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 American Literature & Culture 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.

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

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

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

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

This course provides a gateway to the American Literature and Culture major. We’ll explore major themes and concepts from American cultural history in light of the political, ecological, and racial reckonings taking place in our own moment. Toggling between historical material and more recent representations, we’ll consider the forms of Indigenous dispossession, plantation slavery, environmental destruction, imperial warfare, and coercive community formation that shaped the history of the nation and the hemisphere. Applying interdisciplinary methods to a variety of genres and media (including letters, sermons, poetry, political pamphlets, images, speeches, graphic novels, fiction, and film), we’ll trace throughlines from the first arrival of Europeans on New World shores in the fifteenth century to the height of U.S. dominance in the twentieth. Our readings will include early texts by Spanish conquistadors, Puritan settlers, antislavery activists, and Atlantic revolutionaries and later works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, William Apess, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison that remember and reimagine those stories. Finally, we’ll investigate the unique place of California and Los Angeles in utopian and dystopian figurations of American life through fiction by John Steinbeck, essays by Joan Didion, and a film by Paul Thomas Anderson whose foreboding title encapsulates the course’s interrogation of inequality, excessive resource consumption, and holy violence.

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 26. Enrollment preference for English 20W will be given to first and second-year students. Approved applicants will receive a PTE directly from the instructor.

To apply, please prepare a brief (no more than 250 words) note explaining why you wish to take this course, and what previous experience you have with creative writing courses (if any—none required!). Applications may be submitted through our approved web form, which you can access HERE beginning February 19. Students applying to English 20W should enroll in an alternate course during their enrollment passes, and should not assume that they will be admitted.

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

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

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

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

This class will focus on Hamlet as our set text, or case study, for gaining familiarity with various areas of research methods in literary studies. Our goal will be not only acquaintance with Hamlet for its own sake, but also orientation to the many perspectives and strategies critics have used over the centuries in their efforts to interpret the play. Among our explorations will be textual studies and the history of the book; the use of archives; locating; reading and applying secondary research; and historical and contemporary critical approaches. Students will pursue a variety of assignments ranging from critical reviews, annotated bibliographies, and a literature review at the end of the term. This class will work with specialist librarians and, logistics permitting, include a field trip to the Huntington Library in San Marino. This course will prepare you to undertake any kind of undergraduate research in literature.

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 as posted in the Schedule of Classes!

The skills developed in literary study—textual interpretation and rhetorical persuasion—are among the most valued in legal practice. In the U.S., these skills play an especially important role in legal practice for a simple reason: the U.S. Constitution is written. As such, it is textually bound, subject to interpretation, and fairly difficult to revise. This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of law and literature by examining the role that rhetoric played in the cultural development of the United States in the long 19th century. Students will read founding documents and the revolutionary literary traditions that developed alongside them (the slave narrative, transcendentalism, etc.). Since this is a “junior seminar,” the course will give students a chance to develop their reading and writing skills in a small, interactive format. Primary readings will include works by Jefferson, Douglass, Stanton, Thoreau, Stowe, and Melville. Assignments will likely include in-class writing, an outline, presentation, quizzes, and an essay-based final.

 

This course confers English major Elective credit, and is NOT a senior seminar course.

We will read and discuss a selection of English poetry and prose from before the Norman Conquest of 1066, including the complete Beowulf and other heroic poetry, works featuring women, saints, scops (bards) and Vikings, and an early romance that predates the well -known “courtly love” of later medieval literature. All texts are in translation, but we will practice reading Old English aloud. We will also study the history of the English language from its Indo-European origins and trace how early English literature developed in a Roman Britain conquered by Germanic invaders and came to embody diverse political, religious and literary influences. Requirements: regular reading quizzes, in-class writing, and a final class presentation.

When, and how, did English literature begin? To answer this question, we’ll go back over 1300 years, to the obscure 7th and 8th 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.

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? Note: Students must have completed ENGL 141B: Introduction to Old English in order to take this course. 

 

ENGL 141C may fulfill a requirement in Historical: pre-1500 OR foreign literature in translation.

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

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously taken the same topic in lecture or seminar with Prof. Thomas.

Fraudsters, traders, and usurers have been with us ever since humans were infected by what in the Middle Ages was called “filthy lucre.” In this course, we will learn not only about the tricks of their trade but also about the intersection of commerce and literature in texts ranging from the medieval to the early modern periods. On the medieval side, our readings include some of Chaucer’s works (“The General Prologue,” “The Shipman’s Tale,” “The Merchant’s Tale,” “The Pardoner’s Tale,” and “The Summoner’s Tale”), excerpts from Langland’s Piers Plowman, and several Robin Hood ballads such as A Gest of Robyn Hode, Robin Hood and the Potter; on the early modern side, our readings include Gerard Malynes’s Saint George for England, Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Thomas Wilson’s Discourse on Usury, and treatises on rhetoric.

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously taken the same topic in lecture or seminar with Prof. Thomas.

In Early Shakespeare: Green Worlds, Corrupt Courts we will read some early sonnets, Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, As You Like It, and Hamlet, alongside some early poetry. Our goal will be to collaboratively explore the complexities of these works, including their sometimes socially problematic content, to explore injustices and challenges we face in our societies today, both in nature and in our political situations. In this course, you will focus on topics in the plays that are relevant to our experiences today, considering how these moments can be instructive, and how they can be applied in new and inventive ways to imagine a better future for our local environments and communities. The course methodology delivered through a mixture of lectures; group discussion on the plays and secondary scholarship; dramatic workshops, practicums for editing and dramaturgy, and performance opportunities. The final projects are designed to encourage you to express a personal, unique response to Shakespeare, whether that be through a performance, close reading of a passage, an edited text for a specific group of readers or an adapted/cut script for actors.

In Thunder and Lightning: Spectacle in Late Shakespeare we will read Twelfth Night, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, King Lear, and The Tempest. Our goal will be to collaboratively explore the complexities of these works, including their sometimes socially problematic content, to explore injustices and challenges we face in our societies today, both in nature and in our political situations. In this course, you will focus on topics in the plays that are relevant to our experiences today, considering how these moments can be instructive, and how they can be applied in new and inventive ways to imagine a better future for our local environments and communities. The course methodology delivered through a mixture of lectures; group discussion on the plays and secondary scholarship; dramatic workshops, practicums for editing and dramaturgy, and performance opportunities. The final projects are designed to encourage you to express a personal, unique response to Shakespeare, whether that be through a performance, close reading of a passage, an edited text for a specific group of readers or an adapted/cut script for actors.

An intensive study of Shakespeare’s works from 1604 onward, including Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Students have in-class and out-of-class writing assignments, possible quizzes, and midterm and final exams. Careful reading of the plays in their original language before class is essential, and regular attendance and participation in discussions is required.

Study of major works of Milton, with emphasis on Paradise Lost.

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

 

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

Placing Jane Austen in context 250 years after her birth is a tricky but rewarding task: does she belong to the 18^th century or the 19^th? the Gothic or Romantic traditions (or neither)? 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), as well as film and television adaptations of the novels.

Reading four literary masterpieces of the novel genre, students in this course will gain both a comprehensive overview of the novel as it developed in England over selected periods of the nineteenth century, as well as a solid understanding of the foundations of modern fiction. Each of the novels we read in the class demonstrates an evolving array of technical achievements in the creation of narrative perspective, elaboration of theme, and the development of literary character: Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1864), George Elliot’s Middlemarch (1872), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). Lectures and discussions will consider historical and social background of each book, conditions of authorship, and publication, economics, narrative theory, issues around sexuality and social class, as well as how to write about novels. Requirements include short writing exercises, occasional quizzes and a final paper.

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.

Study of American fiction (both novels and short stories) from its beginning to end of 19th century.

The title of the course begs for interrogation: what is a “major” writer–by what standards do we measure major and minor (implied) writers? Historically, who has been excluded from the ranks of major writers and why have they been excluded? Is this even an academic, let alone equitable, way to measure the value a writer contributes to us? And speaking of us, who is American?

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

Some say hip hop was born just over fifty years ago when a creative kid with a big sound system threw a back-to-school party in the Bronx. But hip hop as we know it today is at once much older and much younger than that. This class will center on one facet of hip hop—the lyric performance of rap artists—against the backdrop of its expansive culture. We’ll consider dozens of rappers, from Tupac and Biggie to Kendrick and Drake, from MC Lyte and J. Cole, from Doechii to GloRilla. The goal of the course is (1) to build a literary-critical vocabulary for discussing rap’s poetics and (2) to gain a greater appreciation for the art and science of rapping to a beat.

This class is a survey of U.S. Latinx literature and an introduction to its major cultural trends. We will study literature pertaining to various regional and national origin groups (the Caribbean, Mexico, South America, and Central America), and discuss how these works speak to the (contested) definition of “Latinx” and the heterogeneity of Latinx communities in the U.S. Latinx literature has a deep history that emerges from literary traditions spanning more than four centuries, but our course will focus on more contemporary works that have contributed to the tradition’s ongoing historical and aesthetic lineages. While we will begin with texts that have been central to establishing a canon of Latinx literature, we will continue with others that enrich, complicate, and call such canons into question. Together, we will read from a range of genres—novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and plays—to ask what these literary forms can tell us about the socio-historical issues facing Latinx communities both today and in the past.

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, Yiyun Li, Nami Mun, Adrian Tomine, Anthony Veasna So 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.

Gothic conventions—crumbling castles, supernatural villains, damsels in distress, dark doubles—have survived, thrived, and evolved in British popular fiction over the course of three centuries. In this course, we will explore examples of Gothic fiction from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. We will consider its historical and cultural contexts as well as its enduring mass appeal. Texts will include Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as shorter works by Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, M.R. James, Angela Carter, and others.

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, transnational scale. What would it mean to reframe a 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 literary works from Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania/the Pacific and South Asia to examine their histories of empire as well as how creative practitioners from these regions have engaged the vexed representations and experiences of militarism, particularly in regards to gender. Topics to explore include nuclearization as well as multi-scalar concerns from climate change to intimacies with more-than-human others. Reading materials will be interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretical. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a presentation, 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.

James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, is widely regarded as one of the most significant works of world literature and the game-changing novel of the twentieth century. In this class we will reading Ulysses in its entirety, and lay the foundation for deeper engagement with literary research and various histories that contextualize the book.

 

Not open for credit to students who took ENGL 179R with Prof. Jaurretche in Spring 2024.

Study of American fiction (both novels and short stories) from its beginning to end of 19th century.

The title of the course begs for interrogation: what is a “major” writer–by what standards do we measure major and minor (implied) writers? Historically, who has been excluded from the ranks of major writers and why have they been excluded? Is this even an academic, let alone equitable, way to measure the value a writer contributes to us? And speaking of us, who is American?

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’ll chart the course of American poetry since 1945 so that we may establish a shared foundation and a sense of the evolving critical, aesthetic, and political concerns of the times. We’ll 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 term, we’ll read the complete works of several living poets. The goal here is to foster a deeper immersion in the work of those poets 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.

An examination of the diversity and evolution of American short fiction over the last forty years. We’ll read stories about work, death, sex, tech, race, place, love, gender, class, climate, catastrophe, religion, justice, and more. Narratives will vary in length from flash fiction to novellas, with a primary focus on the short story form. By examining short stories historically, critically, and aesthetically, students will learn how to interpret and critique short fiction as a reflection of our contemporary society and collective humanity. Assignments will be both creative and analytical. Students will deepen their critical skills through essay writing, as well as craft their own short stories.

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

In what critics consider the first disability memoir in English, William Hay’s “Deformity: An Essay” (1754), Hay, an amateur man of letters and member of Parliament, likens his curved spine to the artist William Hogarth’s famous line of beauty.  This course will consider the complex relationship of deformity to beauty, which is not one of simple opposition, from the early modern period to the present day. Beginning with Shakespeare’s Richard III (1592-4) and Francis Bacon’s “Of Deformity” (1597), and paying special attention to questions of gender, we will explore how writing about deformity evolves over time, depicts complex subjectivity and constructs disability as identity.  Other texts may include 18^th-century poems by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Leapor, and Mary Wortley Montagu, fiction by Sarah Scott and Mary Shelley, and essays and twentieth-century memoirs by Randolph Bourne, Katherine Butler Hathaway, Lucy Grealy, and Chloe Cooper Jones.  Requirements will include several discussion posts/short close readings, and a final paper.

Some say hip hop was born just over fifty years ago when a creative kid with a big sound system threw a back-to-school party in the Bronx. But hip hop as we know it today is at once much older and much younger than that. This class will center on one facet of hip hop—the lyric performance of rap artists—against the backdrop of its expansive culture. We’ll consider dozens of rappers, from Tupac and Biggie to Kendrick and Drake, from MC Lyte and J. Cole, from Doechii to GloRilla. The goal of the course is (1) to build a literary-critical vocabulary for discussing rap’s poetics and (2) to gain a greater appreciation for the art and science of rapping to a beat.

This class is a survey of U.S. Latinx literature and an introduction to its major cultural trends. We will study literature pertaining to various regional and national origin groups (the Caribbean, Mexico, South America, and Central America), and discuss how these works speak to the (contested) definition of “Latinx” and the heterogeneity of Latinx communities in the U.S. Latinx literature has a deep history that emerges from literary traditions spanning more than four centuries, but our course will focus on more contemporary works that have contributed to the tradition’s ongoing historical and aesthetic lineages. While we will begin with texts that have been central to establishing a canon of Latinx literature, we will continue with others that enrich, complicate, and call such canons into question. Together, we will read from a range of genres—novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and plays—to ask what these literary forms can tell us about the socio-historical issues facing Latinx communities both today and in the past.

This course troubles dominant conceptions of science fiction and genre by reading Indigenous horror, fantasy, and speculative storytelling. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, queer, and more-than-human frameworks, we will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use wonder to subvert genre conventions and challenge colonial violence (past and present). We will also contemplate how Indigenous fiction, visual culture, and sonic media depict diverse understandings of space-time, embodiment, being, kinship, and relations with more-than-human worlds. Content considerations: our materials engage ecological violence, gender and sexual violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously completed ENGL 115E with Prof. Mo’e’hahne.

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, Yiyun Li, Nami Mun, Adrian Tomine, Anthony Veasna So 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 the United States today, abolition has become a broad strategy for achieving social justice; it tends to take as its objects the prison industrial complex and the systemic racial structures that have resulted in this country’s status as the largest jailer in the world. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, abolitionists were those who sought to end the slave trade and the practice of slavery itself. This course investigates the continuities and discontinuities between these two abolitionist moments. Throughout, we’ll consider how contemporary abolitionist frameworks might aid us in approaching the literature and culture of the past, and vice versa.

 

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

This course traces Indigenous queer, trans*, and gender-expansive aesthetics from the late 20^th to the early 21^st centuries. We will contemplate the ways that artists and theorists craft gender-expansive lifeways, erotics, embodiments, and kinship with human and more-than-human worlds. We will also consider how artists and authors enact global anti-colonial solidarities and imagine healing pathways for Indigenous communities, genders, and sexualities across Turtle Island and beyond. Our texts will include queer, trans*, nonbinary, and Two Spirit poetry, experimental cinema, photography, visual art, young adult fiction, performance art, and critical theory from Canada, Greenland, the United States, Mexico, and Palestine. Content considerations: our materials engage gender and sexual violence, racial violence, anti-migrant violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.

 

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

This course asks how colonial models of property and personhood shaped both the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the world we continue to inhabit today. We’ll examine the ways in which political and economic ideas associated with the Enlightenment helped to produce racialized and gendered subject positions that were coded as pathological and subordinate. Through readings of eighteenth-century fiction and poetry, political and philosophical treatises, and autobiographical narratives, we will explore how the notion of a “possessive individual” affected the lives of laborers, women, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans.

 

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

This course focuses on voices of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Black Atlantic. Drawing primarily from Anglophone texts written by authors of African and European descent, we will try to define what we mean by voice in a literature class, and what we understand the relation between voice and narrative to be. Our work will be driven by a number of intellectual and ethical questions: how do we recognize diverse voices in the historical archives? How do we recover them for twenty-first-century audiences? What is at stake in this recovery? These questions will push us to think carefully about the nature of our reading practices, particularly as we look to the past. Together, we will strive to imagine the modes of literacy and illiteracy that we bring to our encounters with materials from the past and we will continue to ask ourselves what we mean by voice, by speech, by silence, and by authority—particularly as these relate to a broad constellation of forms, genres, and modes of mediation.

 

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

Placing Jane Austen in context 250 years after her birth is a tricky but rewarding task: does she belong to the 18^th century or the 19^th? the Gothic or Romantic traditions (or neither)? 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), as well as film and television adaptations of the novels.

This class is a survey of U.S. Latinx literature and an introduction to its major cultural trends. We will study literature pertaining to various regional and national origin groups (the Caribbean, Mexico, South America, and Central America), and discuss how these works speak to the (contested) definition of “Latinx” and the heterogeneity of Latinx communities in the U.S. Latinx literature has a deep history that emerges from literary traditions spanning more than four centuries, but our course will focus on more contemporary works that have contributed to the tradition’s ongoing historical and aesthetic lineages. While we will begin with texts that have been central to establishing a canon of Latinx literature, we will continue with others that enrich, complicate, and call such canons into question. Together, we will read from a range of genres—novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and plays—to ask what these literary forms can tell us about the socio-historical issues facing Latinx communities both today and in the past.

This course troubles dominant conceptions of science fiction and genre by reading Indigenous horror, fantasy, and speculative storytelling. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, queer, and more-than-human frameworks, we will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use wonder to subvert genre conventions and challenge colonial violence (past and present). We will also contemplate how Indigenous fiction, visual culture, and sonic media depict diverse understandings of space-time, embodiment, being, kinship, and relations with more-than-human worlds. Content considerations: our materials engage ecological violence, gender and sexual violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously completed ENGL 115E with Prof. Mo’e’hahne.

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, transnational scale. What would it mean to reframe a 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 literary works from Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania/the Pacific and South Asia to examine their histories of empire as well as how creative practitioners from these regions have engaged the vexed representations and experiences of militarism, particularly in regards to gender. Topics to explore include nuclearization as well as multi-scalar concerns from climate change to intimacies with more-than-human others. Reading materials will be interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretical. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a presentation, 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 asks how colonial models of property and personhood shaped both the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the world we continue to inhabit today. We’ll examine the ways in which political and economic ideas associated with the Enlightenment helped to produce racialized and gendered subject positions that were coded as pathological and subordinate. Through readings of eighteenth-century fiction and poetry, political and philosophical treatises, and autobiographical narratives, we will explore how the notion of a “possessive individual” affected the lives of laborers, women, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans.

 

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

This course focuses on voices of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Black Atlantic. Drawing primarily from Anglophone texts written by authors of African and European descent, we will try to define what we mean by voice in a literature class, and what we understand the relation between voice and narrative to be. Our work will be driven by a number of intellectual and ethical questions: how do we recognize diverse voices in the historical archives? How do we recover them for twenty-first-century audiences? What is at stake in this recovery? These questions will push us to think carefully about the nature of our reading practices, particularly as we look to the past. Together, we will strive to imagine the modes of literacy and illiteracy that we bring to our encounters with materials from the past and we will continue to ask ourselves what we mean by voice, by speech, by silence, and by authority—particularly as these relate to a broad constellation of forms, genres, and modes of mediation.

 

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

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

 

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

Some say hip hop was born just over fifty years ago when a creative kid with a big sound system threw a back-to-school party in the Bronx. But hip hop as we know it today is at once much older and much younger than that. This class will center on one facet of hip hop—the lyric performance of rap artists—against the backdrop of its expansive culture. We’ll consider dozens of rappers, from Tupac and Biggie to Kendrick and Drake, from MC Lyte and J. Cole, from Doechii to GloRilla. The goal of the course is (1) to build a literary-critical vocabulary for discussing rap’s poetics and (2) to gain a greater appreciation for the art and science of rapping to a beat.

This course troubles dominant conceptions of science fiction and genre by reading Indigenous horror, fantasy, and speculative storytelling. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, queer, and more-than-human frameworks, we will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use wonder to subvert genre conventions and challenge colonial violence (past and present). We will also contemplate how Indigenous fiction, visual culture, and sonic media depict diverse understandings of space-time, embodiment, being, kinship, and relations with more-than-human worlds. Content considerations: our materials engage ecological violence, gender and sexual violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously completed ENGL 115E with Prof. Mo’e’hahne.

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, Yiyun Li, Nami Mun, Adrian Tomine, Anthony Veasna So 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.

Gothic conventions—crumbling castles, supernatural villains, damsels in distress, dark doubles—have survived, thrived, and evolved in British popular fiction over the course of three centuries. In this course, we will explore examples of Gothic fiction from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. We will consider its historical and cultural contexts as well as its enduring mass appeal. Texts will include Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as shorter works by Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, M.R. James, Angela Carter, and others.

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 explorations and elaborations of psychoanalytic theory.

This course takes as its focus contemporary literature written in the Netherlands and Flanders, focusing in particular on the ways in which Dutch-language authors negotiate representations of identity today. Paying attention to the ways in which texts address the intersections of gender, sexuality, race and class with societal norms and expectations, we will study and position this literature within a transnational framework of contemporary cultural and literary theory. Some of the questions this course asks are: How are questions of identity knitted to our histories, present circumstances, and hopes for the future? How do representations of gender, sexuality and race chime with or subvert societal expectations and prejudices in the Netherlands and Flanders? What futures are gestured towards in the face of technological changes and the climate crisis? At the same time, we will also explore, investigate and question the position of Dutch literature as a ‘minor literature,’ engaging with recent work on the decolonization and/or worlding of Dutch studies. Authors studied will likely include Simone Atangana Bekono, Valentijn Hoogenkamp, Lieke Marsman, Lucas Rijneveld, Chika Unigwe, Nadia de Vries, Niña Weijers, amongst others. Requirements include attendance and active participation in class, a presentation, one in-class midterm writing assignment, and a final paper.

 

ENGL 118A.2 as taught by Prof. Van Hove may satisfy either a foreign literature in translation requirement OR a Breadth Area 3 requirement.

This course will explore the strange affinities between two major British critics of society and art, John Ruskin (1819-1900) and John Berger (1926-2017), in order to think about the function of criticism. Although neither was adopted by mainstream art history, both writers were greatly influential on their times, with Ruskin, for example, seeking to change a nation’s taste with his multi-volume Modern Painters, and Berger attempting to challenge how people saw art in his book and popular television program Ways of Seeing. Both writers worked at the boundary of the verbal and the visual, and both took art seriously as a source of critical ideas about modern life: especially about capitalism, ecology, technology, and justice. We will look closely at their techniques of writing both art and social criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – as well as consider the relevance of these themes to our own times.

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

 

This course fulfills an upper-division requirement for the Literature & the Environment minor. Students in the minor may contact Steph Bundy (stephanie@english.ucla.edu) to enroll.

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 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 apply to the departmental honors program.

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, transnational scale. What would it mean to reframe a 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 literary works from Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania/the Pacific and South Asia to examine their histories of empire as well as how creative practitioners from these regions have engaged the vexed representations and experiences of militarism, particularly in regards to gender. Topics to explore include nuclearization as well as multi-scalar concerns from climate change to intimacies with more-than-human others. Reading materials will be interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretical. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a presentation, and a final essay/project.

 

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

 

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 the United States today, abolition has become a broad strategy for achieving social justice; it tends to take as its objects the prison industrial complex and the systemic racial structures that have resulted in this country’s status as the largest jailer in the world. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, abolitionists were those who sought to end the slave trade and the practice of slavery itself. This course investigates the continuities and discontinuities between these two abolitionist moments. Throughout, we’ll consider how contemporary abolitionist frameworks might aid us in approaching the literature and culture of the past, and vice versa.

 

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

This course traces Indigenous queer, trans*, and gender-expansive aesthetics from the late 20^th to the early 21^st centuries. We will contemplate the ways that artists and theorists craft gender-expansive lifeways, erotics, embodiments, and kinship with human and more-than-human worlds. We will also consider how artists and authors enact global anti-colonial solidarities and imagine healing pathways for Indigenous communities, genders, and sexualities across Turtle Island and beyond. Our texts will include queer, trans*, nonbinary, and Two Spirit poetry, experimental cinema, photography, visual art, young adult fiction, performance art, and critical theory from Canada, Greenland, the United States, Mexico, and Palestine. Content considerations: our materials engage gender and sexual violence, racial violence, anti-migrant violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.

 

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

We’ll consider the literary elements of the love story over the past several centuries. Traces the evolution of the genre, beginning with a Jane Austen novel and ending in the contemporary period.

Placing Jane Austen in context 250 years after her birth is a tricky but rewarding task: does she belong to the 18^th century or the 19^th? the Gothic or Romantic traditions (or neither)? 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), as well as film and television adaptations of the novels.

Reading four literary masterpieces of the novel genre, students in this course will gain both a comprehensive overview of the novel as it developed in England over selected periods of the nineteenth century, as well as a solid understanding of the foundations of modern fiction. Each of the novels we read in the class demonstrates an evolving array of technical achievements in the creation of narrative perspective, elaboration of theme, and the development of literary character: Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1864), George Elliot’s Middlemarch (1872), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). Lectures and discussions will consider historical and social background of each book, conditions of authorship, and publication, economics, narrative theory, issues around sexuality and social class, as well as how to write about novels. Requirements include short writing exercises, occasional quizzes and a final paper.

Study of American fiction (both novels and short stories) from its beginning to end of 19th century.

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’ll chart the course of American poetry since 1945 so that we may establish a shared foundation and a sense of the evolving critical, aesthetic, and political concerns of the times. We’ll 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 term, we’ll read the complete works of several living poets. The goal here is to foster a deeper immersion in the work of those poets 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.

An examination of the diversity and evolution of American short fiction over the last forty years. We’ll read stories about work, death, sex, tech, race, place, love, gender, class, climate, catastrophe, religion, justice, and more. Narratives will vary in length from flash fiction to novellas, with a primary focus on the short story form. By examining short stories historically, critically, and aesthetically, students will learn how to interpret and critique short fiction as a reflection of our contemporary society and collective humanity. Assignments will be both creative and analytical. Students will deepen their critical skills through essay writing, as well as craft their own short stories.

Course Description

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

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: Cruz 136A) and it should be sent to mullen@humnet.ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2026.

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 advanced poetry workshop, you’ll write a new poem each week, and 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.

Enrollment is by instructor consent. If admitted, you must attend the first class.

How to Apply

To apply for the course, submit by e-mail attachment (in one document) three to five of your best poems. In the body of the e-mail, provide your name, UID number, major, class level, and a brief note (no more than 250 words) about your experiences with poetry, literary poets who interest and/or influence you, any other creative writing courses you may have taken (none required!), and any other creative writing courses to which you are applying this quarter.

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Smith 136B.1) and it should be sent to rwilson@english.ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2026.

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 advanced poetry workshop, you’ll write a new poem each week, and 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.

Enrollment is by instructor consent. If admitted, you must attend the first class.

How to Apply

To apply for the course, submit by e-mail attachment (in one document) three to five of your best poems. In the body of the e-mail, provide your name, UID number, major, class level, and a brief note (no more than 250 words) about your experiences with poetry, literary poets who interest and/or influence you, any other creative writing courses you may have taken (none required!), and any other creative writing courses to which you are applying this quarter.

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Heaney 136B.2) and it should be sent to rwilson@english.ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2026.

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 fiction. We will consider the short story form, closely reading classics and contemporary short stories. 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 fiction. A Word document or PDF is preferable. In the body of the email, tell me what workshops you’ve taken in the past. Also, please list three pieces of creative writing you’ve recently read that have moved you.

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Rodriguez 137B.1) and it should be sent to jtorres7@ucla.edu and creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2026.

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 or more great short stories 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 week, based on a prompt the teacher will offer, connected to the story they’ve read all week and studied. Most weeks, we’ll write in class. Some weeks you’ll write at home and bring the story to class.

 

The goals of the class are:

1) to turn every student in the class into a lifelong reader FOR PLEASURE

2) to help the students develop a regular practice reading and writing

3) to foster and recognize each student’s specific talent and train her/his/their technical skills. We’ll work 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 more than one workshops and have preferences, please indicate those preferences.

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

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2026.

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 writing workshop focused on the reading and writing of creative nonfiction. In this form, the act of writing is not an explanation of the world around you but a means of discovering how you think and feel about it. We will read and discuss a variety of creative nonfiction: some personal essays, some narrative reportage, some portraits, and some hybrid forms. The goal of the course is to help students develop their own unique voice and a sense of narrative rhythm and pacing necessary to craft a truly engaging story. Students will complete weekly short writing exercises, as well as a longer piece that will be critiqued in workshop and revised.

How to Apply

Please email me one PDF attachment of your best creative prose writing (5-8 numbered pages, double-spaced, 12 pt serif font). The sample may be drawn from creative nonfiction or from fiction. In the body of the email, provide your name, major, class standing, and a brief note about yourself. Is there a piece of writing you have read lately that moved you? Which writers do you consistently return to, and what draws you back to them? Tell me about your current creative writing habits and any experience with creative nonfiction. If you’ve taken other writing workshops, either at UCLA or elsewhere, please let me know.

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: McDonald M138.2) and it should be sent to xuanjuliana@gmail.com AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2026.

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 seminar, students will produce experimental approaches to popular variants of isekai genres in web novels, comics/manga, anime, visual novels, video games, films, and other media. We’ll also draw inspiration from a broader global history of “other world” or “portal fantasy” narratives, ranging from historical novels like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865) to recent video games like the literal walking simulator Baby Steps (Bennett Foddy, 2025). Building from these traditions, the course explores isekai not only as a genre but as a set of formal devices: transformation, leveling, save points, world rules, and so forth. We’ll ask how stories change when protagonists are reborn as objects, interfaces, monsters, or institutions—and what it means to write from within worlds structured by gaming conventions like stats, menus, maps, and mods. In the other direction, we’ll ask: how can we think of isekai genres as experimental modes of video game criticism in its own right? Using a collective workshop format, students will engage in a series of creative experiments that may include web novels, memes, interactive narratives, TTRPGs, dating sims, comics, machinima, net art, and a range of collaborative hybrid forms that blur writing, play, and poetics. Studying the genre conventions of isekai in relation to literary history, contemporary media, fan cultures, and video games, we’ll develop our own experimental methods for writing ourselves beyond the looking glass. No previous training in another world required.

How to Apply

Please submit a cover letter introducing yourself and a sample of your writing or creative work in any format (no more than five pages, links to online work in any genre encouraged). In your cover letter, please include the following: your student identification number, email address, year of graduation, and a brief statement that addresses your interest in the course and any relevant coursework and/or creative practices in or beyond the classroom. Finally, please list any works in the genre that inspire you!

Please email your submission as a PDF and title your PDF starting with your last name, i.e.: lastname_isekai_submission.pdf. The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Baker M138.3) and it should be sent to dsnelson@humnet.ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2026.

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.

This course explores the genre of the illness narrative across historical periods with a particular focus on the problem of representing pain. Elaine Scarry, in her classic study The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1987), famously claimed that “to have great pain is to have certainty, to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt,” while Virginia Woolf in “On Being Ill” (1926) deplores the dearth of literature on illness in the aftermath of her own. How can illness, pain and suffering be narrated when they defy words? We will attempt to answer this question by reading a wide range of literary, philosophical, and critical texts on pain.  These may include sections of John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), novelist Frances Burney’s mastectomy narrative (1812), the poems of Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980), Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (1994), and Eula Biss’s “The Pain Scale” (2005). We will explore pain “in relation,” as the disability studies scholar Alyson Patsvas puts it, in order to better understand it as a historical construct and a source of knowledge, while also considering the vexed relationship between disability studies and health humanities. Requirements include several discussion-board posts, an oral presentation, and a final project which could include your own personal narrative.

In this seminar, we try to answer two basic questions that should be of interest all students of literature and culture: what is a novel, and why does it matter? We will approach these large questions from two related areas of inquiry, including (1) the novel’s historical emergence as a massively popular cultural phenomenon over hundreds of years of its development, and (2) the novel as a distinct literary genre with its own narrative conventions, techniques, standards of truth and value, as well as conceptions of human character. Both of these areas have been the subject of intense theoretical speculation. Seminar students will read the most provocative and engaging statements about the novel from important writers over the last hundred years or so, and will use their insights to analyze two or three novels from different historical time periods. Requirements include oral presentations, group work, class discussion, short papers, and a longer final paper.

This course will undertake a detailed study of the four works that make up Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of English history plays: Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V.  Along the way, we will acquire some familiarity with Shakespeare’s chronicle sources and dramatic precedents; competing early modern historiographical models and methods; genre theory; performance theory; the political situation and social concerns of England in the late 1590s when the plays are written (i.e., not just the early 1400s, when the plays are set); and the needs of a harried property manager.  We will also sample some of the many filmed treatments of these plays.

This is a comparative course examining Latinx Caribbean poetry from the 1960s to the present. Through poetry, we will attend to how the Caribbean archipelago extends far beyond its physical geography and into a U.S. Latinx cultural imaginary. In doing so, we will trace poetic counterhistories that critique nationalist and colonial frameworks by thinking through the ways in which history bears on the present. To do so, we will adopt various theoretical frameworks that draw from performance studies, ecopoetics, and translation studies to support our close readings practices. The class is designed to develop students’ skills and confidence in analyzing poetry in general while attending to the particular poetics of the Caribbean. Together, we will think critically about the geographies of Latinx literature—from various locales in the United States to the Caribbean itself—to ask what poetry in particular can tell us about the histories and constructions of these places. The poets include: Richard Blanco, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Oliver Baez Bendorf, and Jasminne Mendez among others.

 

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

This capstone seminar is based at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, which is in the Adams District of Los Angeles.  The Clark Library houses the largest archive of Oscar Wilde materials in the world. The seminar aims to introduce students to advanced methods in archival research. The curriculum covers many aspects of Wilde’s career, from this time lecturing in the United States in 1882 to his period of exile in France and Italy after his release from prison in 1897. Sponsored by the Ahmanson Foundation, the seminar carries an award of $1,000 for all students who successfully complete the class.

 

Admission is by instructor consent only. Click here to review the application process. Application materials must be submitted to the instructor by 5.00pm PT on Friday, February 6, 2026.

This seminar explores race and gender codings and silences in European and Mediterranean premodern popular romances. How do chivalric knights and ladies negotiate the compromises and double-binds of pursuing their own desires and amassing status and memorial reputations within their communities? How do romances manage characters that arrest the attention of other characters and readers alike by using cultural ideals to challenge norms? Conversely, how do characters pass invisibly under social radars? What tactics can leverage social orders into new shapes? Text may include: Yde and Olive, Dhat al-Himma, Roman de Silence, Romance of Moraien, the Lais of Marie de France, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and her successors, and contemporary theories of race, gender, and sexuality.

 

Requirements: Weekly in-class response paper (30%), and a seminar term project comprised of prospectus, bibliography, drafts, and final version(50%), and a class presentation of that project (20%).

This capstone seminar takes Rachel Carson’s influential book as a starting point to engage the oceanic imaginary in visual arts, film, and literature. We will engage Indigenous, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to understanding the deep ocean, and the current threats to local ecologies, such as DDT and other kinds of toxic dumping. The course will include interdisciplinary readings about the ocean and its complex meanings and representations, mandatory attendance of Rebeca Méndez’s installation The Sea Around Us the first week of class, as well as attendance at a symposium and film screening at the Hammer Museum. Assignments include a material contribution to our interdisciplinary ocean studies library, such as an essay, poster, or book.

 

Enrolls via department consent: Enrollment is restricted to students who can attend The Sea Around Us viewing during week 1 of the spring quarter. To request enrollment from the department, click here. (The enrollment request link will go live at 9 am on February 9.)

This course traces the evolution of the ancient Mediterranean epic into the medieval romance, with a focus on character types, narrative patterns, imagery and themes — especially war, justice, the city or kingdom, religion, eros, and the journey or quest. Books are drawn from the following list: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot, The Romance of the Rose, The Lais of Marie de France, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. Assignments include weekly reports on assigned topics, reading quizzes or exercises, and a final research paper presented at a tenth-week mini-conference.

 

Admission by instructor’s permission (PTE). Applicants should submit a list of literature courses taken so far, a brief (100-200 word) description of their educational goals, and a 5-10 pp. writing sample from a previous course. All materials should be sent as a PDF attachment to this email address: <ejager@humnet.ucla.edu>. No Google.docs, please!

Reading a selection of “history” plays across Shakespeare’s canon, this course invites students interested in making sense of these plays in our current moment. We will explore the scholarly field of early modern history plays, and traditional ways of reading them. The course asks students to reconsider historical chronologies and genre as an organizing principle for the plays. Students will have the opportunity to approach the plays in new ways beyond the familiar reading of these plays as cohering around power dynamics, and notions of masculinity and war, as we incorporate alternative, non-normative versions of history.

We live in a world of systems and networks, ceaseless communications and social media. But what that means, and what it looks like, and feels like, may be another story—or range of stories.

 

This course will look at contemporary novels, and  visual culture, that stage those stories, and reconsider how we live in and with  these circuits and networks today, in the world interior of capital.

Readings will include recent novels by, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ling Ma, Cormac McCarthy, Sayaka Murata; and Natsuo Kirino, accompanied by film and visual arts.

As a Capstone course, participation is mandatory. Students will briefly present on the texts and on their projects related to the course; and engage in shared discussions. The final project may take the form of a term paper or presentation.

Not open for credit to students who have previously taken the same topic with Prof. Seltzer in lecture or seminar.

This course invites us to think about the ways that medicine and community have shaped the histories and literatures of the United States. Beginning with the early colonial violence that defined European–Indigenous relations for centuries to come, we will ask ourselves two sets of questions: first, how do historical conceptions of illness and health set the terms through which writers imagine their communal ideal? Second, what are the strategies of inclusion and exclusion that continue to determine the boundaries of our public health debates? Reading from a number of genres including novels, poems, essays, memoirs, and pamphlets, we will consider the limits of our knowledge and vocabulary as we inquire into the meaning of immunity, susceptibility, knowledge, conspiracy, treatment, care, and medicine.

 

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

Title and topic TBD.

 

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