Summer 2026

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

Fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major and a lower-division requirement for the Creative Writing minor.

Fulfills Writing II requirement.

Additional sections of English 4W may open if the waitlist fills.

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.

Fulfills a lower-division requirement for the Creative Writing minor.

Fulfills Writing II requirement.

Additional sections of English 20W may open if the waitlist fills. Unlike the regular academic year, summer offerings of ENGL 20W do not require an application.

Introduction to popular and important cultural works of comic books, graphic novels, and manga across the 20th and 21st centuries. Emphasis on developing graphic media literacy – recognizing how text and image combine to create meaning – and the unique vocabulary of comics across cultures. Discussion of topics including imperialism, health humanities, gender, sexuality, disability, and more through the affordances provided by graphic media.

A late medieval play about Jesus’s crucifixion is steeped in self-consciousness, showing the actors failing to make their Jesus’s body fit onto the prop cross; a Shakespeare play, when grappling with medieval historical sources, makes Joan of Arc Black; a modern adaptation of the ancient poem Beowulf likens the monster Grendel to the gap between James Baldwin’s teeth. This is medievalism(s); the processes of interpretation and re-creation that operate in adaptations of medieval literature, as well as (as this class will explore) in medieval literature itself. Medieval depictions of the body are frequently strange, but they also lay out the foundations of race, disability, and gender that define our human bodies today. Medievalist writers use, play, and market in this space, drawing their own unique figurations of the human for their own audiences. This course will thus allow us to think about all the centuries of literary, historical, and artistic work that goes into making a human body fit our expectations.

Readings will include medieval romances, English mystery plays, poems and plays by Shakespeare, allegories by Spenser, and works by modern writers like Toni Morrison and Roger Reeves. Readings will also include secondary sources discussing medievalism, disability, and race. Assignments include weekly reading responses, and two longer essays.

A late medieval play about Jesus’s crucifixion is steeped in self-consciousness, showing the actors failing to make their Jesus’s body fit onto the prop cross; a Shakespeare play, when grappling with medieval historical sources, makes Joan of Arc Black; a modern adaptation of the ancient poem Beowulf likens the monster Grendel to the gap between James Baldwin’s teeth. This is medievalism(s); the processes of interpretation and re-creation that operate in adaptations of medieval literature, as well as (as this class will explore) in medieval literature itself. Medieval depictions of the body are frequently strange, but they also lay out the foundations of race, disability, and gender that define our human bodies today. Medievalist writers use, play, and market in this space, drawing their own unique figurations of the human for their own audiences. This course will thus allow us to think about all the centuries of literary, historical, and artistic work that goes into making a human body fit our expectations.

Readings will include medieval romances, English mystery plays, poems and plays by Shakespeare, allegories by Spenser, and works by modern writers like Toni Morrison and Roger Reeves. Readings will also include secondary sources discussing medievalism, disability, and race. Assignments include weekly reading responses, and two longer essays.

In this course we will explore popular Shakespeare plays and adaptations on screen: 1 Henry IV, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. We will watch film productions of the plays alongside our readings of the texts, exploring productions both that “remain faithful” to the text and follow more conventional concepts of how to film Shakespeare: for example with directors such as Orson Welles (Chimes at Midnight, 1965), Peter Brooke (King Lear, 1971), or David Icke’s Hamlet with Andrew Scott (2018). We will also consider adaptations at varying degrees of distance from Shakespeare’s language, time, plot, or geography, for example with Tonderai Munyevu’s South African Township Kupenga Kwa Hamlet (2015), Akira Kurosawa’s (Throne of Blood, 1957), Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet, and even an adaptation for children: Gnomio and Juliet (2011) directed by Kelly Asbury. We will end by exploring the tendency toward the biography of Shakespeare in film with Shakespeare in Love (1998) directed by John Madden, and the recent Hamnet (2025), directed by Chloé Zhao. We will support our critique of Shakespeare’s biography in these productions with Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World.

During her relatively short lifetime, Jane Austen wrote only six novels, which sold modestly well. She died, at the age of forty-one, a rather moderate literary success. In the two hundred or so years since her death, however, Austen has become a literary celebrity, household name, and object of worldwide fan adoration. What is it about Austen’s fiction that still captivates readers? How have her handful of novels — set in the early nineteenth century, mostly in small English villages — spawned so many adaptations, rewritings, sequels, conventions, merchandise, and even action figures? Is it even possible to count how many Pride and Prejudice adaptations exist at this point? These are some of the questions we will ask over the course of “Jane Austen: Then and Now.” In addition to reading at least three of Austen’s novels, we will also watch screen adaptations of each of these novels and take adaptation seriously as a mode of cultural critique. What do these twentieth- and twenty-first century Austen adaptations and homages say about their own moment of production—and how do they engage with Austen’s writing and her era?

What constitutes “appropriate” literature for children and adolescents? Who gets to decide? This course focuses on the historically contingent nature of these questions by inviting students to read books that have been removed from or kept off of American school shelves over the course of the last century or so. We will consider what it means to analyze these controversial texts as literary works: What do we–and other students–stand to learn from them? What artistic merit do they have or lack, and how do we even define “artistic merit”? Possible readings include Melissa (Alex Gino), The Hate U Give (Angie Thomas), Lysistrata (Aristophanes), Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), Forever (Judy Blume), and Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman). We will supplement our primary readings with excerpts from relevant legal proceedings and scholarly criticism. Assignments will include weekly discussion posts and a research essay.

Consideration of ways in which discourses of otherness circulate and operate in speculative fiction. From Frankenstein’s monster to encounters with alien species in outer space, the genre has a long history of exploring cultural conceptions of alterity, as well as contact zones where divergent ideologies and values collide. Study will explore texts—primarily, though not exclusively, American—that critically evaluate our notions of the Other in its various guises: the foreign, the uncanny, the monstrous, the threatening, the incomprehensible, the alluring. Course objective is to critically evaluate how speculative fiction reflects, informs, reorients, and shifts cultural understandings of difference. Authors may include Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula K. Le Guin, and China Miéville.

How does the way we perceive the world vary across cultural, historical, and geographic locations? What can the natural world (its structures, milieux, and inhabitants) teach us about perceiving the world differently? How do contemporary media ecologies shape and modulate our perceptions of our broader (social) world? We will explore these questions through literary works by authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Rivers Solomon, Helena Maria Viramontes, Tony Tulathimutte, as well as films and new media works including Network! (1976), K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025), Queers in Love at the End of the World (2013), and Life is Strange: True Colors (2021).‡ These primary readings will be accompanied by theoretical readings by authors such as Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, Xine Yao, Sara Ahmed, Justine Pizzo, Brian Massumi, Jakob von Uexküll, Nicole Seymour, and Ed Yong.

‡Accessibility options such as Let’s Play YouTube videos or access to the Text/Tech Lab will be provided for all video games.

In a world increasingly dominated by images, the power of one’s “face card” seems increasingly important. This course explores contemporary manipulations of the face in photography, film, and digital media to understand the significance of the face in current debates over desire, identity, and surveillance. We will examine works in a variety of contemporary media, including Ruth Ozeki’s The Face: A Time Code (2015), Kim Kardashian’s Selfish (2015), YouTube makeup tutorials of the early 2000s, and other works. There will be a creative option for the final project.

“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

Los Angeles is a city of myths, erasures, and contested spaces—defined as much by freeways and redlines as by novels, films, and screenplays. This interdisciplinary course explores how Los Angeles has been imagined over the last 150 years and how those representations shape our understanding of urban space, race, class, memory, and belonging. Moving across literature, film, television, music, and visual culture, we will ask: Who gets to tell the story of L.A.? Whose stories are marginalized or erased? And how does the city continually reinvent itself through narrative?

Beyond the page and screen, the course emphasizes place-based and digital learning. Using digitized archives and online exhibits from local institutions—including the LA Public Library and the Huntington Library—we will trace the layered histories of Los Angeles neighborhoods and landmarks across time. From the vanished Victorian mansions of Bunker Hill to the streets of South L.A., we will examine how artists and everyday Angelenos have responded to migration and displacement, the rise of Hollywood’s “dream factory,” subcultures and countercultures, racialized violence and inequality, and ongoing environmental crises. We will engage creatively with the “real” and “imagined” city through a digital mapping project, building spatial narratives that connect texts to the geography of Los Angeles. By grounding cultural analysis in actual urban space, the course invites students to rethink how stories and cities shape one another.

Los Angeles may be the most photographed, filmed, and written-about city in the world, yet it remains deeply misunderstood. Is it a utopia of sunshine and opportunity or a dystopia of smog and exclusion? This course treats L.A. as a dynamic text to be read, mapped, and reimagined.

What makes villains so interesting? Why does the villain get the best song in a Disney movie? Why do we love to watch characters who act badly? What does the depiction of villains and villainous behavior reveal about a society’s values and self-conception?

By examining some of the most memorable villains of the past few centuries, we will explore the above questions. Course materials may include Shakespearean tragedies like Macbeth or Othello, selections from John Milton’s 17th-century epic poem Paradise Lost, the nineteenth-century play Hedda Gabler, old and new classic novels such as Wuthering Heights and American Psycho, children’s stories, and classic and contemporary film.