostly in small English villages — spawned so many adaptations, rewritings, sequels, conventions, merchandise, and even action figures? These are some of the questions we will ask over the course of “Jane Austen: Then and Now.” We will be reading some of Austen’s juvenilia and at least two of her novels. We will also watch screen adaptations of Austen’s writing (and life) and take adaptation seriously as a mode of cultural critique.

This class focuses on a range of critical and political debates about slavery, sexual equality, the meaning of work, the factory system, disability, socialism, prostitution, and aesthetics from the 1830s through the 1890s in Britain. Writers include Mary Prince, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Caroline Norton, and W. T. Stead.

In this course, we will explore in depth Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a means to think about the novel as an art form and about the history of the British Victorian period when it was published. This novel experiments dramatically with form. It alternates between omniscient and first-person narration. Half is written in the past tense, half in the present. And its monthly serialization gets enfolded into its story. You will learn to think critically about literary form in this course, and we will engage some literary theory to help us to do so. You will also think about the historical period depicted and what it means to you. Dickens’ story takes us into traumatic conflicts concerning class and gender, philosophical questions of justice, the power of bureaucratic institutions, and much more. Please be aware that there is a very heavy reading and writing load in this course.

This course will primarily—but not exclusively—focus on younger voices in the contemporary poetry scene, including writers who have only recently published their first books. We will also read established poets who either live in Southern California or have some connection to the region, including selected Mexican poets in translation.

Course requirements include:

• Weekly writing assignments (e.g., short analytical essays, creative exercises, etc.)
• A group presentation on a poet or poetry-related topic
• A final project: either a short research paper or a creative work, due during finals week

Class sessions will primarily be discussion-based, with a focus on close reading of individual poems. Occasionally, short lectures will supplement our discussions. Additionally, 2–3 poets will be invited to visit the class—either in person or virtually—to read their work and engage with student questions.

This course examines recent trends in contemporary American fiction, focusing in particular on the past thirty years of literary output from U.S. 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, Jennifer Egan, and Tao Lin.

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 course studies U.S. culture through literature produced during a period of significant turmoil and crisis. Historically, this period is framed by two controversial figures emblematic of a kind of American repression: Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Focusing on literature, we will consider how music, visual arts, and media engage the socio-political conditions that shape U.S. society. This is a period where the US walks both in the shadow of nuclear annihilation and toward a hope for humanity’s progress. Race as a technology of modern social order proves central since the United States has played a unique role among nations in its struggles over the role race has played in the conflicts and hopes of U.S. social organization. While our focus will be on literature, we will approach the literary as one manifestation of cultural expression. We will analyze a variety of cultural texts – musical, visual, and mediatized – in order to assess their various meanings and significances.

 

The goals of the class will be: 1) to practice speaking and writing in clear and organized ways; 2) to analyze cultural texts critically; 3) to generate original ideas by synthesizing different critical thoughts and analyses; 4) to learn about U.S. life and culture in the post-war era. A large part of the class involves discussion and in-class writing, so attendance is required.

 

Not open for credit to students who completed ENGL 177 with Prof. Perez-Torres in 21F or 23W.

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 15. 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 June 26. Students applying to English 20W should enroll in an alternate course during their enrollment passes, and should not assume that they will be admitted.

 

Questions should be directed to the English Undergraduate Advising Offices via MyUCLA MessageCenter.

 

Students who are interested in taking English 20W in lieu of English 4W while working on their lower-division major or minor requirements should contact a Dept. of English advisor.

Course Description:

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

In this intermediate poetry workshop, you’ll write a new poem each week, and you 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.

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 (in one document) 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, literary poets who interest and/or influence you, 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 136A) and it should be sent to rwilson@english.ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 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 3-hour seminar requires students to submit weekly writing, including first drafts of poems, targeted writing exercises, and eventually, revised versions of poems that have been workshopped during the quarter. Students will also be expected to meet periodically in small breakout groups with one or two classmates.

The aim of the course is to elevate each student’s writing to the next level—ideally, to the point where you feel confident submitting your work to literary journals.

All forms of poetry are welcome, whether formal, experimental, prose poetry, performance-based, or mixed media, as long as the primary genre remains poetry. As a class, we will also co-edit a small journal featuring the best work by each student, culminating in a launch reading.

How to Apply:

Please submit a single PDF titled with your last and first name (in that order). Your PDF should include:

• Your name, student ID number, major, and year
• A brief but representative selection of your recent poems (about 3–5 pages)
• A paragraph or two describing your experience and development as a poet, including favorite poets, books, etc.
• A quote from a favorite poem, along with a few sentences explaining what you appreciate about it

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Oliver 136B) and it should be sent to stefans@humnet.ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 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:

Imagine an accordion. The instrument at its most compressed represents poetry; when extended to its fullest, the baggiest of prose fiction. Short stories abound at various points along the accordion between the contraction of the poem and the stretch of the novel. We read and discuss exemplars of short stories to discern the music of how short fiction works. Students write, score, conduct, three original stories for discussion in a workshop format and revise them into a final portfolio.

How to Apply:

Email a word document of one of your short stories (no less than 5 pages and not more than 8 pages maximum length) with a brief statement of your recent reading in fiction and past creative writing experience.

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: McDonald 137B) and it should be sent to freddaguiar@ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2025.

Acceptance notifications:

A class list announcement will be posted at the main English department office, 149 Kaplan Hall. Accepted students may also receive email notifications.

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, profiles based on interviews, and fact pieces 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> for consideration on a rolling basis.

This course qualifies as an eligible non-fiction topic for the Professional Writing minor.

In this seminar we will read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and representative sections of Finnegans Wake. As Ulysses is the pivotal novel of the twentieth-century, the greater portion of the class will be given over to its discussion. Our conversations will range from Joyce’s vision of the role of the artist in society, to considerations of the ways in which his work advances textual, gender, postcolonial, ecological, historical, and philosophical scholarship. Discussion will be based upon close reading of the works, as well as materials generated by members of the class. At the end of the quarter we will introduce Finnegans Wake, with an eye to strategies for interpretation of Joyce’s most obscure text. Please note: because of the reading load in this course, I ask that you begin reading Dubliners prior to our first session. We will begin at our first session with a conversation about “The Sisters” and “Araby.”

This course examines literary and cinematic representations of the American immigrant experience over the last century. To live between cultures, to experience the confounding processes of racialization and assimilation, to labor to translate one’s deepest interiority into a foreign language––all these aspects of migration make a new imaginative relationship with the world a necessity for the migrant and, as such, are fertile ground for literary exploration and cinematic expression. In this class, we study novels and movies as distinct mediums even as we attend to their affinities, such as an impulse toward narrative storytelling. Among our films, one is from the silent era (Chaplin’s The Immigrant); among our novels, one is a wordless story of sequenced, illustrated panels (Tan’s The Arrival). Other novels include Eugenides’ Middlesex, Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Ozeki’s A Tale for a Time Being, Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. Other movies: Coppola’s The Godfather, Nair’s The Namesake, Sayles’ Lone Star, Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre.

 

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

This seminar investigates the extent to which “literary” writers engaged and even transformed highly technical concepts of credit, need, excess, balance, doubt, risk, profit and loss central to the medieval legal discourse on usury. Texts including The Ballads of Robin Hood, Langland’s Piers Plowman, Gower’s Vox Clamantis and Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale will be explored alongside technical discussions of usury by writers such as Gratian, Giles of Lessines, Peter of John Olivi, John Freiburg, and Nicholas Oresme. Questions for discussion and research would include: to what extent, if any, did our “literary” writers contribute to, or even intervene in, the legal discourse about usury? What role did technical notions of usury play in the crafting of literature?

 

Not open for credit to students who will be taking ENGL 149.1 with Prof. Thomas in Fall 2025.