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.

 

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

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

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

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

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

Enrollment by instructor consent and NOT by enrollment pass time: Interested students should apply by 8 pm on February 29. 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.

In the 20^th and 21^st centuries, the study of natural and built environments has often involved visions of the future along with proposals for social and political change. Disciplines ranging from biology, ecology, and atmospheric science to urban studies, urban and regional planning, architecture, design, and landscape architecture as well as writers, film-makers, and videogame designers have generated a multitude of narratives and images of what better futures might look like, and how worse futures might be avoided. Implicitly or explicitly, these narratives of future environments are enmeshed with underlying assumptions about what the best social order would be, how a more just society might function, and how human communities should relate to nonhuman species and systems. This course will focus on this connection between stories about urban, ecological, and planetary futures; the technologies involved in their creation, use, and maintenance; and the underlying assumptions that shape them.
The course will approach these questions through narratology, the study of narrative across media, in conjunction with theories of justice. Students will be trained in a basic understanding of how narrative functions and how major types of narrative differ from each other: When and in what context did a particular story emerge? Who is its author? What are the author’s intentions? If there is a narrator figure, how is this figure different from the author? Who are the major characters – the protagonists and antagonists? Whom are readers invited to sympathize with or distrust? How do narrative plots shape our sense of time, turning points, and progress or decline? Where does the author (or narrator) choose to set the beginning and ending of the story, and how does that inform our view of just outcomes? What would the story look or sound like if it were told from a different point of view, or if it ended differently?Traditional stories have often been expected to deliver “poetic justice,” whereby those characters whom the narrative frames as morally flawed are punished in some way, and those who acquit themselves well are rewarded – or at least survive and achieve an important goal. But questions of justice in narrative go well beyond the obvious question of the ending. They also involve who is cast as a major or a minor character, whose point of view is given ample space and whose is ignored, what events are distinguished as important or dismissed, for example. Not just by way of their content but by way of their formal choices, narratives convey ideas of the “good life” and the just society: including distributive, participatory, capabilities, and recognition justice.Students will apply narrative analysis to stories about future environments – from the manifestoes of biotech engineers and architectural avantgarde movements to science fiction stories about climate change – as well as to the stories that are implicit in plans and artifacts. The materials in this class will include futuristic narrative in both fictional and nonfictional contexts: science fiction (including graphic novels), nonfiction texts, feature and documentary film, and videogames. The class will engage with four different areas that technology has been imaginatively envisioned to create or transform:

1. Bodies and Ecosystems: genetic engineering, new forms of agriculture, technologies to restore ecosystems/endangered species;
2. Cities: buildings, infrastructure, urban planning, extraterrestrial habitats;
3. Planetary environments: terraforming, geoengineering.

 

English 32 is an acceptable lower-division course for the Literature & Environment minor. L&E minors should contact Steph Bundy (stephanie@english.ucla.edu) for assistance with enrollment.

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 writing-intensive course will focus on the literary essay. Students will study examples of the essay across the history of literature in English, and we will practice writing essays in a variety of styles and genres, from personal and reflective to moral, descriptive, social, and political.

 

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

In this writing-intensive course, students will consider the art and craft of memoir writing, with a specific focus on memoirs about reading and writing. What happens when authors use their own lives as readers and writers as a frame for larger stories about being human?  Who gets to tell these stories, and how? Students will engage with 20th- and 21st-century examples of the form by reading them critically, writing about them analytically, and using them as models for their own work. Constructive participation in peer workshops, substantial revision of their own work, and active consideration of the writing process will all be important aspects of the class. Authors may include Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Mary Karr, Annie Dillard, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Bechdel, Maggie Nelson, Joan Didion, Hilary Mantel, Elif Batuman, Alberto Manguel, Haruki Murakami, and Margo Jefferson.

 

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

Major poetry and prose of early medieval Britain, including epic, romance, history, saints’ lives, and travel literature. Texts and topics include Beowulf, Vikings, poems on women, Bede, and King Alfred.

 

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

When, and how, did English literature begin? To answer this question, we’ll go back over 1300 years, to the obscure 7^thand 8^th centuries, a time when English was only just beginning to be written down, when the English kingdoms were still in the process of converting to Christianity, and when fluent Greek speakers from Africa and the Middle East opened the first school at Canterbury. Featuring poets and scholars like Aldhelm, Alcuin, and Bede, there will be monsters and demons, letters with advice on where to study, and a “treatise on sexual practice” along with several masterpieces of early medieval art.

 

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

Late medieval England was a time of rebellion, revolution, and (a small number of) heretics burned at the stake. Reading the springtime world of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, however, one would be hard pressed to know that medieval England was riven with political divisions, and struggling with crises of class, gender, and religious identities, alongside the relentless march of disease and medicine, technology and superstition, international trade and reactionary provincialism. What, then, are the histories that medieval English literature creates and obscures?

 

We will learn how to develop historical research questions, how to conduct historical and literary research, and how to begin to answer those questions in substantial literary critical papers. We will be reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and selections of connected Middle English verse and prose to ask meaningful literary critical questions about the wider medieval world. There will be two papers: a 5-6 page paper and a final 20 page paper. Students will also make a formal 15 minute presentation on their research project during the second half of the quarter

 

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

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

 

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

This 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 as well as a more complex sense of Shakespearean imitation and originality. We will then consider those plays as sources, in turn, as they are ripped off/riffed on by modern artistic, theatrical, cinematic, and musical derivatives. Although our main focus will be 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.

The class will begin with the foundational discourses of early modern eroticism: Plato’s Symposium; Ovid’s Amores and/or Ars amatoria; and Petrarch’s Rime sparse. We will then turn to the erotic lyrics of the English Renaissance (Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, et alia). There will be weekly short (1-2 pp.) papers on the assigned readings. Attendance and participation are required, but I can probably Zoom the class for those stricken by illness or car trouble. No late admits.

 

Note: none of this poetry is remotely pornographic, although some of it deals with subjects one might not wish to explain to young children. But, in general, the only body parts to which reference is made are the heart and eyes. This is a course about eros, not libido.

 

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

Intensive study of 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).

In this course, we will explore in depth Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a means to think about the novel as an art form and about the history of the British Victorian period, when it was published. This novel experiments dramatically with form. It alternates between omniscient and first-person narration. Half is written in the past tense, half in the present. And its monthly serialization gets enfolded into its story. You will learn to think critically about literary form in this course, and we will read a bit of 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 heavy reading and writing load in this course.

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 course will track queerness across a range of writers in Britain and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A guiding thread of our exploration will be the question of the closet: the hidden queer worlds that existed within and against normative mainstream culture. We will consider queer desire as a mode of reading and being read, and question its changes and transformations over the time period. What did it mean to be queer then, and how does this meaning affect our culture now? Authors under consideration will include Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, and John Rechy. We will draw on critical ideas from queer theory, psychoanalysis, race theory and sociology.

This course examines the dynamic array of voices, forms, and styles in Asian American prose from the 2000s to the present day. We will consider how work (including short fiction, memoir, essays, and comic novellas) by Jhumpa Lahiri, Anthony Veasna So, Nami Mun, Charles Yu, and others grapple with issues of cultural identity, displacement, and stereotypes, utilizing distinct narrative techniques and perspectives. By critically engaging with this increasingly complex body of writing, we will explore and challenge prevailing notions surrounding race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and the immigrant experience.

In her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, novelist Toni Morrison dissected the “Africanist” presence haunting American literature, particularly the latter’s dependence on polarities of black and white. This course, while keeping Morrison’s edict in mind, moves at a different angle. Principally, what unites contemporary black diasporic writers? Taking the contemporary as a starting place, rather than a fait accompli, and understanding Blackness in a fluid, Black Atlantic sense—rather than a strictly Black American one—this course seeks to unearth different rubrics for examining and understanding what strands of thought unite the contemporary in Black literatures. In doing so, we not only examine a set of protagonists with disparate interests but also travel to markedly different spatio-temporal zones, including 1920s and present-day Harlem and 1980s Los Angeles.

Black writers in the United States have long used fiction as an artistic venue for directly engaging political issues.  In this class, we will read texts ranging from the turn of the 20^th century through the 1970s that treat such topics as the legacies of slavery in the post-Reconstruction era, gender hierarchy and power, the impact of Marxist thought on Black radicalism in the 1930s, racial violence, and the Civil Rights and Black Nationalism movements of the 60s.  We will focus not just on the historical contexts of the works but also on the strategies employed by the authors in their attempts to shape reader attitudes even as they wrestle with complex political questions resistant to simple resolution.  Writers to be covered include Pauline Hopkins, George Schuyler, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker.

 

Requirements: midterm examination, term paper, final examination

This course will study some of the major concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, as they are explored, challenged and even reinvented in works of film and literature. Psychoanalytic concepts under consideration will include: paranoia, depression (melancholia), the uncanny, hysteria, transference and dream work. We will look at the primary texts of Freud closely. In the film and literature we study, we will in particular attend to how certain genres – especially horror and science fiction – have lent themselves to psychoanalytic theory. Authors to be studied may include Henry James, Shirley Jackson and Octavia Butler. Films may include The Day the Earth Stood Still (Dir. Wise, 1951), Melancholia (dir. Von Trier, 2011) and Hereditary (Dir. Aster, 2018)

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

 

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

 

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

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/discussion starter, 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.

In this course, we will explore in depth Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a means to think about the novel as an art form and about the history of the British Victorian period, when it was published. This novel experiments dramatically with form. It alternates between omniscient and first-person narration. Half is written in the past tense, half in the present. And its monthly serialization gets enfolded into its story. You will learn to think critically about literary form in this course, and we will read a bit of 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 heavy reading and writing load in this course.

This course explored works from the “Modernist” Era, considered to last from the late 19th century to the period just after WWII, when poets, painters, composers and others were experimenting wildly with new modes of making art. In additional to reading work by “major” American poets of the time — including Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stein, Hughes, etc. — we’ll explore how the poets were responding to developments in other arts, especially music, painting, and fiction. Short weekly assignments, some creative, and a final paper are required.

In this course, we’ll examine the structure and techniques of the love story, by reading short stories that span the 20th and 21st century, from around the globe. We’ll consider the biography of the writers as well as the cultures of the communities they lived in, their society’s expectations for dating, courtship, marriage and sex. We’ll interrogate the pleasures afforded by the love story and consider whether a contemporary American love story is possible, within the realist tradition.

This course focuses on innovative works of modernist prose fiction, painting, and music by American artists in the decade following World War One. Selected readings reintroduce students to a variety of narrative techniques, visual representations, and stylistic innovations demonstrated in the writing of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner between 1919 and 1929. We will contextualize the work of these writers in the history and visual culture of their time, including avant-garde artistic movements, new technologies, forms of sound reproduction, early cinema, and other representational media.

James Joyce is widely regarded as the most important author of the 20^th century. In this course we will undertake a full reading of his novel Ulysses.  Time permitting, we will explore a small portion of Finnegans Wake.   This is an R-designated class, which means your main work will be production of a research-based paper, as well as other assignments.

Introduction to interdisciplinary study of race and ethnicity, with primary focus on literature. Through examination of institutions that form understanding of race—citizenship, nationalism, class, gender, and labor—interrogation of how we come to think of ourselves and others as having race, and effects of such racialized thinking. Course is not about any particular racial or ethnic group, but highlights creation of ethnic categories and their effects on cultural production.

This course will track queerness across a range of writers in Britain and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A guiding thread of our exploration will be the question of the closet: the hidden queer worlds that existed within and against normative mainstream culture. We will consider queer desire as a mode of reading and being read, and question its changes and transformations over the time period. What did it mean to be queer then, and how does this meaning affect our culture now? Authors under consideration will include Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, and John Rechy. We will draw on critical ideas from queer theory, psychoanalysis, race theory and sociology.

This course examines the dynamic array of voices, forms, and styles in Asian American prose from the 2000s to the present day. We will consider how work (including short fiction, memoir, essays, and comic novellas) by Jhumpa Lahiri, Anthony Veasna So, Nami Mun, Charles Yu, and others grapple with issues of cultural identity, displacement, and stereotypes, utilizing distinct narrative techniques and perspectives. By critically engaging with this increasingly complex body of writing, we will explore and challenge prevailing notions surrounding race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and the immigrant experience.

In her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, novelist Toni Morrison dissected the “Africanist” presence haunting American literature, particularly the latter’s dependence on polarities of black and white. This course, while keeping Morrison’s edict in mind, moves at a different angle. Principally, what unites contemporary black diasporic writers? Taking the contemporary as a starting place, rather than a fait accompli, and understanding Blackness in a fluid, Black Atlantic sense—rather than a strictly Black American one—this course seeks to unearth different rubrics for examining and understanding what strands of thought unite the contemporary in Black literatures. In doing so, we not only examine a set of protagonists with disparate interests but also travel to markedly different spatio-temporal zones, including 1920s and present-day Harlem and 1980s Los Angeles.

Black writers in the United States have long used fiction as an artistic venue for directly engaging political issues.  In this class, we will read texts ranging from the turn of the 20^th century through the 1970s that treat such topics as the legacies of slavery in the post-Reconstruction era, gender hierarchy and power, the impact of Marxist thought on Black radicalism in the 1930s, racial violence, and the Civil Rights and Black Nationalism movements of the 60s.  We will focus not just on the historical contexts of the works but also on the strategies employed by the authors in their attempts to shape reader attitudes even as they wrestle with complex political questions resistant to simple resolution.  Writers to be covered include Pauline Hopkins, George Schuyler, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker.

 

Requirements: midterm examination, term paper, final examination

Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature from poetry of Triple Alliance and Aztec Empire through end of Mexican Revolution (1920), including oral and written forms (poetry, corridos, testimonios, folklore, novels, short stories, and drama) by writers such as Nezahualcoyotl (Hungry Coyote), Cabaza de Vaca, Lorenzo de Zavala, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Eusebio Chacón, Daniel Venegas, and Lorena Villegas de Magón.

 

This course fulfills a pre-1848 requirement for the American Literature and Culture major. Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature and Culture majors on first pass, and will open up to all majors on second pass.

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 course focuses on innovative works of modernist prose fiction, painting, and music by American artists in the decade following World War One. Selected readings reintroduce students to a variety of narrative techniques, visual representations, and stylistic innovations demonstrated in the writing of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner between 1919 and 1929. We will contextualize the work of these writers in the history and visual culture of their time, including avant-garde artistic movements, new technologies, forms of sound reproduction, early cinema, and other representational media.

Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature from poetry of Triple Alliance and Aztec Empire through end of Mexican Revolution (1920), including oral and written forms (poetry, corridos, testimonios, folklore, novels, short stories, and drama) by writers such as Nezahualcoyotl (Hungry Coyote), Cabaza de Vaca, Lorenzo de Zavala, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Eusebio Chacón, Daniel Venegas, and Lorena Villegas de Magón.

 

This course fulfills a pre-1848 requirement for the American Literature and Culture major. Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature and Culture majors on first pass, and will open up to all majors on second pass.

Over 100 million people are currently displaced by violence and environmental destruction. This course will focus on their stories. Throughout the quarter, we will work with community organizations in greater Los Angeles to support recently resettled refugees as well as immigrant rights more broadly. At the same time, we will read contemporary stories of exile and migration alongside 19th-century slave narratives and medieval accounts, pushing back at the notion that there has ever been a nation “apart.” As we will see, much medieval English literature was resolutely engaged with enduring questions of displacement and hospitality, while ongoing projects like Refugee Tales evoke a deep archive of Anglophone writing by and about asylum seekers. Please note: This is a community-engaged course and requires 20 hours of volunteering off-campus with an assigned community partner.

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

 

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

 

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

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/discussion starter, and a final essay/project.

 

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

This course will track queerness across a range of writers in Britain and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A guiding thread of our exploration will be the question of the closet: the hidden queer worlds that existed within and against normative mainstream culture. We will consider queer desire as a mode of reading and being read, and question its changes and transformations over the time period. What did it mean to be queer then, and how does this meaning affect our culture now? Authors under consideration will include Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, and John Rechy. We will draw on critical ideas from queer theory, psychoanalysis, race theory and sociology.

Black writers in the United States have long used fiction as an artistic venue for directly engaging political issues.  In this class, we will read texts ranging from the turn of the 20^th century through the 1970s that treat such topics as the legacies of slavery in the post-Reconstruction era, gender hierarchy and power, the impact of Marxist thought on Black radicalism in the 1930s, racial violence, and the Civil Rights and Black Nationalism movements of the 60s.  We will focus not just on the historical contexts of the works but also on the strategies employed by the authors in their attempts to shape reader attitudes even as they wrestle with complex political questions resistant to simple resolution.  Writers to be covered include Pauline Hopkins, George Schuyler, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker.

 

Requirements: midterm examination, term paper, final examination

This course will study some of the major concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, as they are explored, challenged and even reinvented in works of film and literature. Psychoanalytic concepts under consideration will include: paranoia, depression (melancholia), the uncanny, hysteria, transference and dream work. We will look at the primary texts of Freud closely. In the film and literature we study, we will in particular attend to how certain genres – especially horror and science fiction – have lent themselves to psychoanalytic theory. Authors to be studied may include Henry James, Shirley Jackson and Octavia Butler. Films may include The Day the Earth Stood Still (Dir. Wise, 1951), Melancholia (dir. Von Trier, 2011) and Hereditary (Dir. Aster, 2018)

Over 100 million people are currently displaced by violence and environmental destruction. This course will focus on their stories. Throughout the quarter, we will work with community organizations in greater Los Angeles to support recently resettled refugees as well as immigrant rights more broadly. At the same time, we will read contemporary stories of exile and migration alongside 19th-century slave narratives and medieval accounts, pushing back at the notion that there has ever been a nation “apart.” As we will see, much medieval English literature was resolutely engaged with enduring questions of displacement and hospitality, while ongoing projects like Refugee Tales evoke a deep archive of Anglophone writing by and about asylum seekers. Please note: This is a community-engaged course and requires 20 hours of volunteering off-campus with an assigned community partner.

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

For example, e.g., consider Dungeons & Dragons. This once-fringe role-playing game has remained a pervasive force in tabletop gaming since its publication in 1974. However, in recent years, its popularity has skyrocketed across a range of media through edited podcasts (The Adventure Zone), streaming actual plays (Critical Role), video games (Baldur’s Gate 3), movies (Honor Among Thieves), and TV series (Stranger Things), among other genres from fan fiction and xerox zines to social media art and webcomics. In the lineage of transmedia storytelling, this seminar will consider ten games “exempli gratia” (e.g., or, for example) in emergent genres. Potential examples will be collectively determined and may include: AI Dungeon, What Remains of Edith Finch, Super Mario, the historical avant-gardes, Beat Saber, Grand Theft Auto, the Oulipo, Alan Wake, Queers in Love at the End of the World, Katamari Damacy, Elden Ring, Surrealism, Dialect, Final Fantasy, Roblox, Disco Elysium, and unexpected works that may emerge over the quarter and in collaborative conversations. Each example will spur a range of critical and scholarly experiments into the form, format, genre, and framework of each game. No previous experience with games or expanded media necessary.

 

A portion of ENGL 129 seats will be made available to Digital Humanities minors. DH students should contact undergraduate advisor Deanna Finlay at deanna@humnet.ucla.edu. 

 

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/discussion starter, 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.

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 course, we will explore in depth Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a means to think about the novel as an art form and about the history of the British Victorian period, when it was published. This novel experiments dramatically with form. It alternates between omniscient and first-person narration. Half is written in the past tense, half in the present. And its monthly serialization gets enfolded into its story. You will learn to think critically about literary form in this course, and we will read a bit of 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 heavy reading and writing load in this course.

This course explored works from the “Modernist” Era, considered to last from the late 19th century to the period just after WWII, when poets, painters, composers and others were experimenting wildly with new modes of making art. In additional to reading work by “major” American poets of the time — including Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stein, Hughes, etc. — we’ll explore how the poets were responding to developments in other arts, especially music, painting, and fiction. Short weekly assignments, some creative, and a final paper are required.

In this course, we’ll examine the structure and techniques of the love story, by reading short stories that span the 20th and 21st century, from around the globe. We’ll consider the biography of the writers as well as the cultures of the communities they lived in, their society’s expectations for dating, courtship, marriage and sex. We’ll interrogate the pleasures afforded by the love story and consider whether a contemporary American love story is possible, within the realist tradition.

This course focuses on innovative works of modernist prose fiction, painting, and music by American artists in the decade following World War One. Selected readings reintroduce students to a variety of narrative techniques, visual representations, and stylistic innovations demonstrated in the writing of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner between 1919 and 1929. We will contextualize the work of these writers in the history and visual culture of their time, including avant-garde artistic movements, new technologies, forms of sound reproduction, early cinema, and other representational media.

James Joyce is widely regarded as the most important author of the 20^th century. In this course we will undertake a full reading of his novel Ulysses.  Time permitting, we will explore a small portion of Finnegans Wake.   This is an R-designated class, which means your main work will be production of a research-based paper, as well as other assignments.

NOTE: Students who have received credit for old course 136 or new course 136B are ineligible to receive credit for course 136A.

 

Course Description:

In this intermediate poetry workshop, you’ll write a new poem each week, and you can expect many of the same experiences you’d have in any other writing course: discussion of exemplary published work, group work, and peer critique. 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, any other creative writing courses you may have taken (none required!), and any other creative writing courses to which you are applying this quarter.

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

 YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY EMAIL AND MUST CONTAIN YOUR LAST NAME AND “136A” IN THE SUBJECT LINE. YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU OMIT THIS TAG IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2024.

 

Acceptance Notifications:

Accepted students will be notified by e-mail.

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

 

Course Description:

In this course, we’ll take apart the anatomy and physiology of a poem, which will also entail encountering the diverse manifestations and definitions of what a poem is and can be, paying particular attention to how the act of writing can be a way of engaging with the current moment. Participants are invited to explore their complex and shifting understandings of a poem with respect to their own writing and peer work and assigned texts. You’ll write a new poem each week, and we’ll approach the workshop via an “open studios” method, or place of building and possibility, like a “woodworking workshop.”

How to Apply:

To apply, please share via one PDF attachment consisting of three to five of your best poems. In the body of the e-mail, provide your name, major(s), class standing, and a brief note about your experiences with poetry, your favorite contemporary poets, and any other creative writing courses you may have taken either at UCLA or elsewhere (there are no pre-reqs for this workshop with me, I’m just curious!).

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

YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY EMAIL AND MUST CONTAIN YOUR LAST NAME AND “136B” IN THE SUBJECT LINE. YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU OMIT THIS TAG IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2024.

 

Acceptance Notifications

Accepted students will be notified by e-mail.

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

 

Course Description:

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

We will consider the short story form, studying one 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.

Enrollment is by instructor consent (PTE).

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.) and indicate any other creative writing courses to which you are applying this quarter.

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Chiang 137B.1) and it should be sent to monasimpson@mac.com AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY EMAIL AND MUST CONTAIN YOUR LAST NAME AND “137B.1” IN THE SUBJECT LINE. YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU OMIT THIS TAG IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2024.

 

Acceptance notifications:

Accepted students will be notified by e-mail. A class list will be posted in the English main office in KAPLAN 149 on the first day of Spring term.

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 fiction. We will consider the short story form, reading great short stories weekly, which students will be asked to study and to reread. Students will write both shorter weekly stories and two longer stories. The teacher’s primary goal in the class is to help the students develop a daily practice of writing and to foster and train their ability to recognize what’s best in their work. We’ll also discuss revision and the development of a sound critical faculty.

How to Apply:

To be considered for the class, please submit five pages (double spaced) of your fiction and tell me what workshops you’ve taken in the past. Also, please list your three favorite short stories and their authors. Mention the book you’re reading right now.

If you are applying to both workshops and have a preference, please indicate that preference. Submissions must be e-mailed to jtorres7@ucla.edu 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: Rodriguez 137B.2)

YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY EMAIL AND MUST CONTAIN YOUR LAST NAME AND “137B.2” IN THE SUBJECT LINE. YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU OMIT THIS TAG IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2024.

 

Acceptance Notifications:

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

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

 

Course Description:

 We will study short samples of narrative nonfiction, and students will write their own pieces to be shared and discussed in the workshop. Forms and genres may include description, chronology, cause and effect, analysis and argument, memoir, interview and the research article.

Enrollment by instructor consent (PTE).

How to Apply:

Interested students should submit a 250-word personal statement about their writing goals, a list of writing and literature courses taken so far, and a 5-10 page double-spaced nonfiction writing sample.  Please submit all applications via email to <ejager@humnet.ucla.edu>.

Acceptance Notifications:

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

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

 

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

 

Course Description:

 This course, intended for writers and musicians of all levels, focuses on the essentials of songwriting — lyrics, melody, chord progressions, rhythmic elements, and so forth. Students are required to complete a series of writing / composing assignments each week. Some training in basic music theory and in digital audio workstations (such as GarageBand) will be provided. The student’s final portfolio will be three complete songs derived from the assignments.

Enrollment by instructor consent (PTE).

How to Apply:

To submit, send a cover letter describing your experience with writing and/or music and samples of your writing and/or music to stefans@humnet.ucla.edu. Be sure to include your student ID number.

 

Acceptance Notifications:

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

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

 

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

 

Course Description:

 This section of M138 will be restricted to student military veterans. In this workshop course, you will have the opportunity to take ownership of and communicate your service experience through any and all literary forms—creative nonfiction (memoir, fact-based narrative), poetry, prose fiction, and hybrid genres. We will read published examples of such writing, and will work on developing disciplined practice, effective process, and satisfying product.

How to Apply:

Enrolllment is by instructor consent. To apply for the course, please write a brief (no more than 250 words) e-mail introducing yourself and your service experience, and explaining why you wish to take this course. Include your name, major, and class level; put your last name and the course number in the subject line (example: “Smith M138”); and send to rwilson@english.ucla.edu.

 

Acceptance Notifications:

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

In this seminar we try to answer two basic questions that should interest all students of literature: what is a novel, and why does it matter? We will approach these questions from two related areas of study. These include (1) the novel’s historical emergence as a cultural phenomenon over hundreds of years of development, and (2) the novel as a distinct literary genre with its own narrative conventions, techniques, and conceptions of human character. Both areas have been the subject of intense literary criticism and theoretical speculation for the last hundred years or so. Students will read the most provocative and engaging statements about the novel from these important secondary sources, and will use their insights from them to read two or three novels from different time periods. Requirements include regular oral reports, engaged class discussion, short papers, and a longer paper.

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.[1] There will be weekly short papers on the readings, but no exams. No late admits permitted.

 Not open to students who have previously taken a seminar titled “The Literature of the Law” with Prof. Shuger.

This class will investigate the genre of the psychoanalytic case history, considering it from a literary angle as well as a psychoanalytic one.  In addition to providing an overview of major psychoanalytic concepts, the class discussions will attend to questions of narrative perspective and reliability, to modes of characterization, including the role of major and minor characters, and to the role of the analyst.  We will read a substantial selection of Sigmund Freud’s case histories, as well as case histories and commentaries by Ella Sharpe, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, Jacques Lacan, and Frantz Fanon.  We will discuss the ways in which gender, age, sexual orientation, war trauma, and a colonial setting impact the telling and rendering of the case history.

Course explores cancer narratives including John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), novelist Frances Burney’s mastectomy narrative (1812), and poet Anne Boyer’s anti-memoir The Undying (2019), in order to better understand the vexed relationship between disability studies and health humanities. We will also read a range of historical and theoretical sources on topics including the history and sociology of cancer (starting with Susan Sontag’s 1978 classic Illness as Metaphor), the genre of the illness narrative, and the complex distinctions and connections between illness and disability. Requirements include several discussion-board posts, an oral presentation, and a final research project which could include your own personal narrative.

 

A portion of ENGL 184.1 seats will be allocated to students pursuing the Disability Studies major or minor. Interested Disability Studies students should inquire with Prof. Deutsch at hdeutsch@humnet.ucla.edu.

Using the extensive resources of the Oscar Wilde archive held at the Clark Library, this seminar focuses on different ways of researching topics relating to both the writer’s controversial life and his links with other artists and writers of the 1880s and 1890s. The seminar draws on published and unpublished materials to consider such issues as Wilde’s income, his successes on the London stage, the trials of 1895, his prison years, his links with publishers such as John Lane and Elkin Mathews, his relations with the audacious artist Aubrey Beardsley, and his early death from encephalomeningitis in Paris on November 30, 1900. This seminar will be of particular interest to undergraduates who wish to acquire advanced research skills in the humanities. Course requirements include two research papers.

 

How to Apply:

On the morning of Friday, February 16, Professor Bristow will conduct interviews through Zoom with selected students who have expressed interest in enrolling the seminar. Prospective students should submit the following documents to Professor Bristow: a letter explaining their reasons for wanting to enroll in the course, a printed PDF of their DAR, and a resume containing contact information. The documents should be submitted to Professor Bristow in the UCLA English Department Main Office (149 Kaplan Hall) by 5:00pm PST, Friday, February 9, 2024.

 

English 184.2 will be the Spring 2024 Ahmanson Undergraduate Seminar. Subsidies for use of Lyft are provided for student transportation to and from the Clark Library. Undergraduate students who successfully complete the seminar are awarded a $1,000 scholarship.

What differentiates a rare book from an old book? Why are some old books valuable and others worthless? We will work hands-on with medieval manuscripts, early printed books, 18th century engravings, 19th century pulp novels, archival photographs, ephemera such as zines and rock posters, and other archives in Special Collections. We will study how libraries and special collections are assembled (and what’s excluded), how digital archives are curated and presented (and what voices are silenced), and how books are described, bought, and sold. As we explore UCLA’s Special Collections, we will develop research questions in response to the books and texts we encounter each week. There will be a series of shorter writing assignments and a final research paper. Students will also make a formal 15 minute presentation on their research project during the second half of the quarter.

“Flyover Country” refers to the interior parts of the country that one flies over when traveling from one cost to the other, usually from one densely populated urban center (like southern California) to another (like the northeastern “Megalopolis” of Boston/New York/Philadelphia/Washington DC). The term also implies a general neglect and ignorance of this wide swath of U.S. territory. Given that it’s an election year, when “flyover states” will play a crucial role in choosing our next president, this seminar explores the 20^th and 21^st-century literature of “flyover country.” What histories, logics, and values shape this literature? What challenges might this literature pose for the assumptions that status quo, center-left discourse makes about the world? What counts as politics in “flyover country”? Or are these places and peoples really as different as we’ve been led to believe? Readings will include novels from Sherwood Anderson, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, and Marilynne Robinson.

 

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