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.

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major. 

 

Fulfills Writing II requirement.

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 Writing II requirement. Not open to students with credit for English 20.

This course explores the earliest works of African American literature. The first writers of African descent living in the Caribbean, England, and North America are often read simply as a prelude to the more fully developed Black literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By contrast, this course presumes that the texts of the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic are worthy of study on their own. We’ll examine what one writer called African Americans’ “uncommon sufferings” and the literary frameworks they used to make sense of them. In the process, we’ll consider the relationship between forced migration and transatlantic mobility, the role of literacy and authorship in the quest for freedom, the intersection of race and gender, and the place of Christian theology, scientific enlightenment, capitalist enterprise, and revolutionary violence in Black antislavery discourse. Readings will include slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, political pamphlets, letters, poetry, fiction, and a recent graphic novel adaptation of The Confessions of Nat Turner.

 

**This course qualifies as a pre-1848 course for the American Literature and Culture major.

We will read core texts of the late 18^th and early-to-mid 19^th centuries, including the poetry of Henry Derozio, John Keats, Charlotte Smith, and Phyllis Wheatly, and Austen’s novella Persuasion. At the same time, we will consider contemporary representations of this period, including R. F. Kuang’s novel Babel (2022), and films/shows that may include Persuasion (2022), Bright Star (2009), The Favourite (2018), Bridgerton (2022), and Belle (2013). Brief excerpts of theory by Lauren Berlant, Anne Anlin Cheng, Edward Glissant, Jose Muñoz, Edward Said, and Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick will help us clarify our questions. Central to this course are questions of how and why the 18^th century and the Romantic period are adapted in a contemporary American context. What questions or problems does the Romantic period allow us to think through? How do we reclaim historical narratives from a canon dominated by white, cishet voices? What are the aesthetic and theoretical problems that arise when we try to imagine histories outside of these canons? Can you cosplay history without reproducing it?

This six-week course is focused on cultural depictions of interracial encounters across borders. Students will interrogate the sociohistorical construction of the US-Mexico border from the 1850s to the present. Rather than viewing literature as a means to transparently understand other cultures and accumulate knowledge, students will approach literature as a subversive interface for critical discourse on topics related to racialization, borders, power, and desire across a transnational context in flux. Such topics include, but are not limited to, xenophobia, gendered violence, forced migration, imperialism, the American Dream, etc. Additionally, rather than view borders as fixed and inflexible infrastructures, students will reflect on their fungible nature from a transhistorical perspective.

Have you ever observed a boomer and wondered “Why are you like this?” In this course, we’ll try to answer that question and others by looking through the lens of children’s literature in the boomer era. From The Red Badge of Courage to The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, the books boomers read as kids are full of fun, adventure, death, mystery, and all kinds of ideas about how Americans are and how they should be. By investigating what children and teens were reading in schools and outside them in the 1940s-70s, we’ll come away with a fuller picture of what ideas about gender, race, class, and politics went into the formation of this influential generation, and we’ll learn to think about the texts we’ve been nourished on ourselves in similar ways. What ideas and images did we glean from the books we read as children? In what ways did these texts draw on understandings that might be more similar to the baby boomer generation’s than we realize? And, how might we (as kids and as readers) still be influenced by the powerful ideas that came out of the boomer era–about the family, about war, about civil rights and women’s rights, etc.? We’ll think about how our course texts and cultural touch-stones form our image of America in the mid-20th century, and we’ll learn to complicate this image with close and sustained reading, contextual and archival research, and sophisticated analysis.

This course will examine the literary history of computing as it evolved from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy and code poetry to the invention of physical computing machines like the Enigma during World War II. Topics will include the conceptualization of random-access memory (RAM), executable programming languages, and Boolean algebra. Authors may include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, and George Boole. This course will also cover many fundamentals of digital research methods, including how to train AI models for archival research. No experience with computing is necessary.

Los Angeles has been alternately imagined as an Edenic paradise of orange groves and opportunity and as a dystopian realm of corruption and decay. In this course, we’ll reckon with the complex and often contradictory images of Los Angeles in a range of texts across literature, film, and media over the last 150 years.

 

Together we’ll interrogate the role these texts play in shaping understandings of and attitudes towards the city and the diverse communities that call it home. As we explore various neighborhoods across time, we’ll examine how writers, artists, and filmmakers have responded to migration and gentrification, extreme social and economic inequality and racist violence, the emergence and dominance of the Hollywood “dream factory,” and ongoing environmental crises in America’s second-largest city. Grounding our readings in history, geography, and urban study, we’ll become more familiar with the changing cultural landscapes, artistic and political movements, architectural and environmental features, and industrial conditions that continue to shape L.A.

This course explores the earliest works of African American literature. The first writers of African descent living in the Caribbean, England, and North America are often read simply as a prelude to the more fully developed Black literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By contrast, this course presumes that the texts of the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic are worthy of study on their own. We’ll examine what one writer called African Americans’ “uncommon sufferings” and the literary frameworks they used to make sense of them. In the process, we’ll consider the relationship between forced migration and transatlantic mobility, the role of literacy and authorship in the quest for freedom, the intersection of race and gender, and the place of Christian theology, scientific enlightenment, capitalist enterprise, and revolutionary violence in Black antislavery discourse. Readings will include slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, political pamphlets, letters, poetry, fiction, and a recent graphic novel adaptation of The Confessions of Nat Turner.

 

**This course qualifies as a pre-1848 course for the American Literature and Culture major.

This six-week course is focused on cultural depictions of interracial encounters across borders. Students will interrogate the sociohistorical construction of the US-Mexico border from the 1850s to the present. Rather than viewing literature as a means to transparently understand other cultures and accumulate knowledge, students will approach literature as a subversive interface for critical discourse on topics related to racialization, borders, power, and desire across a transnational context in flux. Such topics include, but are not limited to, xenophobia, gendered violence, forced migration, imperialism, the American Dream, etc. Additionally, rather than view borders as fixed and inflexible infrastructures, students will reflect on their fungible nature from a transhistorical perspective.

Los Angeles has been alternately imagined as an Edenic paradise of orange groves and opportunity and as a dystopian realm of corruption and decay. In this course, we’ll reckon with the complex and often contradictory images of Los Angeles in a range of texts across literature, film, and media over the last 150 years.

 

Together we’ll interrogate the role these texts play in shaping understandings of and attitudes towards the city and the diverse communities that call it home. As we explore various neighborhoods across time, we’ll examine how writers, artists, and filmmakers have responded to migration and gentrification, extreme social and economic inequality and racist violence, the emergence and dominance of the Hollywood “dream factory,” and ongoing environmental crises in America’s second-largest city. Grounding our readings in history, geography, and urban study, we’ll become more familiar with the changing cultural landscapes, artistic and political movements, architectural and environmental features, and industrial conditions that continue to shape L.A.

This six-week course is focused on cultural depictions of interracial encounters across borders. Students will interrogate the sociohistorical construction of the US-Mexico border from the 1850s to the present. Rather than viewing literature as a means to transparently understand other cultures and accumulate knowledge, students will approach literature as a subversive interface for critical discourse on topics related to racialization, borders, power, and desire across a transnational context in flux. Such topics include, but are not limited to, xenophobia, gendered violence, forced migration, imperialism, the American Dream, etc. Additionally, rather than view borders as fixed and inflexible infrastructures, students will reflect on their fungible nature from a transhistorical perspective.

Have you ever observed a boomer and wondered “Why are you like this?” In this course, we’ll try to answer that question and others by looking through the lens of children’s literature in the boomer era. From The Red Badge of Courage to The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, the books boomers read as kids are full of fun, adventure, death, mystery, and all kinds of ideas about how Americans are and how they should be. By investigating what children and teens were reading in schools and outside them in the 1940s-70s, we’ll come away with a fuller picture of what ideas about gender, race, class, and politics went into the formation of this influential generation, and we’ll learn to think about the texts we’ve been nourished on ourselves in similar ways. What ideas and images did we glean from the books we read as children? In what ways did these texts draw on understandings that might be more similar to the baby boomer generation’s than we realize? And, how might we (as kids and as readers) still be influenced by the powerful ideas that came out of the boomer era–about the family, about war, about civil rights and women’s rights, etc.? We’ll think about how our course texts and cultural touch-stones form our image of America in the mid-20th century, and we’ll learn to complicate this image with close and sustained reading, contextual and archival research, and sophisticated analysis.

This course will examine the literary history of computing as it evolved from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy and code poetry to the invention of physical computing machines like the Enigma during World War II. Topics will include the conceptualization of random-access memory (RAM), executable programming languages, and Boolean algebra. Authors may include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, and George Boole. This course will also cover many fundamentals of digital research methods, including how to train AI models for archival research. No experience with computing is necessary.

Los Angeles has been alternately imagined as an Edenic paradise of orange groves and opportunity and as a dystopian realm of corruption and decay. In this course, we’ll reckon with the complex and often contradictory images of Los Angeles in a range of texts across literature, film, and media over the last 150 years.

 

Together we’ll interrogate the role these texts play in shaping understandings of and attitudes towards the city and the diverse communities that call it home. As we explore various neighborhoods across time, we’ll examine how writers, artists, and filmmakers have responded to migration and gentrification, extreme social and economic inequality and racist violence, the emergence and dominance of the Hollywood “dream factory,” and ongoing environmental crises in America’s second-largest city. Grounding our readings in history, geography, and urban study, we’ll become more familiar with the changing cultural landscapes, artistic and political movements, architectural and environmental features, and industrial conditions that continue to shape L.A.

We will read core texts of the late 18^th and early-to-mid 19^th centuries, including the poetry of Henry Derozio, John Keats, Charlotte Smith, and Phyllis Wheatly, and Austen’s novella Persuasion. At the same time, we will consider contemporary representations of this period, including R. F. Kuang’s novel Babel (2022), and films/shows that may include Persuasion (2022), Bright Star (2009), The Favourite (2018), Bridgerton (2022), and Belle (2013). Brief excerpts of theory by Lauren Berlant, Anne Anlin Cheng, Edward Glissant, Jose Muñoz, Edward Said, and Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick will help us clarify our questions. Central to this course are questions of how and why the 18^th century and the Romantic period are adapted in a contemporary American context. What questions or problems does the Romantic period allow us to think through? How do we reclaim historical narratives from a canon dominated by white, cishet voices? What are the aesthetic and theoretical problems that arise when we try to imagine histories outside of these canons? Can you cosplay history without reproducing it?

In this class, we’ll explore the realm of “creative nonfiction,” which will take us across many different mediums and genres. From true crime podcasts to celebrity profiles, from music to memoir writing, creative nonfiction is a vast and diverse category. Some of the contemporary writers whose work we’ll look at include Hanif Abdurraqib, Karen Tongson, Roxane Gay, Daniel Lavery, and David Sedaris. We will interrogate the relationship between fiction and nonfiction, as well as analyze the formal techniques that creative nonfiction writers have at their disposal. In addition to reading and discussing creative nonfiction works, students will develop a regular writing practice as they work towards a final creative nonfiction project. We will also practice giving and receiving feedback, with the aim of coming together as a community of writers.

 

This course is eligible for credit on the Professional Writing minor.