CoursesCourses for the English Major

Introduction to literary analysis, with close reading and carefully written exposition of selections from principal modes of literature: poetry, prose fiction, and drama. Minimum of 15 to 20 pages of revised writing. Satisfies Writing II requirement.

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major. Please note that specifically marked sections may be reserved for Dept. of English majors and minors. All other sections are open to students of all majors.

English 4HW confers College Honors credit. Students participating in the College Honors program may contact a Dept. of English advisor to request a seat in the class.

 

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

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

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

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

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

Enrollment by instructor consent and NOT by enrollment pass time: Interested students should apply by 8 pm on February 28. Applications received after this date will be considered only if additional space should become available and may not receive a full review or response. Enrollment preference for English 20W will be given to first and second-year students. Approved applicants will receive a PTE directly from the instructor.

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

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

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

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

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

 

English M30 is a required preparatory course for the Literature & Environment minor. L&E minors should contact Steph Bundy (stephanie@english.ucla.edu) for assistance with enrollment.

Introduction to medieval texts juxtaposed with modern texts and media to analyze how and why the medieval (in form of crusade, quest, romance, world-construction, etc.) is continually reproduced and transformed in large scale popular productions, novels, film, and television. Textual focus on medieval works in comparison to analysis of 20th- and 21st-century works may include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Le Morte Darthur, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Harry Potter.

 

Not open for credit to English majors or students with credit for any course in the 140 series.

How has fiction shaped the way authors and readers imagine what it means to be an American? What role did fiction play in shaping competing visions of America in the aftermath of the American Revolution, when the U.S. did not yet have an established cultural identity or literary tradition? And what new meanings does literature hold for us today? This survey will introduce students to several American literary traditions—gothic literature, abolitionist literature, transcendentalism, romance, and realism—paying special attention to the way literature creates and reimagines the contested origins, identities, and meanings of “America.” We will read literature by Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, David Walker, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Sigourney, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Charles Chesnutt.

 

Not open for credit to English majors or students with credit for any course in the 170 series.

We’ll survey contemporary mixed race literature with the goal of answering the question: What is mixed-race literature, and what are the implications of the presentations of mixedness it contains? The course will introduce why it may be difficult to define mixed race literature, explore scholarship surrounding presentations of mixedness, and present a brief contextual history of mixedness in the U.S. Each week corresponds to a different pattern of representation: binary vs. fluid representations of mixed identity, mixed characters’ association with tragedy, mixed people as symbols for a better world, as shapeshifters, as cultural “bridges,” and as metaphors for cultural crossings. The course will discuss the one drop rule and blood quantum laws, as well as how mixedness is associated with alienation. We’ll return to our opening definition of mixed race literature and redefine it based on our learning. Alongside the readings, we’ll read excerpted scholarship to provide critical frameworks through which to analyze and critique representations of mixedness.

 

Facilitated by Emily Kim with Professor Streeter as faculty mentor. This 1-unit seminar is part of the Undergraduate Student Initiated Education program.

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

This course will explore how literature “uses” disability for a variety of purposes, from characterization to cultural critique. Reading texts from the eighteenth century to the present, we will historicize disability and analyze its intersections with class, race, and gender.

 

This course confers Writing II credit. Dept. of English majors who wish to take this course in lieu of English 4W should speak with a departmental advisor.

This course is for the staff of Westwind, UCLA’s Journal for the Arts. If you are interested in joining the Westwind staff, please familiarize yourself with the journal at www.westwind.ucla.edu, and come to the first Spring meeting (time and day posted in the Schedule of Classes.)

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

 

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

“Careers in Humanities” challenges misassumptions regarding Humanities majors and their practical applications to life after graduation. In this course, students will explore a wide range of careers, with hands-on practice in crafting a personal professional narrative. Guest lectures will be given by UCLA professionals and alumni–all experts in career planning and local industries. Students will engage with workplace leaders, and simultaneously build a professional dossier–on paper or online–in preparation for life after UCLA with a humanities degree.

 

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

This course is NOT a Dept. of English senior seminar; students in search of a senior seminar should enroll in ENGL 181B – 184 or M191A – M191E.

This course does NOT qualify for foreign literature in translation credit.

This course on Old English literature includes the epic, the elegy, religious verse and heroic poetry, ranging over topics from travel and treasure to Vikings, saints, poets and women’s roles.  We will also spend several weeks on a close reading of Beowulf.   Classes will involve lecture and discussion as well as a weekly quiz on the assigned reading, plus practice at reading aloud and translating accessible OE texts.  Week Ten will be devoted to a conference where everyone will present a five-minute summary of their research project so that the whole class may benefit from each person’s work.  Your revised and expanded paper will be due one week after our last class.

 

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

Although it only survives in one half-burned copy, Beowulf is today both the early medieval poem that begins countless British literature surveys and the subject of blockbuster movie and novel adaptations. Yet, even as the poem invites us into its mead halls and dragon hoards relatively easily, it remains impossible for us to say exactly when or by whom it was written, or what its earliest audiences may have thought of it. In this course, we will translate key scenes from the original Old English, while reading the whole through a range of translations and critical lenses. One of our guiding course themes will be intimacy: How close can we get to a poem (and a language) from 1000 years ago? And what ways of reading can help us illuminate it? In this way, our course will serve as a laboratory for different interpretive approaches, from manuscript analysis and linguistic questions to theoretical frameworks drawn from feminist criticism, queer theory, and indigenous studies. Over the course of the quarter, students will also pursue an original research project on the poem and its readers medieval and modern.

 

**Students must have completed ENGL 141b: Introduction to Old English or otherwise have reading knowledge of the language in order to take this course; both English 141B and 141C are eligible to satisfy either the pre-1500 requirement OR the foreign literature in translation requirement.

In Invisible Cities Italo Calvino allows Kublai Khan, emperor of virtually the whole of thirteenth-century Asia, to experience “the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin.” To this exhaustion of empire, the salve and possible solution becomes a survey of cities presented by Marco Polo, the Khan’s Italian servant and ambassador. This course examines medieval cities as physical and figurative terrains, nodes for crystallizing cultural difference and cultural intelligibility in a variety of narrative modes.  This course begins with the dubious doubling of medieval London with the city of Troy in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and then maps its incommensurate jurisdictions in the romance of Athelston, and Hoccleve’s Series.  The class proceeds eastward to the great city of Jerusalem situated on maps at the navel of the world, as a pilgrimage site, a crusading prize, and a scriptural memory palace for meditating toward the heavenly city at the end of time.  Then we will examine an Asian city with similar imaginary scope and power, the Abbasid capital of Baghdad, as it is invoked in selected tales from the 1001 Nights.  The last part of the class explores travel accounts from European and Asian travelers that constellate worlds by listing cities, including Marco Polo’s The Division/Description of the World, al-Idrisi’s Geography, Ibn Jubayr’s and Ibn Battuta’s Rihlas.  The class will end with the visionary explorations of infernal, purgatorial, or heavenly cities in Dante’s Comedia, and the alliterative Pearl, ending with Italo Calvino’s fabulous take off on Marco Polo, Invisible Cities.

Two 2000-word papers OR One shared class project, with 1500 word analytical debrief, and online forum (50%); weekly response papers (30%); optional class presentation (replaces one of the papers); lively class participation (20%).

Texts may include:

Athelston, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Hoccleve’s Series; the pilgrimage of Egeria, The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela, Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du Monde, The Boke of John Mandeville, Pearl, Surat-al Hajj (the Quranic Sura of the Pilgrimage to Mecca); al-Idrisi, Geography, Ibn Jubayr, Ibn Battuta; Dante’s Comedia; Arabian Nights tr. Haddawy; Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Secondary sources may include Suzanne Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative; Frances and Joseph Gies, Life in a Medieval City; Chiara Frugoni and William McCuaig, A Day in a Medieval City; Keith D. Lilly, City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form; Vito Fumagalli, Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages; Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive”; Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City”; Walter Benjamin, “The Flaneur”; Arcades Project.

 

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

An intensive study of Shakespeare’s works from 1604 onward, including Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus and The Tempest (and possibly The Winter’s Tale). Students will write a brief close-reading essay and a longer final essay, and will take midterm and final exams. Careful reading of the plays in their original language before class is essential, and regular attendance and active participation is required.

 

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

This course will explore selected plays by William Shakespeare from the general perspective of source study, considering both Shakespeare’s use of sources and the use of Shakespeare as a source.  We will first read some narrative and dramatic works that Shakespeare used in crafting his own plays so that we may better understand the playwright’s transformational strategies. In so doing, we will hope to recover a fresh awareness of the plays’ particular idiosyncrasies while gaining a more complex sense of Shakespearean imitation and originality. We will then consider those plays as sources, in turn, as they are riffed on/ripped off by modern theatrical, cinematic, and musical derivatives. Although our main focus will be, throughout, on Shakespeare’s plays, we will also acquire a sense of their durable importance as cultural properties, resources, and totemic objects of veneration, homage, allusion, and parody.

 

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

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

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

Placing Jane Austen in context is a tricky but rewarding task: does she belong to the 18^th century or the 19^th? the Gothic or Romantic traditions? And why do such contexts matter? In this course, we will read four of Austen’s major novels together (with an option to read one or both of the others on your own) in addition to Lady Susan, a short early work. We will also read contemporary writings on historical and literary issues including (but not limited to) women’s rights; gender and authorship; revolution; slavery, race, and colonialism; sensibility; Romanticism; and the Gothic novel. Our reading will be supported by critical texts examining Austen’s writing from a variety of critical perspectives (biographical, feminist, generic, new historical, and post-colonial, among others).

This class explores debates about colonial slavery, female suffrage, domestic abuse, socialist aesthetics, and the aesthetic movement in relation to wide range of writers, including Mary Prince, Caroline Norton, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Frances Power Cobbe, Mona Caird, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, and William Morris.

This course offers a broad survey of major American authors whose enduring works have shaped a distinctive national literature over more than two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and growing demographic diversity, all of these writers grappled with fundamental issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the abstract ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each in their own way transformed literary conventions to express their unique visions of their place in America and in the world. We will read the following works selected from different crucial stages in this developing literary history of the United States, including Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography; Hannah W. Foster’s novel, The Coquette; Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Fanny Fern’s novel, Ruth Hall; Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Stephen Crane’s short novels, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother; Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Ernest Hemingway’s first collection of short stories, In Our Time.

This class examines a range of lesbian, gay, genderqueer, and trans fictions that were produced in the United States and Britain from the 1890s through the early 1970s. Authors include Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, E. M. Forster, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and John Rechy. The class concludes by exploring Shola Von Reinhold’s prizewinning novel LOTE (2020), which reconstructs Black queer experience of the 1920s from a twenty-first century perspective.

This course examines a range of Asian American literary writings—autobiography, realist novel, modernist narrative, short fiction, manifesto, and drama, among others—which depict Asians’ experiences in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1980s. Issues to look at include colonialism, empire-building, trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic migration, war memory, diaspora, interethnic and generational relations, social activism, and race/gender/class dynamics. Lectures will emphasize making sense of texts in contexts, with attention paid to how the narrative voice, thematic focus, and formal property of the works examined are shaped by the interplay between emergent ethnic authorship, evolving audiences, and social and cultural constraints on this Asian American discourse as a minoritarian formation.

In 2023, during what some consider the 50th anniversary of hip hop’s birth, this course will consider the evolution of hip hop’s poetics from its roots in the 1970s South Bronx to its worldwide influence in the present day. How does rap extend the Western poetic tradition and how does it complicate it? How might we best evaluate the merits of a given rap performance? How has rap changed–as music and as lyric–over the past decade? How has poetry changed because of rap? Among the rappers and poets we’ll consider are Tupac Shakur, Nipsey Hussle, Megan thee Stallion, Kendrick Lamar, Rapsody, Danez Smith, Morgan Parker, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Erica Dawson, and many others. Through a combination of lecture and discussion, we’ll work together to develop a language for talking about the poetics of hip hop.

Chicana/Chicano literature from 1920s through Great Depression and World War II, ending with Chicana/Chicano civil rights movement. Oral and written narratives by writers including Conrado Espinoza, Jovita González, Cleofas Jaramillo, Angelico Chávez, Mario Suárez, Oscar Acosta, and Evangelina Vigil.

In this seminar we examine fiction, film and popular cultural materials depicting interracial relationships and mixed-race identities in the United States. We pay particular attention to how writers engage intersecting categories of social identity, including gender, ethnicity, sexuality and economic class in plots and characters. The class also looks at how imaginative literature intersects with historical conditions, contemporary society and personal experience in its representation of racial crossing and mixing. Novels include Caucasia (Danzy Senna) and A Feather on the Breath of God (Sigrid Nunez). Films include Banana Split (Kip Fulbeck) and Multifacial (Vin Diesel).

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

In an effort to call attention to planetary climate change, some geologists have named the ‘Anthropocene’ as a radical new geological epoch of environmental change akin to a meteor strike. They attribute the origins to the global rise of agriculture, nuclear radiation, and plastics. Yet scholars in the social sciences and humanities have pressed against this universal narrative to ask which humans are really making the impact? They point to histories of empire, militarism, and globalization as fundamental causes, and raise questions as to how to tell the Anthropocene story (or stories) with attention to both local context and planetary scale. This interdisciplinary course explores the Anthropocene debate from the perspective of writers, artists, and filmmakers, particularly from islands in the global south. It turns to key concepts in the emergent field of Anthropocene studies such as climate, weather, scale, and species. The course will be particularly concerned with Postcolonial, Indigenous, Caribbean, and Pacific Island perspectives, especially the relationship between land and (rising) sea. Requirements include active class participation, weekly posts on Bruin Learn, a short presentation, and a final research paper/project.

 

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

 

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

This course traces out the recent oceanic turn in the humanities, with an emphasis on postcolonial methods and approaches. We will examine contemporary postcolonial literature (poetry, short stories and the novel), visual arts, and films that represent the ocean as a space of migration, climate change, embodiment, fluidity, habitation, mining, and a place for an engagement with nonhuman others as well as alternative knowledges and ontologies. We will examine the relationship between empire and the oceans through postcolonial, feminist, and Indigenous methodologies, with a particular emphasis on texts from the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a short presentation, and a final essay/project.

 

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

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), a quintessentially American poet of widespread and indelible influence, was the first black person to win a Pulitzer Prize, for Annie Allen, in 1950. After Robert Hayden, of Detroit, Brooks was the second African American to serve as U.S. Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the equivalent of today’s U.S. Poet Laureate. Born in Topeka, Kansas (landmark of a transformational 1954 Supreme Court case), at age six Brooks moved with her family to Chicago, home of the poet Carl Sandburg, where she would spend the rest of her life. As a resident of the racially red-lined neighborhood of Bronzeville, Brooks observed and experienced the indignities as well as the triumphs of 20^th-century African Americans, turning their everyday struggles and celebrations into vital literary expressions of the human spirit.

 

Spanning from the end of World War I to the beginning of the 21^st century, the poet’s life and work encompass significant developments of modernity, from the struggle for civil rights and black empowerment to feminism and other liberation movements. The poet’s family was part of the great migration of African Americans from the rural South, where her grandparents had been enslaved in Kentucky and Tennessee, to the urban North where her father worked as a janitor, never realizing his dream of becoming a physician. Planting seeds of hope in their offspring, her parents were keen to support their daughter’s literary aspirations.

 

As a poet, Brooks participated in important literary movements that signaled her transition from traditional metered verse to alternative forms such as the sonnet-ballad, to modernist free verse and poems crafted with urgent messages for black readers. Having been encouraged in her youth by Langston Hughes, Brooks was known throughout her life for mentoring and encouraging younger poets. Our reading for this course will include a substantial selection of her poetry as well as her distinctive novel, Maud Martha.

This class explores debates about colonial slavery, female suffrage, domestic abuse, socialist aesthetics, and the aesthetic movement in relation to wide range of writers, including Mary Prince, Caroline Norton, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Frances Power Cobbe, Mona Caird, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, and William Morris.

This course offers a broad survey of major American authors whose enduring works have shaped a distinctive national literature over more than two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and growing demographic diversity, all of these writers grappled with fundamental issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the abstract ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each in their own way transformed literary conventions to express their unique visions of their place in America and in the world. We will read the following works selected from different crucial stages in this developing literary history of the United States, including Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography; Hannah W. Foster’s novel, The Coquette; Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Fanny Fern’s novel, Ruth Hall; Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Stephen Crane’s short novels, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother; Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Ernest Hemingway’s first collection of short stories, In Our Time.

In this class we will read major British poets from 1900 to the present.  After establishing a foundation in nineteenth-century aesthetics, we’ll begin with study of Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and incorporate the poets of World War I. The greater part of the course will be given over to detailed study of the writings of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Our term will conclude with introduction to contemporary poets such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Eavan Boland, and others.

This course offers both a survey of major poets and poetic movements in the United States since World War II and close engagement with the work of a handful of contemporary poets. In the first half of the term, we shall chart the course of American poetry since 1945 so as to establish a common foundation and a sense of the evolving critical, aesthetic, and political concerns of the times. We shall read poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, and many others. In the second half of the course, we shall dedicate each week to a book by a living poet. The goal here is to foster a deeper immersion in the work of that poet and a greater appreciation for the craft of composing a sequence of poems. All of these contemporary poets will make virtual visits to our class, which will allow students the opportunity to hear them read and to engage them in discussion. Throughout the term, class meetings will focus on honing different ways of reading poems and writing about them.

We’ll consider two slender great novels written in English by women: To The Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf and My Antonia, by Willa Cather. We’ll read these books as writers, noticing how each writer uses language, structure, patterning, voice and details to create a cohesive, compelling work of art. Students will be asked do two oral reports and a final paper.

This course will ask what film and literature might have to tell us – if anything – about the meaning of a good life. We will consider the often vexed relationship between art and morality, and will inquire into the ways moral understanding might be enhanced by the arts of film and literature.

 

An aim of the course will be to explore thinking about the good life as it is performed in, and shaped by, different literary and filmic genres. We will look at work by authors including Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, James Baldwin, Iris Murdoch, John Berger and Zadie Smith, and by filmmakers including George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, Kathleen Collins and Jordan Peele. Particular themes from week to week will include good and evil, love and hatred, violence, identity, beauty, luck, storytelling, justice and hope.

 

In studying these texts, we will aim to question, and to extend, our sense of what moral knowledge means in ordinary life. Perspectives drawn from moral philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theories of sexuality, race, and class, will be woven through the course as a whole.

This class examines a range of lesbian, gay, genderqueer, and trans fictions that were produced in the United States and Britain from the 1890s through the early 1970s. Authors include Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, E. M. Forster, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and John Rechy. The class concludes by exploring Shola Von Reinhold’s prizewinning novel LOTE (2020), which reconstructs Black queer experience of the 1920s from a twenty-first century perspective.

The genre of the novel has had a long association with conventional narratives of normative personal development and with stories of compulsory heterosexual marriage. This has meant that writers who wanted to queer the novel have had to find innovative ways to disrupt the form and interfere with those normative trajectories. American novels, in particular, have sometimes been claimed as generally queerer than the novels of other national traditions. This course will study some nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century queer American novels, all of which feature such formal and thematic disruptions. The course will have a dual focus: on a particular literary genre (the novel, in various forms) and a particular content (queer experience, very broadly understood). We will read Charles Brockden Brown’s Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (1799-1800), Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite (c. 1846-47), Margaret J. M. Sweat’s Ethel’s Love-Life (1859), Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme (1861), Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Marsh Island (1885), Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1891/1924), Charles Warren Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company (1904) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), all of them offering unsettling variations on novelistic form and content.

This course examines a range of Asian American literary writings—autobiography, realist novel, modernist narrative, short fiction, manifesto, and drama, among others—which depict Asians’ experiences in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1980s. Issues to look at include colonialism, empire-building, trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic migration, war memory, diaspora, interethnic and generational relations, social activism, and race/gender/class dynamics. Lectures will emphasize making sense of texts in contexts, with attention paid to how the narrative voice, thematic focus, and formal property of the works examined are shaped by the interplay between emergent ethnic authorship, evolving audiences, and social and cultural constraints on this Asian American discourse as a minoritarian formation.

In 2023, during what some consider the 50th anniversary of hip hop’s birth, this course will consider the evolution of hip hop’s poetics from its roots in the 1970s South Bronx to its worldwide influence in the present day. How does rap extend the Western poetic tradition and how does it complicate it? How might we best evaluate the merits of a given rap performance? How has rap changed–as music and as lyric–over the past decade? How has poetry changed because of rap? Among the rappers and poets we’ll consider are Tupac Shakur, Nipsey Hussle, Megan thee Stallion, Kendrick Lamar, Rapsody, Danez Smith, Morgan Parker, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Erica Dawson, and many others. Through a combination of lecture and discussion, we’ll work together to develop a language for talking about the poetics of hip hop.

Chicana/Chicano literature from 1920s through Great Depression and World War II, ending with Chicana/Chicano civil rights movement. Oral and written narratives by writers including Conrado Espinoza, Jovita González, Cleofas Jaramillo, Angelico Chávez, Mario Suárez, Oscar Acosta, and Evangelina Vigil.

Introduction to indigenous literatures of North America through reading fiction, poetry, and visual media. Consideration of how authors imagine indigenous lifeworlds, affective experiences, and genders and sexualities in ways that index and transcend colonial violence. Examination of how authors craft decolonial forms of memory, intergenerational connection, and relationships with more-than-human life. Study asks how indigenous literatures represent significant spaces of cultural, ecological, feminist, and queer theorizing, with the power to enact a decolonial future.

In this seminar we examine fiction, film and popular cultural materials depicting interracial relationships and mixed-race identities in the United States. We pay particular attention to how writers engage intersecting categories of social identity, including gender, ethnicity, sexuality and economic class in plots and characters. The class also looks at how imaginative literature intersects with historical conditions, contemporary society and personal experience in its representation of racial crossing and mixing. Novels include Caucasia (Danzy Senna) and A Feather on the Breath of God (Sigrid Nunez). Films include Banana Split (Kip Fulbeck) and Multifacial (Vin Diesel).

This course traces the rifts and relations between queer theory and feminist theory with particular attention given to how race structures theoretical debates around gender and sexuality. Students will consider the critical interventions of black and women of color feminisms, postcolonial feminism, queer of color critique, trans of color critique, and queer crip of color critique to engage ongoing discussions around Western colonial formations of modern human subjectivity, what constitutes care, consent, and capacity, how we make sense of intimacy, desire, and deviance, and the limits of aesthetic and political representation.

 

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

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, through the lens of performance and race. We will examine the manifestation of these ideals across a variety of contemporary textual, media-based, and embodied forms—including visual culture, film, performance art, photography, sports, music videos, fashion blogs, dance, and everyday life. In doing so, we will explore how performers enact “America” and/or the “American dream” and their relationship to it and how artists use performance as a kinesthetic medium to theatricalize race, gender, and queerness. This class will center on introducing students to some of the key writings (and debates) within performance studies, a field of study devoted to a) treating performative behavior, not just the performing arts, as the subject of serious scholarly study and b) expanding our vision of performance, treating it not only as art but as a means of understanding historical, social, and cultural processes. We will explore key questions including: how do we study that which disappears? How do we isolate the ‘strips of behavior’ that we enact daily? And what constitutes the “live”? By situating the study of American culture in an interdisciplinary context, specifically performance and race, this course encourages students to think rigorously, expansively, and creatively about the varied meanings of belonging, identity, and ‘doing’ one’s body.

 

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

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), a quintessentially American poet of widespread and indelible influence, was the first black person to win a Pulitzer Prize, for Annie Allen, in 1950. After Robert Hayden, of Detroit, Brooks was the second African American to serve as U.S. Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the equivalent of today’s U.S. Poet Laureate. Born in Topeka, Kansas (landmark of a transformational 1954 Supreme Court case), at age six Brooks moved with her family to Chicago, home of the poet Carl Sandburg, where she would spend the rest of her life. As a resident of the racially red-lined neighborhood of Bronzeville, Brooks observed and experienced the indignities as well as the triumphs of 20^th-century African Americans, turning their everyday struggles and celebrations into vital literary expressions of the human spirit.

 

Spanning from the end of World War I to the beginning of the 21^st century, the poet’s life and work encompass significant developments of modernity, from the struggle for civil rights and black empowerment to feminism and other liberation movements. The poet’s family was part of the great migration of African Americans from the rural South, where her grandparents had been enslaved in Kentucky and Tennessee, to the urban North where her father worked as a janitor, never realizing his dream of becoming a physician. Planting seeds of hope in their offspring, her parents were keen to support their daughter’s literary aspirations.

 

As a poet, Brooks participated in important literary movements that signaled her transition from traditional metered verse to alternative forms such as the sonnet-ballad, to modernist free verse and poems crafted with urgent messages for black readers. Having been encouraged in her youth by Langston Hughes, Brooks was known throughout her life for mentoring and encouraging younger poets. Our reading for this course will include a substantial selection of her poetry as well as her distinctive novel, Maud Martha.

Placing Jane Austen in context is a tricky but rewarding task: does she belong to the 18^th century or the 19^th? the Gothic or Romantic traditions? And why do such contexts matter? In this course, we will read four of Austen’s major novels together (with an option to read one or both of the others on your own) in addition to Lady Susan, a short early work. We will also read contemporary writings on historical and literary issues including (but not limited to) women’s rights; gender and authorship; revolution; slavery, race, and colonialism; sensibility; Romanticism; and the Gothic novel. Our reading will be supported by critical texts examining Austen’s writing from a variety of critical perspectives (biographical, feminist, generic, new historical, and post-colonial, among others).

American Sex will be an interdisciplinary exploration of a series of significant episodes in the long and complicated history of American sex. From the secret diary of a Puritan minister, Michael Wigglesworth (1652-57), in which he recorded his sexual transgressions, to the scandalous “bad book affair” in Jonathan Edwards’s congregation (1744), to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s famous sex scandal (1790s), and on through the nineteenth century, what counted as “sex” constantly changed and what we call “sexuality” gradually emerged. To trace these changes and this emergence we will also study novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Julia Ward Howe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Margaret Sweat and Theodore Winthrop. In addition we will study notorious neoclassical marble sculptures by Hiram Powers (The Greek Slave, 1843), Harriet Hosmer (Zenobia in Chains, 1859), and Benjamin Paul Akers (The Dead Pearl Diver, 1858), as well as a scandalous painting by Thomas Eakins (Swimming, 1885). In each case, we will ask: how did these texts and art works understand and represent the acts, identities, and pleasures that today are organized under the rubric of “sexuality”?  American Sex will combine rich primary materials with active reflection on interdisciplinary research methods.

 

**This course satisfies the pre-1848 requirement for American Literature and Culture majors. Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature and Culture majors on first pass; English majors may enroll during second pass.

 

This course will ask what film and literature might have to tell us – if anything – about the meaning of a good life. We will consider the often vexed relationship between art and morality, and will inquire into the ways moral understanding might be enhanced by the arts of film and literature.

 

An aim of the course will be to explore thinking about the good life as it is performed in, and shaped by, different literary and filmic genres. We will look at work by authors including Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, James Baldwin, Iris Murdoch, John Berger and Zadie Smith, and by filmmakers including George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, Kathleen Collins and Jordan Peele. Particular themes from week to week will include good and evil, love and hatred, violence, identity, beauty, luck, storytelling, justice and hope.

 

In studying these texts, we will aim to question, and to extend, our sense of what moral knowledge means in ordinary life. Perspectives drawn from moral philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theories of sexuality, race, and class, will be woven through the course as a whole.

Chicana/Chicano literature from 1920s through Great Depression and World War II, ending with Chicana/Chicano civil rights movement. Oral and written narratives by writers including Conrado Espinoza, Jovita González, Cleofas Jaramillo, Angelico Chávez, Mario Suárez, Oscar Acosta, and Evangelina Vigil.

Introduction to indigenous literatures of North America through reading fiction, poetry, and visual media. Consideration of how authors imagine indigenous lifeworlds, affective experiences, and genders and sexualities in ways that index and transcend colonial violence. Examination of how authors craft decolonial forms of memory, intergenerational connection, and relationships with more-than-human life. Study asks how indigenous literatures represent significant spaces of cultural, ecological, feminist, and queer theorizing, with the power to enact a decolonial future.

In an effort to call attention to planetary climate change, some geologists have named the ‘Anthropocene’ as a radical new geological epoch of environmental change akin to a meteor strike. They attribute the origins to the global rise of agriculture, nuclear radiation, and plastics. Yet scholars in the social sciences and humanities have pressed against this universal narrative to ask which humans are really making the impact? They point to histories of empire, militarism, and globalization as fundamental causes, and raise questions as to how to tell the Anthropocene story (or stories) with attention to both local context and planetary scale. This interdisciplinary course explores the Anthropocene debate from the perspective of writers, artists, and filmmakers, particularly from islands in the global south. It turns to key concepts in the emergent field of Anthropocene studies such as climate, weather, scale, and species. The course will be particularly concerned with Postcolonial, Indigenous, Caribbean, and Pacific Island perspectives, especially the relationship between land and (rising) sea. Requirements include active class participation, weekly posts on Bruin Learn, a short presentation, and a final research paper/project.

 

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

 

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

This course traces out the recent oceanic turn in the humanities, with an emphasis on postcolonial methods and approaches. We will examine contemporary postcolonial literature (poetry, short stories and the novel), visual arts, and films that represent the ocean as a space of migration, climate change, embodiment, fluidity, habitation, mining, and a place for an engagement with nonhuman others as well as alternative knowledges and ontologies. We will examine the relationship between empire and the oceans through postcolonial, feminist, and Indigenous methodologies, with a particular emphasis on texts from the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a short presentation, and a final essay/project.

 

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

The genre of the novel has had a long association with conventional narratives of normative personal development and with stories of compulsory heterosexual marriage. This has meant that writers who wanted to queer the novel have had to find innovative ways to disrupt the form and interfere with those normative trajectories. American novels, in particular, have sometimes been claimed as generally queerer than the novels of other national traditions. This course will study some nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century queer American novels, all of which feature such formal and thematic disruptions. The course will have a dual focus: on a particular literary genre (the novel, in various forms) and a particular content (queer experience, very broadly understood). We will read Charles Brockden Brown’s Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (1799-1800), Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite (c. 1846-47), Margaret J. M. Sweat’s Ethel’s Love-Life (1859), Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme (1861), Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Marsh Island (1885), Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1891/1924), Charles Warren Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company (1904) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), all of them offering unsettling variations on novelistic form and content.

In 2023, during what some consider the 50th anniversary of hip hop’s birth, this course will consider the evolution of hip hop’s poetics from its roots in the 1970s South Bronx to its worldwide influence in the present day. How does rap extend the Western poetic tradition and how does it complicate it? How might we best evaluate the merits of a given rap performance? How has rap changed–as music and as lyric–over the past decade? How has poetry changed because of rap? Among the rappers and poets we’ll consider are Tupac Shakur, Nipsey Hussle, Megan thee Stallion, Kendrick Lamar, Rapsody, Danez Smith, Morgan Parker, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Erica Dawson, and many others. Through a combination of lecture and discussion, we’ll work together to develop a language for talking about the poetics of hip hop.

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

Investigation of texts and ideas in history of aesthetics, critical theory, and interpretation from Greeks through 18th century. Readings may include Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Biblical hermeneutics, Hume, Descartes, Kant, Schiller, and Hegel.

 

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

Investigation of some dominant trends in 19th- and 20th-century aesthetics, critical theory, and interpretation. Topics may include Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism.

 

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

In an effort to call attention to planetary climate change, some geologists have named the ‘Anthropocene’ as a radical new geological epoch of environmental change akin to a meteor strike. They attribute the origins to the global rise of agriculture, nuclear radiation, and plastics. Yet scholars in the social sciences and humanities have pressed against this universal narrative to ask which humans are really making the impact? They point to histories of empire, militarism, and globalization as fundamental causes, and raise questions as to how to tell the Anthropocene story (or stories) with attention to both local context and planetary scale. This interdisciplinary course explores the Anthropocene debate from the perspective of writers, artists, and filmmakers, particularly from islands in the global south. It turns to key concepts in the emergent field of Anthropocene studies such as climate, weather, scale, and species. The course will be particularly concerned with Postcolonial, Indigenous, Caribbean, and Pacific Island perspectives, especially the relationship between land and (rising) sea. Requirements include active class participation, weekly posts on Bruin Learn, a short presentation, and a final research paper/project.

 

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

This course traces the rifts and relations between queer theory and feminist theory with particular attention given to how race structures theoretical debates around gender and sexuality. Students will consider the critical interventions of black and women of color feminisms, postcolonial feminism, queer of color critique, trans of color critique, and queer crip of color critique to engage ongoing discussions around Western colonial formations of modern human subjectivity, what constitutes care, consent, and capacity, how we make sense of intimacy, desire, and deviance, and the limits of aesthetic and political representation.

 

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

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, through the lens of performance and race. We will examine the manifestation of these ideals across a variety of contemporary textual, media-based, and embodied forms—including visual culture, film, performance art, photography, sports, music videos, fashion blogs, dance, and everyday life. In doing so, we will explore how performers enact “America” and/or the “American dream” and their relationship to it and how artists use performance as a kinesthetic medium to theatricalize race, gender, and queerness. This class will center on introducing students to some of the key writings (and debates) within performance studies, a field of study devoted to a) treating performative behavior, not just the performing arts, as the subject of serious scholarly study and b) expanding our vision of performance, treating it not only as art but as a means of understanding historical, social, and cultural processes. We will explore key questions including: how do we study that which disappears? How do we isolate the ‘strips of behavior’ that we enact daily? And what constitutes the “live”? By situating the study of American culture in an interdisciplinary context, specifically performance and race, this course encourages students to think rigorously, expansively, and creatively about the varied meanings of belonging, identity, and ‘doing’ one’s body.

 

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

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

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), a quintessentially American poet of widespread and indelible influence, was the first black person to win a Pulitzer Prize, for Annie Allen, in 1950. After Robert Hayden, of Detroit, Brooks was the second African American to serve as U.S. Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the equivalent of today’s U.S. Poet Laureate. Born in Topeka, Kansas (landmark of a transformational 1954 Supreme Court case), at age six Brooks moved with her family to Chicago, home of the poet Carl Sandburg, where she would spend the rest of her life. As a resident of the racially red-lined neighborhood of Bronzeville, Brooks observed and experienced the indignities as well as the triumphs of 20^th-century African Americans, turning their everyday struggles and celebrations into vital literary expressions of the human spirit.

 

Spanning from the end of World War I to the beginning of the 21^st century, the poet’s life and work encompass significant developments of modernity, from the struggle for civil rights and black empowerment to feminism and other liberation movements. The poet’s family was part of the great migration of African Americans from the rural South, where her grandparents had been enslaved in Kentucky and Tennessee, to the urban North where her father worked as a janitor, never realizing his dream of becoming a physician. Planting seeds of hope in their offspring, her parents were keen to support their daughter’s literary aspirations.

 

As a poet, Brooks participated in important literary movements that signaled her transition from traditional metered verse to alternative forms such as the sonnet-ballad, to modernist free verse and poems crafted with urgent messages for black readers. Having been encouraged in her youth by Langston Hughes, Brooks was known throughout her life for mentoring and encouraging younger poets. Our reading for this course will include a substantial selection of her poetry as well as her distinctive novel, Maud Martha.

An intensive study of Shakespeare’s works from 1604 onward, including Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus and The Tempest (and possibly The Winter’s Tale). Students will write a brief close-reading essay and a longer final essay, and will take midterm and final exams. Careful reading of the plays in their original language before class is essential, and regular attendance and active participation is required.

Placing Jane Austen in context is a tricky but rewarding task: does she belong to the 18^th century or the 19^th? the Gothic or Romantic traditions? And why do such contexts matter? In this course, we will read four of Austen’s major novels together (with an option to read one or both of the others on your own) in addition to Lady Susan, a short early work. We will also read contemporary writings on historical and literary issues including (but not limited to) women’s rights; gender and authorship; revolution; slavery, race, and colonialism; sensibility; Romanticism; and the Gothic novel. Our reading will be supported by critical texts examining Austen’s writing from a variety of critical perspectives (biographical, feminist, generic, new historical, and post-colonial, among others).

In this class we will read major British poets from 1900 to the present.  After establishing a foundation in nineteenth-century aesthetics, we’ll begin with study of Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and incorporate the poets of World War I. The greater part of the course will be given over to detailed study of the writings of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Our term will conclude with introduction to contemporary poets such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Eavan Boland, and others.

This course offers both a survey of major poets and poetic movements in the United States since World War II and close engagement with the work of a handful of contemporary poets. In the first half of the term, we shall chart the course of American poetry since 1945 so as to establish a common foundation and a sense of the evolving critical, aesthetic, and political concerns of the times. We shall read poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, and many others. In the second half of the course, we shall dedicate each week to a book by a living poet. The goal here is to foster a deeper immersion in the work of that poet and a greater appreciation for the craft of composing a sequence of poems. All of these contemporary poets will make virtual visits to our class, which will allow students the opportunity to hear them read and to engage them in discussion. Throughout the term, class meetings will focus on honing different ways of reading poems and writing about them.

American Sex will be an interdisciplinary exploration of a series of significant episodes in the long and complicated history of American sex. From the secret diary of a Puritan minister, Michael Wigglesworth (1652-57), in which he recorded his sexual transgressions, to the scandalous “bad book affair” in Jonathan Edwards’s congregation (1744), to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s famous sex scandal (1790s), and on through the nineteenth century, what counted as “sex” constantly changed and what we call “sexuality” gradually emerged. To trace these changes and this emergence we will also study novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Julia Ward Howe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Margaret Sweat and Theodore Winthrop. In addition we will study notorious neoclassical marble sculptures by Hiram Powers (The Greek Slave, 1843), Harriet Hosmer (Zenobia in Chains, 1859), and Benjamin Paul Akers (The Dead Pearl Diver, 1858), as well as a scandalous painting by Thomas Eakins (Swimming, 1885). In each case, we will ask: how did these texts and art works understand and represent the acts, identities, and pleasures that today are organized under the rubric of “sexuality”?  American Sex will combine rich primary materials with active reflection on interdisciplinary research methods.

 

**This course satisfies the pre-1848 requirement for American Literature and Culture majors. Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature and Culture majors on first pass; English majors may enroll during second pass.

We’ll consider two slender great novels written in English by women: To The Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf and My Antonia, by Willa Cather. We’ll read these books as writers, noticing how each writer uses language, structure, patterning, voice and details to create a cohesive, compelling work of art. Students will be asked do two oral reports and a final paper.

This course will ask what film and literature might have to tell us – if anything – about the meaning of a good life. We will consider the often vexed relationship between art and morality, and will inquire into the ways moral understanding might be enhanced by the arts of film and literature.

 

An aim of the course will be to explore thinking about the good life as it is performed in, and shaped by, different literary and filmic genres. We will look at work by authors including Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, James Baldwin, Iris Murdoch, John Berger and Zadie Smith, and by filmmakers including George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, Kathleen Collins and Jordan Peele. Particular themes from week to week will include good and evil, love and hatred, violence, identity, beauty, luck, storytelling, justice and hope.

 

In studying these texts, we will aim to question, and to extend, our sense of what moral knowledge means in ordinary life. Perspectives drawn from moral philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theories of sexuality, race, and class, will be woven through the course as a whole.

Course Description:

In this creative writing workshop, students write original poems, a new poem each week, and post weekly drafts for class discussion. Each student also contributes constructive feedback to fellow writers, and makes an oral presentation on the work of a published poet. Criteria for grading include regular and punctual attendance and completion of assignments, participation in discussion with respectful critique of fellow writers, as well as a final portfolio of revised poems. Enrollment is by instructor consent.

How to Apply:

To apply for enrollment, please submit five poems you have written, along with a brief statement about your interest in reading and writing poetry and your previous experience in literature and creative writing courses. Please include your 9-digit UID number and e-mail address. If you are applying to more than one workshop and have a preference, please indicate that preference so we can try to accommodate it.

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Gorman 136.1) and it should be sent to mullen@humnet.ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU DO NOT FORMAT THE SUBJECT LINE AS INSTRUCTED ABOVE.

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 24, 2023.

Acceptance notifications:

Accepted applicants will be notified by email before the first class meeting.

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

Course Description:

English 136 is an intensive poetry workshop, and you’ll write a new poem each week. In class, we’ll discuss your work, the work of fellow students, and other assigned readings. Expect many of the same experiences you’d have in any other writing course: group work, peer critique, revision, and discussion of published work. You’ll also be expected to write a review of a recent single-author book of poems, and submit a collection of your revised poems at the end of the quarter.

How to Apply:

Enrollment is by instructor consent. If admitted, you must attend the first class. To apply for the course, submit by e-mail attachment three to five of your best poems. In the body of the e-mail, provide your name, UID number, major, class level, and a brief note (no more than 250 words) about your experiences with poetry, your favorite poets, and any other creative writing courses you may have taken (none required!).

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Smith 136.2) and it should be sent to rwilson@english.ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU DO NOT FORMAT THE SUBJECT LINE AS INSTRUCTED ABOVE.

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 24, 2023.

Acceptance notifications:

Accepted applicants will be notified by email before the first class meeting.

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

Course Description:

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

We will consider the short story form, studying one short story weekly, which the students will be expected to read three times and annotate in an effort to grasp its mechanics and magic.

Students will write one (very) short story every other week, based on a prompt the teacher will offer. The goals of the class are 1) to turn every student in the class into a lifelong reader 2) to help the students develop a regular practice of writing and 3) to foster and train technical skill. We’ll work on revision and the development of a sound critical faculty. Emphasis will be on developing the student writer’s voice.

How to Apply:

Please submit no more than 5 (double-spaced) pages of your fiction and list any workshops you’ve taken in the past. Please list your three favorite short stories and their authors. Also, please tell me your class standing (sophomore, junior, etc.)

If you are applying to multiple workshops and have a preference, please indicate that preference.

Submissions must be e-mailed to monasimpson@mac.com and creativewriting@english.ucla.edu. When e-mailing submissions, please put your last name and the course and section number in the subject line (example: Jackson 137.1)

YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU DO NOT FORMAT THE SUBJECT LINE AS INSTRUCTED ABOVE.

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 2023.

Acceptance notifications:

Accepted applicants will be notified by email before the first class meeting.

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

Course Description:

How does one transform a glorious chaos of experiences, obsessions, dreams, theories, and observations into a shapely and compelling short story? This course will explore a variety of methods, both traditional and experimental, for making that transformation possible. An interest in mechanics and a sense of adventure are key. In addition to submitting stories for workshop, students will be asked to read widely, annotate closely, and contribute generously to discussions. Refining the ability to critique peers’ work will be of equal importance as developing one’s own writing.

How to Apply:

Please submit no more than 5 (double-spaced) pages of your fiction and list any workshops you’ve taken in the past. Please list your three favorite short stories and their authors. Also, please tell me your class standing (i.e. sophomore, junior).

Submissions must be e-mailed to sarahshunlienbynum@gmail.com and creativewriting@english.ucla.edu. Please include your last name and the course and section number in the subject line (example: O’Connor 137.2). 

YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU DO NOT FORMAT THE SUBJECT LINE AS INSTRUCTED ABOVE.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 2023.

Acceptance notifications:

Accepted applicants will be notified by email before the first class meeting.

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

The seminar will read selections from the classic texts of British law, from Fortescue in the fifteenth century to Blackstone in the eighteenth. We will explore a variety of topics: contract, oaths, the jury system, rape, murder, equity, suicide, censorship, inheritance. The readings tend to be long and hard—and therefore wonderful preparation for law school (especially since 90% of modern American law is rooted in the English common law)—although we will also read some utterly electrifying trial narratives. Although the course has obvious relevance for prospective law students, it should also be of great value for those intending to do graduate work in English history or literature. . . . I strongly recommend reading J.H. Baker’s Introduction to English Legal History over spring break. There will be weekly short papers on the readings, but no exams.

During the medieval period, drama had not yet become a profession, yet all over Europe and England for 500 years before Shakespeare, plays and spectacles were a crucial part of social life. Liturgical dramas and mystery cycles, cautionary allegories, and festive interludes were seasonally performed, often at great expense and with elaborate props, costumes and stage effects. For two hundred years the Corpus Christi cycles were staged yearly by guilds of merchants and artisans, counterposing artisanal, mercantile, clerical, and popular interests. At the same time, there were no institutionalized theaters with invisible walls to separate the actors from the audience, but rather mobile stagings that could take the itinerary of Christ’s life or the shape of human history and lay it like a web over an entire city.

This class explores the beginnings of English drama with attention to recent developments in gender studies, performance theory, and cultural studies. Beginning with continental liturgical and twelfth-century church drama, centering on the English Corpus Christi cycles, the saint’s and morality plays, and pursuing its line through the Reformation and the beginnings of the English professional theater, this course explores the way medieval society performed itself at some of its most contested cultural intersections.

We will explore the following questions:What does premodern, pre-fourth-wall, nonrealistic drama offer to modernist, postcolonial, surrealist recaptures and detournements of drama as social and cognitive intervention? What are the most profitable theoretical approaches to a drama that predates realism and falls between the abstractions of allegory on the one hand and the absorptions of individual psychology on the other? How do the plays negotiate the relationships between the material objects and bodies upon the stage, the historical and biblical narratives they embody, the verities they signify, and the conflicting social urgencies of their audiences. What civic spaces are realigned by these itinerant dramaturgies? What institutional orthodoxies are perplexed by the scandalous spectacle of Christ’s theatrically wounded body or Mary’s virginal, pregnant body? How can a theater be both popular and sacramental? How were the plays materially produced, and with what itineraries, stage-machines, censorships? How does the distinction between theater and performance break down when audiences went not only to watch but to participate? How did sixteenth-century humanism, the English reformation and the gradual professionalization of the theater affect the many forms of medieval drama and what continuities can we trace into subsequent periods?

The primary anthology, David Bevington’s Medieval Drama, is very approachable in terms of language: Latin, French, and German plays have facing page translations, and the Middle English ones are very well glossed. I’ve used this anthology for years with undergraduates.

Secondary texts may include: Herbert Blau, Richard Schechner, Sarah Beckwith, Theresa Coletti, Michael Pearson, and Richard D. McCall.

 

Requirements: 2 conference length papers, OR a draft and a longer term paper, OR a term project with both creative and analytical components (such as a performance and a debrief): (60%); short weekly response papers (25%); class presentation (singly or in a group).(15%).

This course will explore the Beat phenomenon in its historical and cultural moment and will locate Beat literature in the tradition of American Romantic writing. We will concentrate on works by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, paying some attention to other figures like Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose lives and works in some way confront and contest the pedestrian values of 1950s America (and after). We will also investigate the aesthetic principles that the Beats appropriated from diverse modernist and contemporary sources – Dada and Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Bebop – in order to ratify their own contrivances of spontaneity. And finally, we will consider predecessors (e.g., James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller) and inheritors (e.g., Ken Kesey, Sam Shepard, Hunter S. Thompson) whose works illuminate the achievement, or fried shoes, of the Beats.

 

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

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

This seminar focuses on Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved (1987) Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998), works the author has described as a trilogy. Spanning a century, Beloved represents African American life during and immediately after slavery, Jazz is set during the 1920s Jazz Age, and Paradise during the ambiguous, transitional decade of the 1970s. We also read Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye (1970), her 2008 novel A Mercy and her final novel, 2015’s God Help the Child, along with selected critical essays.

 

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

This course engages with theories of negative affects such as ugly feelings, depression, melancholia, rage, and dysphoria in feminist and queer theoretical texts, as well as in contemporary literature and poetry. We will press back upon the notion that such negative affects are merely antisocial, apolitical, apathetic, and irrational. Instead, we will take seriously the critical, political, and aesthetic possibilities in feeling, as personal but political too, as both individual and structural, as that which shapes psychic and social life. We will consider how feeling down, feeling backward, feeling out of time and out of place provide nonidentitarian, nonessentialist ways of understanding and moving through categories of racial, sexual, gender difference, which scholars and writers alike have used in a range of works.

 

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