Fall 2026

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 sections 1-3 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 utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to examine U.S. culture writ large, specifically “America” itself, as an imagined and often-contested idea, a trenchant source of belonging and exclusion, and a fecund site of aesthetic and cultural production. We will explore the manifestation of these ideals across various contemporary literary and media-based forms—including poetry, visual culture, film, performance, photography, music, and art. In doing so, we will examine how artists, writers, and musicians perform “America” and/or “the American dream” and their relationship to it.

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: Continuing UCLA students should apply by 11:59 pm on July 3. 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 25. 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 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 introduce you to the way in which humanists and social scientists in anthropology, geography, history, literary studies, and philosophy have engaged with environmental issues. We will discuss 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.

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

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.

Readers have long been fascinated by the gothic excesses of nineteenth-century U.S. literature. However, critics have not always taken the gothic tendencies of early U.S. literature seriously—seeing in its overblown conventions the signs of an underdeveloped and almost juvenile culture. This seminar uses the early U.S. Gothic to introduce students to the interdisciplinary methods of the American Literature and Culture major. We will approach the Gothic—and its unreliable narrators, doppelgangers, and obsession with the uncanny—as an opportunity to understand the anxieties about identity and power that divided and haunted the tumultuous century between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Readings will include secondary criticism, as well as primary texts by Jefferson, Brown, Cusick, Sigourney, Apess, Poe, Hawthorne, and Crafts. Assignments will include a presentation, weekly in-class reading responses, a quote outline, and an essay-based final.

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 15.

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 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).

Examination of representative plays; readings may range from Greek to modern drama. Emphasis on critical approaches to dramatic text; study of issues such as plot construction, characterization, special uses of language in drama, methods of evaluation.

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. You will learn to think critically about literary form in this course, and we will engage with 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 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, students will learn the art and craft of literary criticism for a general (rather than for a specifically academic) 21st-century audience. We will look at reviews of literary texts from the 18th century to the present and examine the recent developments in literary and cultural criticism that have led to the emergence of internet publications dedicated to those forms, including sites like Public Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as the ways in which national and global periodicals have successfully adapted their book review sections to reach a wider internet-based audience. Finally, we will examine the ways in which contemporary book reviews encompass other forms of culture, especially visual and digital culture. Students will compile a portfolio of criticism and other writing culminating in a final pair of reviews of recent works, as well as a critical analysis of the role of book reviews and cultural criticism in historical and current contexts.

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.

This course will prepare students to submit first-person writings to journals and magazines that publish works for college students and young adults. Such works include memoirs and autobiographies, humor, opinion pieces, reviews, and cultural criticism. We will explore the literary marketplace to determine which publishing venues are best suited to each individual’s work. We will also learn how to submit one’s writing to 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. Several editors will visit the class, offering advice about the publishing process. Requirements: 2-3 pages of writing each week, participation in student critiques, and attendance.

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.

A rattle bag of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow entertainments and edifications, the Canterbury Tales resists 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. We’ll encounter gossip, prophecy, prayer, promises of love, oaths of friendship, lies, fraudulent agreements, alchemy, and ekphrasis, and we’ll analyze how the text constructs gender, faith, and sexuality over a number of the individual tales.

Class participation is required. There will be a Middle English quiz, frequent in-class writing assignments, and two longer essays.

Stories of holy women – hagiographical narratives – offer a space for thinking through the shifting relationship between the church and the holy woman, between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, as well as between animals and saints. The course extends from the travails of the runaway bride Christina of Markyate and the visions of Hildegard of Bingen to the feats of Catherine of Siena, and the travails of Dorothea of Montau and Margery Kempe. We will read writings about and by holy women (and a couple by holy men) alongside relevant materials on dream-visions, narrative strategies, books of rhetorical composition, digests of law, and other institutional documents on issues ranging from virginity to marriage, from travel to enclosure, from writing to preaching, from secrets shared and secrets betrayed. Questions for discussion include: What make these narratives compelling or powerful? To what extent do formal conventions of storytelling help invent powerful female characters in an otherwise male-dominated world?

Not open for credit to students who have completed the same topic with Prof. Thomas in a previous lecture or seminar course.

In 150A, we will read poetry Shakespeare wrote in the 1590’s, alongside five of his dramatic works from that period, incorporating at least one play from each genre: comedy, history and tragedy. The course is delivered through lectures, discussion based group work, dramatic workshops and performances, as well as text-based practicums for editing early quarto and folio text variants, with a visit to UCLA’s special collections. Students are introduced both to textual scholarship in the field, as well as performance studies of the plays, and are encouraged to bring their personal responses and take ownership over the texts, as we continue to read, perform, and enjoy them.

In 150B, we will read five plays Shakespeare wrote after 1600, considering how new technology and stage craft at both court masques and the indoor playhouses influenced and shaped the late plays. We will consider the shared themes of loss and reconciliation across these plays, and the shift into the Romance genre, focusing on aspects such as the invisible complexities of raw human emotion, as well as magical revelations full of dramatic spectacle and wonder. Drawing from performance studies and archival databases of previous productions, we will consider how spectacles can be staged in each of the plays. In groups, students will employ dramaturgical skills to create a directorial premise and abstract of their own imagined production, writing an adapted and abridged script for a short performance from one play.

This class will focus almost entirely on a single work by John Milton: Paradise Lost, his most famous — and most epic — poem. Narrating the fall and expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in over 10,000 lines of blank verse, Paradise Lost is not for the faint of heart. While the poem is most explicitly adapting the first three chapters of Genesis, Paradise Lost is also a densely referential poem in conversation with numerous other texts — Milton was, after all, also a prodigious reader. Over the course of the quarter, we will work our way through Paradise Lost at a pace that should make it feel more accessible. This practice of careful and close reading will also allow us to give Milton’s challenging, compelling, and influential poem the attention it so richly deserves.

This course puts eighteenth-century literature and culture in conversation with contemporary queer and trans theories / methods in order to explore alternative ways of being in the period associated with the rise of traditional gender norms and companionate marriage. We will also look at recent adaptations and historical fiction to consider how seemingly anachronistic accounts of the past can help us better understand the past—and liberate our present and future.

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 this course, we read Laurence Sterne’s genre-defying novel Tristram Shandy (published between 1759 and 1767). And then we read it again. The course has two broad aims. The first is to immerse ourselves in a rich and influential text. The second aim is to reflect on the process and temporality of encountering a difficult—but, I hope, rewarding—work of literature. How do our re-encounters with Tristram Shandy change our sense of its meaning? This course is grounded in the view that recursivity (i.e., re-reading), and dilating the time we spend with a text, are special features of literary study. Finally, we’ll consider whether foregrounding these aspects of our discipline might provide tools for critically interrogating and historicizing our modern attention economy.

This is a course in the so-called “Big Six” Romantic poets: Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. We will read their most important works (including but not limited to Blake’s so-called “prophetic” books and his Songs of Innocence and Experience, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, some of Wordsworth’s Prelude, some of Byron’s Don Juan, and all of Shelley and Keats’s major odes) and consider them both in terms of their formal and aesthetic properties and in relation to their historical context, i.e. the French Revolution, the rise of imperialism, and the growing impact of capitalism on human social life and the environment.

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

Satisfies the pre-1848 requirement for the American Literature & Culture major.

Historical survey of American literatures from Jacksonian era to end of Civil War, including emergent tradition of American Romanticism, augmented and challenged by genres of popular protest urging application of democratic ideals to questions of race, gender, and social equality.

This class looks at six classic works of queer fiction starting with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891) and finishing with the Chicano author John Rechy’s City of Night (1963). The syllabus includes E. M. Forster’s Maurice (written 1913), Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1937), and James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962).

This course examines black revolutionary drama as a distinct genre. Beginning with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, we consider a longer history of African Americans in theater, considering lively debates about aesthetics and politics from the era of slavery and emancipation to the present. We also study the development of black theater in various historical contexts, across the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. We end with a look at developments in contemporary theater that continue to expand the boundaries of race, performance, and spectacle, including the turn to satire, theater and social movements, and collaborative writing. Students are expected to participate extensively during class, including discussion, in-class writing, and group assignments. Readings include Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Wole Soyinka, George C. Wolfe, Cheryl Dunye, Marlon Riggs, and Anna Deavere Smith.

This course traces the evolution of the genre from the mid-nineteenth through the twenty-first century. We will start with traditional mysteries written by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie. Next, we will contrast the English murder mystery with hard-boiled detective fiction, or noir, written by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Walter Mosley. Later, we will examine various offshoots of mysteries and detective fiction, gothic and supernatural literature, the courtroom thriller, suspense, and horror. Requirements: weekly attendance and participation in class discussion, two surprise quizzes, and a 10-15 page paper due on the last day of class.

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.

What is “postcolonial” about postcolonial literature? Does the term refer to an historical timeline and geographical area? Or is the study of postcolonial literature about something other than a set of spatial and temporal coordinates? This class is an introduction to the key literary, political, aesthetic, and ethical questions raised by postcolonial literatures and the methods of reading they have inspired. Students will reflect on the contribution of these methods to our understandings of power, resistance, nation, exile, violence, translation, displacement, reparation, and more. We will also discuss the salience of these methods for analyzing new forms of degradation and disposability in the present, as well as for framing ongoing demands for decolonization. Readings will include major theoretical texts that have structured the field and multi-regional case studies from poetry, fiction, visual art, and film. Written assignments will focus on the skills necessary for critical research, argumentation and analysis.

This course will cover the major works of American dramatist Edward Albee (1928-2016), probably best known for his play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” made into a startling film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 1966. Albee’s plays, ranging from early work that bore resemblance to European trends such as the “Theatre of the Absurd” to his mid- and late-career plays that boldly satirized and critiqued American society — especially our shared illusions, interpersonal power games and inability to communicate — are at once hilarious and brutally frank. Albee’s complex relationship with the queer literary community — “I am not a gay writer. I am a writer who happens to be gay,” he said when receiving the Lambda Literary Pioneer award in 2011 — further complicates a reading of his work. We’ll read some of his most controversial and experimental plays as well as several that won the Pulitzer Prize. Weekly writing assignments and a final paper or creative project.

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.

From Alice in Wonderland to Winnie-the-Pooh. This course studies the ways in which ideas about “children’s literature” developed from the time of Lewis Carroll’s intellectually complex “Alice” stories to the appearance of A. A. Milne’s “Bear of No Brain at all.” The syllabus includes the evolution of J. M. Barrie’s drama and stories about Peter Pan, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s tale of colonial orphanhood in A Little Princess, the socialist E. Nesbit’s Story of the Treasure Seekers, and the focus on social justice in Oscar Wilde’s fairytales.

Black British writers living in the U.K. publish fiction, poetry, plays and essays against a stream of official literature in those genres. Recent books by Black British writers appear to negotiate all the usual strictures of good art but with the added need to clear an authentic space of legitimacy and right to belong in the company of the UK’s canonized texts. Reading Black British writers from the recent past to the present, shows how aware the literature remains of the complex history of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonization and their morphologies in the urgent present.

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, 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. A feature of our course will be guest lecture and live performance of some of his later dramatic works.

This course puts eighteenth-century literature and culture in conversation with contemporary queer and trans theories / methods in order to explore alternative ways of being in the period associated with the rise of traditional gender norms and companionate marriage. We will also look at recent adaptations and historical fiction to consider how seemingly anachronistic accounts of the past can help us better understand the past—and liberate our present and future.

This class looks at six classic works of queer fiction starting with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891) and finishing with the Chicano author John Rechy’s City of Night (1963). The syllabus includes E. M. Forster’s Maurice (written 1913), Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1937), and James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962).

This course examines black revolutionary drama as a distinct genre. Beginning with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, we consider a longer history of African Americans in theater, considering lively debates about aesthetics and politics from the era of slavery and emancipation to the present. We also study the development of black theater in various historical contexts, across the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. We end with a look at developments in contemporary theater that continue to expand the boundaries of race, performance, and spectacle, including the turn to satire, theater and social movements, and collaborative writing. Students are expected to participate extensively during class, including discussion, in-class writing, and group assignments. Readings include Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Wole Soyinka, George C. Wolfe, Cheryl Dunye, Marlon Riggs, and Anna Deavere Smith.

This course engages with the ways that racial, sexual, and gender difference is produced, represented, and experienced as embodied sensation. How is difference felt on and in the body? How does sensation—pleasurable, painful, or a mix of both—become a site of knowledge, history, and power? Through literature, performance, and visual culture, alongside texts in critical race studies, Black and women of color feminisms, and queer theory, we will consider how subjects marked by difference forge new worlds at the same time that they bear histories of violence, in ways that might not be visible, but are felt.

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.

Historical survey of American literatures from Jacksonian era to end of Civil War, including emergent tradition of American Romanticism, augmented and challenged by genres of popular protest urging application of democratic ideals to questions of race, gender, and social equality.

Black British writers living in the U.K. publish fiction, poetry, plays and essays against a stream of official literature in those genres. Recent books by Black British writers appear to negotiate all the usual strictures of good art but with the added need to clear an authentic space of legitimacy and right to belong in the company of the UK’s canonized texts. Reading Black British writers from the recent past to the present, shows how aware the literature remains of the complex history of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonization and their morphologies in the urgent present.

This course examines black revolutionary drama as a distinct genre. Beginning with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, we consider a longer history of African Americans in theater, considering lively debates about aesthetics and politics from the era of slavery and emancipation to the present. We also study the development of black theater in various historical contexts, across the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. We end with a look at developments in contemporary theater that continue to expand the boundaries of race, performance, and spectacle, including the turn to satire, theater and social movements, and collaborative writing. Students are expected to participate extensively during class, including discussion, in-class writing, and group assignments. Readings include Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Wole Soyinka, George C. Wolfe, Cheryl Dunye, Marlon Riggs, and Anna Deavere Smith.

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

What is “postcolonial” about postcolonial literature? Does the term refer to an historical timeline and geographical area? Or is the study of postcolonial literature about something other than a set of spatial and temporal coordinates? This class is an introduction to the key literary, political, aesthetic, and ethical questions raised by postcolonial literatures and the methods of reading they have inspired. Students will reflect on the contribution of these methods to our understandings of power, resistance, nation, exile, violence, translation, displacement, reparation, and more. We will also discuss the salience of these methods for analyzing new forms of degradation and disposability in the present, as well as for framing ongoing demands for decolonization. Readings will include major theoretical texts that have structured the field and multi-regional case studies from poetry, fiction, visual art, and film. Written assignments will focus on the skills necessary for critical research, argumentation and analysis.

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

Satisfies the pre-1848 requirement for the American Literature & Culture major.

Black British writers living in the U.K. publish fiction, poetry, plays and essays against a stream of official literature in those genres. Recent books by Black British writers appear to negotiate all the usual strictures of good art but with the added need to clear an authentic space of legitimacy and right to belong in the company of the UK’s canonized texts. Reading Black British writers from the recent past to the present, shows how aware the literature remains of the complex history of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonization and their morphologies in the urgent present.

This course puts eighteenth-century literature and culture in conversation with contemporary queer and trans theories / methods in order to explore alternative ways of being in the period associated with the rise of traditional gender norms and companionate marriage. We will also look at recent adaptations and historical fiction to consider how seemingly anachronistic accounts of the past can help us better understand the past—and liberate our present and future.

This course examines black revolutionary drama as a distinct genre. Beginning with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, we consider a longer history of African Americans in theater, considering lively debates about aesthetics and politics from the era of slavery and emancipation to the present. We also study the development of black theater in various historical contexts, across the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. We end with a look at developments in contemporary theater that continue to expand the boundaries of race, performance, and spectacle, including the turn to satire, theater and social movements, and collaborative writing. Students are expected to participate extensively during class, including discussion, in-class writing, and group assignments. Readings include Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Wole Soyinka, George C. Wolfe, Cheryl Dunye, Marlon Riggs, and Anna Deavere Smith.

Study of myth, dramatic origins, oral epic, folktale, and ballad.

This course traces the evolution of the genre from the mid-nineteenth through the twenty-first century. We will start with traditional mysteries written by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie. Next, we will contrast the English murder mystery with hard-boiled detective fiction, or noir, written by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Walter Mosley. Later, we will examine various offshoots of mysteries and detective fiction, gothic and supernatural literature, the courtroom thriller, suspense, and horror. Requirements: weekly attendance and participation in class discussion, two surprise quizzes, and a 10-15 page paper due on the last day of class.

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

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.

Why not just say what you mean? This course will focus on criticism and theory that presents the concealment of meaning as an important linguistic tactic and aesthetic technique in the context of social and political pressure. We will isolate opacity, ambiguity, and irony for particular attention but will also consider their connection to other concepts that explain language in terms of misdirection: difference and deferral, the unconscious, and post-irony. We will ask how these ideas seek to answer new forms of social and political exposure in the modern world. Why do concealment and misdirection come to be seen as sources of invention, of political integrity, and even of truth itself? To what extent do they serve as critical and aesthetic resources today? Readings will include theoretical texts by Édouard Glissant, Jacques Derrida, William Empson, Frantz Fanon, and Jonathan Lear, as well as case studies from modern and contemporary literature, visual art, and film. Students will practice criticism, argumentation, and analysis in written assignments.

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