CoursesCourses for the English Major

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

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

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

 

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

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

English 10C embraces a very broad range of literary works from 1850 to the present. The syllabus for winter 2023 includes poetry, drama, and prose fiction by African, American, British, Caribbean, and Irish writers. Titled “Different Times, Different Places,” the course explores writings by Frances E. W. Harper, Harriet Jacobs, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, H. P. Lovecraft, James Baldwin, Tillie Olsen, Jean Rhys, Ama Ata Aidoo, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, Sarah Kane, Edwidge Danticat, Ocean Vuong, Carmen Maria Machado, Anthony Veasna So, and Jake Skeet, among others.

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

This course utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to examine U.S. culture writ large, specifically “America” itself, as an imagined and often-contested idea, a trenchant source of belonging and exclusion, and a fecund site of aesthetic and cultural production. We will explore the manifestation of these ideals across a variety of contemporary literary and media-based forms—including poetry, visual culture, film, performance, photography, music, and art. In doing so, we will examine how artists, writers, and musicians perform “America” and/or “the American dream” and their relationship to it.

 

This course is a required preparation course for the American Literature and Culture major. Students in other majors may enroll for Foundations or Diversity credit.

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 November 27. Applications received after this date will be considered only if additional space should become available and may not receive a full review or response. Enrollment preference for English 20W will be given to first and second-year students. Approved applicants will receive a PTE directly from the instructor.

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

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

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

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

This course investigates the origins and significance of the early American novel. Reading five representative works of prose fiction from the long eighteenth century, we’ll theorize the genre as a whole and explore the early American novel’s differences from its metropolitan British counterparts. We’ll examine the genre’s relationship to historical developments like capitalism, colonialism, Atlantic slavery, scientific enlightenment, religious awakening, and democratic revolution in order to illuminate modern hierarchies of gender, race, class, and faith. We’ll track shifting attitudes toward facticity and fictionality by considering the novel’s debts to nonfictional forms like letters, reports, sermons, natural histories, captivity narratives, and autobiographies. And we’ll analyze formal features like perspective, characterization, and emplotment as well as thematic oppositions like civilization vs. savagery, intimacy vs. publicity, and domesticity vs. violence. Assignments will include a close reading essay, secondary source response, and final research paper.

 

This course is a required preparation course for the American Literature and Culture major. Students in other majors may enroll for Foundations or Diversity credit.

Shakespeare’s command of the theater and our imagination, perhaps our “global” imagination is the centerpiece of our course. Our course is especially invested in helping students understand Shakespeare as a sign of cultural knowledge. Since at least the nineteenth century, if not before, to have culture (in Anglo-American societies and colonies) has gone hand-and-hand with “having” Shakespeare. Our course will explore some of the dimensions of the relationship between Shakespeare and culture as we carry out “close readings” of individual plays. Throughout, we will focus on a diversity of issues, ranging from formal literary ones to broader cultural ones, including genre, historiography, nationalism, race, sexuality, religion, and psychology. While our course is an introduction to Shakespeare, it does not reduce Shakespeare to oversimplification or platitudes. Our objective is to introduce students to the complexities, densities, beauty, elusiveness, and sometimes, yes, the startling simplicity of this playwright and phenomenon known as “Shakespeare.”

 

Not open for credit to English majors.

A study of representative examples of Western drama from antiquity to the present.

This course explores contemporary environmental narratives and art that engage the histories and cultures of energy. We will read narratives of energy extraction, pollution, and infrastructure through environmental justice frameworks and analyze how different genres (science fiction, fantasy, utopia/dystopia) imagine energy justice and futures. By exploring how energy is intimately linked to the histories of race, capitalism, patriarchy, and empire, this course explores the complex relations between race, nature, and power.

This seminar asks a question: “How does climate change feel?” The question does not have an answer. The relationship between environmental change, affective experience, and political action is an open area of inquiry, and the goal of this class is to equip you to participate in that inquiry. The class will introduce students to the environmental humanities by modeling the research methods that scholars in the field use to understand how art, narrative history, identity, and other cultural factors shape people’s relationships with planetary systems. We’ll focus especially on how recent fictional and nonfictional narratives ask their audiences to think and feel about climate change and its solutions. Ultimately, in collaboration with your peers, you will develop your own research questions based on the interests you bring to the class.

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 Winter meeting as posted in the Schedule of Classes!

This course provides instruction in critical writing about literature and culture specifically for English major transfer students at UCLA. Its goal is to help students improve their skills and abilities at literary and cultural analysis. It’s a workshop for discovering richer literary questions, developing more nuanced analyses of complex texts, sustaining arguments, and developing your own authoritative voice. The course assumes writing is a process, so students write, rewrite, and workshop all writing assignments. Requirements include a number of low-stakes shorter writing tasks (1-3 pages) and a final paper (6-8 pages).  Grades will be based 35% on your final paper (including notes, prewriting, and drafts) and 65% on other written assignments and your class participation.

 

English 110T qualifies as an elective for the English major and the Professional Writing Minor and cannot be taken for credit if you have taken English 110A.

 

Enrollment is limited to transfer students: please contact the English undergraduate advising office via MyUCLA MessageCenter to enroll.

What does it mean to engage in “public writing” or to be a “public intellectual? This course broadens students’ concept of what it means to write about literature by exploring the history and practice of writing literary criticism for a general (rather than for a specifically academic) audience. We’ll pay particular attention to the range of venues that have emerged for writers to publish their work for non-specialist readers. The course will include extensive opportunities for critical writing in a variety of forms and for a variety of audiences, as well as building research skills for a variety of applications, including a culminating portfolio project.

 

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

We will read selections from Chaucer’s famous anthology of romances, comic stories, saints’ lives and cautionary tales as told by a motley crew — pilgrims on the road to Canterbury in the tumultuous 1380s amid threats of war, royal intrigue, popular revolt, and plague.  We will read the tales in Middle English, with regular quizzes and exams, a 2000-word research paper, and a required recitation of Chaucer’s 18-line proem to the General Prologue.

In this course, you will learn to read English as it was written a thousand years ago, beginning with a grammatical overview and ultimately translating a wide array of the earliest English literature, from riddles and dream guides to monastic sign language and explanations of elephants for people who would never get to see them. Throughout, we will examine varying assumptions about knowledge and knowledge production, literature and literary theory then and now, focusing in particular on texts that instruct their readers in how to read them—from magical incantations to manuals on how to predict the future.

 

Note: Students who complete English 141B are eligible (and encouraged!) to take 141C: Beowulf in Spring quarter; both English 141B and 141C are eligible to satisfy either the pre-1500 requirement OR the foreign literature in translation requirement.

Dreams, visions and apparitions are constitutive of medieval literature writ large. They are ubiquitous in hagiographical writings, academic commentaries, theological treatises and poetic compositions. They often inaugurate treatises and tales, raise expectations, fulfill or even frustrate audience expectations. Wherever they occur, they offer a space for thinking through the relations between the real and the visionary, between the historical and the fantastic, between the empirically verifiable and the spiritually valuable, between medieval discourses or disciplines including rhetoric, history, law, and theology. In this course, we will explore dreams, visions and apparitions in texts ranging from the “lives” of holy women and men (such as the semi-autobiographical The Passion of St. Perpetua and Felicity, the anonymous biography of the bride Christina of Markyate, and Eadmer’s Life of Anselm) to the great poetic works of Chaucer (The Parlement of Foules, The House of Fame, The Canterbury Tales), Gower (Confessio amantis) and Langland (Piers Plowman). Our focus will be on the ways in which writers handle oneiric experiences not just for their content but also their form. We will read fictional compositions framed by dreams, visions and apparitions alongside relevant dream theories/commentaries such as Macrobius’s influential Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, glosses to his commentary and Augustine’s De Genesi ad Litteram. There will also be an optional Latin reading component to enable us to read some of the technical or academic texts on dreams in the original.

In this course, we will examine the intersection of commerce and literature in a number of medieval and post-medieval texts ranging from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, excerpts from Piers Plowman and Robin Hood narratives to a few medievalistic texts such as Gerard Malynes’s Saint George for England. We will close-read tales such as “The General Prologue,” “The Shipman’s Tale,” “The Merchant’s Tale,” “The Pardoner’s Tale,” and “The Summoner’s Tale,” in light of thinking about “filthy lucre” (“turpe lucrum”) found in treatises on avarice, usury, and simony as well as on money and financial speculation. In approaching these tales contextually, we will explore the extent to which the fraudster, trader and usurer frequently merge and become indistinguishable from each other. By reading fictional texts through the lens of “filthy lucre,” we will also understand how theories and practices of medieval commerce shaped them as well as other post-medieval writings.

 

Not open for credit to students who have taken the same topic (Filthy Lucre) with Prof. Thomas in the past.

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

A study of representative Problem Plays, Tragedies, and Romances from the second half of Shakespeare’s career.

Into the 20th, Greco-Roman texts written between 750 BC and ca 200 AD dominated the curriculum from grade school through college in both England and America. These are works of extraordinary importance (e.g., the checks-and-balances structure of the American constitution comes from the 1st century BC Greek historian, Polybius), and also of extraordinary beauty, variety, and intelligence. The course focuses on English Renaissance translations of the classics because the Renaissance was the rebirth (the re-naissance) of classical learning and literature, and one of the foci will be the Tudor-Stuart contexts of these translations; but the class also provides a general introduction to the classical foundations on which virtually all English and American literature rest. Readings include selections from Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, Plutarch, Xenophon on topics as far-flung as love, duty, sex, science, and empire.

There will be a weekly short paper and a final project.

No late enrollments.

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 castaway, the captive, the convert, the heretic, the preacher, the witch, the master, the slave. Tackling a range of genres—settlement reportage, sermons, natural histories, political pamphlets, 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 the American Literature and Culture major; enrollment will be restricted to American Lit & Culture majors on first pass, and will open to English majors on second pass.

Broad survey of representative American writers across several centuries, designed to give concise account of broad narrative of American literary development, from origins through 19th century. Includes mainly works that have traditionally been identified as American classics and asks both what makes American literature distinctive and what its relations are to other literatures in English.

Introductory survey of 20th-century African American literature from New Negro Movement of post-World War I period to 1960s, including oral materials (ballads, blues, speeches) and fiction, poetry, and essays by authors such as Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ralph Ellison.

Introductory survey of African American literary expression from late 1950s through 1970s. Topics include rise of Black Arts Movement of 1960s and emergence of black women’s writing in early 1970s, with focus on authors such as Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, and Ernest Gaines.

Using the city of Dublin as our locus, students in this course will read a variety of major works written by Dublin writers. A grounding in Dublin geography, urban study, and history will prepare students to consider various dimensions of Irish experience in the twentieth-century, from its status as a country under British rule through its fight for independence, and ultimate autonomy. A feature of this class is team research and annotation of digitized archival and historical items for publication as a Field Guide.

Using a variety of written and visual texts, this course explores the meaning of “culture,” a word with a complex history and one that continues to have currency in literary, political, and critical discourse. We will trace the term’s anthropological, sociological, and ideological meanings as they developed over the last two centuries. Topics include cultural capital, popular culture, the culture wars, conspicuous consumption, and culture as a regulatory system. Readings may include Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, essays of T.S. Eliot, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, essays of Clifford Geertz, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ German Ideology, and other theorists. We will read literary works by Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather. The goal is to use the idea of culture as a critical framework to interpret literary texts in ways that amplify the skills of close reading. Requirements: short essays, quizzes, a longer paper, and a comprehensive final examination.

 

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

Introduction to major themes and issues in postcolonial literature, with focus on contemporary literature and writings produced after decolonization, often engaging history of British or other empires with emphasis on Anglophone writers from Africa, Caribbean, South Asia, and indigenous Pacific.

 

Broad survey of representative American writers across several centuries, designed to give concise account of broad narrative of American literary development, from origins through 19th century. Includes mainly works that have traditionally been identified as American classics and asks both what makes American literature distinctive and what its relations are to other literatures in English.

A little over two decades into the 21st century, new issues and forms of writing have arisen in poetry that are either brand new or were only inchoate in the century prior. This course aims not only to read poets who are exemplary of these developments but also the poetics — the aesthetic philosophies and assertions of what poets are or should be doing — that animate this creativity. Topics include: avant-garde poetry such as “conceptual” and digital literature; the critical discourse around the growing body of transgender and non-binary poetry; new angles on poetry by ethnic “minorities” including cross-cultural poetry; and the increasing interest in discovering ways to write “public” poetry and unearthing new “publics” themselves. Writers include Cathy Park Hong, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Ben Lerner, Elisabeth Houston and Craig Dworkin among many others. Students will also contribute to a class anthology of recent poetry in addition to their work on a series of short essays and creative assignments.

This course focuses on key works of modernist prose fiction by American writers in the decade following World War One. Selected readings reintroduce students to the astonishing variety of experimentation in narrative technique, controversial subject matter, and stylistic innovation demonstrated in the early work of classic authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner between the years 1919 and 1929. This is a class for students interested in reading great fiction, learning about modernism and avant-garde literary movements, thinking about early twentieth century conceptions of gender and queerness, and making connections to our own historico-cultural moment.

We examine the intersection of family and ethnicity as staged in comedy and drama in order to consider how literary and TV expressions of laughter, love, and emotional conflict have both reinforced the nuclear family ideal and challenged it by reimagining the American family variously (as single-parent and female-headed; as multi-generational and ethnic). We ask if there’s more to comedy than how many times it makes you laugh, or if accounting for changing times and mores can somehow compensate for jokes that age badly. Situation comedies include Father Knows Best, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Fresh Off the Boat, and Black-ish; TV dramedies include Girls and Louie. Dramatic fiction and autobiography (The Godfather, The Woman Warrior, Autobiography of Malcolm X) will be paired with comic novels (Portnoy’s Complaint, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, The Sellout). Telenovela-inspired Chicana literature (Caramelo and So Far from God) will be read alongside TV comedy and drama adapted from Latin American telenovelas (Ugly Betty, Jane the Virgin, Queen of the South).

Historically, this period is framed by two controversial figures: Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. We will look at literature, music, visual arts, and other media and consider their relationship to the socio-political conditions shaping an emerging post-war U.S. society. Race as a technology of modern social order will be central in our analysis since the United States has played a unique role among nations in its struggles over the function of race as central to and outside U.S. social order. While our focus will be on literature, we will approach the literary as one manifestation of cultural expression. A large part of the class will involve participation and so attendance in class is required.

We live in a world of systems and networks, mass 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 some modern and contemporary novels, and visual culture, that stage those stories.  And we will reconsider how we live in and with systems and media today.  Readings will include novels by, for example, Sayaka Murata, Cormac McCarthy, Ling Ma, Kazuo Ishiguro, China Miéville, and Tom McCarthy, accompanied by film and anime. The course will require frequent writing assignments, close analysis of the materials, and active participation in class discussion.  Contributions to discussion and on-time papers are required:  no exceptions.

 

Not open for credit to students who have taken English 179 on the same topic with Prof. Seltzer in the past.

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

 

This course is open to students of all majors for Diversity and/or Foundations credit.

Introductory survey of 20th-century African American literature from New Negro Movement of post-World War I period to 1960s, including oral materials (ballads, blues, speeches) and fiction, poetry, and essays by authors such as Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ralph Ellison.

Introductory survey of African American literary expression from late 1950s through 1970s. Topics include rise of Black Arts Movement of 1960s and emergence of black women’s writing in early 1970s, with focus on authors such as Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, and Ernest Gaines.

This course considers how Indigenous artists imagine alternative possibilities for intimacy and futurity by engaging in decolonial forms of wonder and speculation. Thinking with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” our readings trace nonrealist storytelling practices that resist normative conceptions of being, embodiment, temporality, and space. Reading contemporary Indigenous fiction, cinema, and graphic literatures, we will examine the ways that authors draw on and subvert diverse genre conventions (such as those found in horror, science fiction, and fantasy). We will ask: how do Indigenous wonderworks enact Indigenous cosmologies, ecological knowledges, and decolonial feminist relations with the more-than-human world? How do feminist and queer forms of wonder challenge heteropatriarchal violence while also creating decolonial forms of kinship and intergenerational connection? How are colonial apocalypses imagined as opportunities for creating queer Indigenous utopias?

This course asks how voices of the Early Black Atlantic constituted themselves in the literary and historical imagination of the era. Drawing from Anglophone texts written by authors of African and European descent between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries—including Diallo, Equiano, Gronniosaw, and Sutton, among others—we will consider the various forms that these voices inhabit, their modes of expression, and the tropes and figures associate with them. As the quarter progresses, we will ask ourselves what we mean by voice, by speech, by silence, by authorship, 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 the American Literature and Culture major; enrollment will be restricted to American Lit & Culture majors on first pass, and will open to English majors on second pass.

This course focuses on key works of modernist prose fiction by American writers in the decade following World War One. Selected readings reintroduce students to the astonishing variety of experimentation in narrative technique, controversial subject matter, and stylistic innovation demonstrated in the early work of classic authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner between the years 1919 and 1929. This is a class for students interested in reading great fiction, learning about modernism and avant-garde literary movements, thinking about early twentieth century conceptions of gender and queerness, and making connections to our own historico-cultural moment.

We examine the intersection of family and ethnicity as staged in comedy and drama in order to consider how literary and TV expressions of laughter, love, and emotional conflict have both reinforced the nuclear family ideal and challenged it by reimagining the American family variously (as single-parent and female-headed; as multi-generational and ethnic). We ask if there’s more to comedy than how many times it makes you laugh, or if accounting for changing times and mores can somehow compensate for jokes that age badly. Situation comedies include Father Knows Best, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Fresh Off the Boat, and Black-ish; TV dramedies include Girls and Louie. Dramatic fiction and autobiography (The Godfather, The Woman Warrior, Autobiography of Malcolm X) will be paired with comic novels (Portnoy’s Complaint, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, The Sellout). Telenovela-inspired Chicana literature (Caramelo and So Far from God) will be read alongside TV comedy and drama adapted from Latin American telenovelas (Ugly Betty, Jane the Virgin, Queen of the South).

Historically, this period is framed by two controversial figures: Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. We will look at literature, music, visual arts, and other media and consider their relationship to the socio-political conditions shaping an emerging post-war U.S. society. Race as a technology of modern social order will be central in our analysis since the United States has played a unique role among nations in its struggles over the function of race as central to and outside U.S. social order. While our focus will be on literature, we will approach the literary as one manifestation of cultural expression. A large part of the class will involve participation and so attendance in class is required.

Postcolonialism is not a unified field of theoretical inquiry.  This course, therefore, is conceived as a series of loosely-connected excursions into a vast field of inquiry to theorize resistance to colonialism and neocolonialism. Among the questions that it will address are: What is the relation between power and resistance? How do postcolonial discourses respond to, and work against the material and economic conditions of inequality and exploitation? What are the ways in which postcolonial critics engage in the politics of representation to resist (neo-)colonialism? Among the texts that we will discuss are Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Said’s Orientalism, and Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?

 

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

 

Introduction to major themes and issues in postcolonial literature, with focus on contemporary literature and writings produced after decolonization, often engaging history of British or other empires with emphasis on Anglophone writers from Africa, Caribbean, South Asia, and indigenous Pacific.

This course asks how voices of the Early Black Atlantic constituted themselves in the literary and historical imagination of the era. Drawing from Anglophone texts written by authors of African and European descent between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries—including Diallo, Equiano, Gronniosaw, and Sutton, among others—we will consider the various forms that these voices inhabit, their modes of expression, and the tropes and figures associate with them. As the quarter progresses, we will ask ourselves what we mean by voice, by speech, by silence, by authorship, 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 the American Literature and Culture major; enrollment will be restricted to American Lit & Culture majors on first pass, and will open to English majors on second pass.

Into the 20th, Greco-Roman texts written between 750 BC and ca 200 AD dominated the curriculum from grade school through college in both England and America. These are works of extraordinary importance (e.g., the checks-and-balances structure of the American constitution comes from the 1st century BC Greek historian, Polybius), and also of extraordinary beauty, variety, and intelligence. The course focuses on English Renaissance translations of the classics because the Renaissance was the rebirth (the re-naissance) of classical learning and literature, and one of the foci will be the Tudor-Stuart contexts of these translations; but the class also provides a general introduction to the classical foundations on which virtually all English and American literature rest. Readings include selections from Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, Plutarch, Xenophon on topics as far-flung as love, duty, sex, science, and empire.

There will be a weekly short paper and a final project.

No late enrollments.

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 castaway, the captive, the convert, the heretic, the preacher, the witch, the master, the slave. Tackling a range of genres—settlement reportage, sermons, natural histories, political pamphlets, 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 the American Literature and Culture major; enrollment will be restricted to American Lit & Culture majors on first pass, and will open to English majors on second pass.

Reading and discussion of lyric spiritual poetry by poets whose work has been influenced and informed by their religious faith traditions, including Native American, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim.

This course considers how Indigenous artists imagine alternative possibilities for intimacy and futurity by engaging in decolonial forms of wonder and speculation. Thinking with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” our readings trace nonrealist storytelling practices that resist normative conceptions of being, embodiment, temporality, and space. Reading contemporary Indigenous fiction, cinema, and graphic literatures, we will examine the ways that authors draw on and subvert diverse genre conventions (such as those found in horror, science fiction, and fantasy). We will ask: how do Indigenous wonderworks enact Indigenous cosmologies, ecological knowledges, and decolonial feminist relations with the more-than-human world? How do feminist and queer forms of wonder challenge heteropatriarchal violence while also creating decolonial forms of kinship and intergenerational connection? How are colonial apocalypses imagined as opportunities for creating queer Indigenous utopias?

How do you see the air? How do you give form to a formless element? We will spend the course coming up with answers to these questions, paying attention to works of film, art, and fiction from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose skies, altered by poison gas, pollution, airplanes, and fires, become newly visible, newly obscure, and, during the pandemic, newly dangerous. In determining why and how air matters, we will navigate fog, clouds, haze, and smoke, and interrogate the poetics and politics of breath, voice, and atmosphere.

 

This course qualifies for credit on the Literature & the Environment minor.

Using the city of Dublin as our locus, students in this course will read a variety of major works written by Dublin writers. A grounding in Dublin geography, urban study, and history will prepare students to consider various dimensions of Irish experience in the twentieth-century, from its status as a country under British rule through its fight for independence, and ultimate autonomy. A feature of this class is team research and annotation of digitized archival and historical items for publication as a Field Guide.

Using a variety of written and visual texts, this course explores the meaning of “culture,” a word with a complex history and one that continues to have currency in literary, political, and critical discourse. We will trace the term’s anthropological, sociological, and ideological meanings as they developed over the last two centuries. Topics include cultural capital, popular culture, the culture wars, conspicuous consumption, and culture as a regulatory system. Readings may include Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, essays of T.S. Eliot, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, essays of Clifford Geertz, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ German Ideology, and other theorists. We will read literary works by Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather. The goal is to use the idea of culture as a critical framework to interpret literary texts in ways that amplify the skills of close reading. Requirements: short essays, quizzes, a longer paper, and a comprehensive final examination.

 

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

Postcolonialism is not a unified field of theoretical inquiry.  This course, therefore, is conceived as a series of loosely-connected excursions into a vast field of inquiry to theorize resistance to colonialism and neocolonialism. Among the questions that it will address are: What is the relation between power and resistance? How do postcolonial discourses respond to, and work against the material and economic conditions of inequality and exploitation? What are the ways in which postcolonial critics engage in the politics of representation to resist (neo-)colonialism? Among the texts that we will discuss are Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Said’s Orientalism, and Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?

 

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

A little over two decades into the 21st century, new issues and forms of writing have arisen in poetry that are either brand new or were only inchoate in the century prior. This course aims not only to read poets who are exemplary of these developments but also the poetics — the aesthetic philosophies and assertions of what poets are or should be doing — that animate this creativity. Topics include: avant-garde poetry such as “conceptual” and digital literature; the critical discourse around the growing body of transgender and non-binary poetry; new angles on poetry by ethnic “minorities” including cross-cultural poetry; and the increasing interest in discovering ways to write “public” poetry and unearthing new “publics” themselves. Writers include Cathy Park Hong, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Ben Lerner, Elisabeth Houston and Craig Dworkin among many others. Students will also contribute to a class anthology of recent poetry in addition to their work on a series of short essays and creative assignments.

This course focuses on key works of modernist prose fiction by American writers in the decade following World War One. Selected readings reintroduce students to the astonishing variety of experimentation in narrative technique, controversial subject matter, and stylistic innovation demonstrated in the early work of classic authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner between the years 1919 and 1929. This is a class for students interested in reading great fiction, learning about modernism and avant-garde literary movements, thinking about early twentieth century conceptions of gender and queerness, and making connections to our own historico-cultural moment.

We examine the intersection of family and ethnicity as staged in comedy and drama in order to consider how literary and TV expressions of laughter, love, and emotional conflict have both reinforced the nuclear family ideal and challenged it by reimagining the American family variously (as single-parent and female-headed; as multi-generational and ethnic). We ask if there’s more to comedy than how many times it makes you laugh, or if accounting for changing times and mores can somehow compensate for jokes that age badly. Situation comedies include Father Knows Best, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Fresh Off the Boat, and Black-ish; TV dramedies include Girls and Louie. Dramatic fiction and autobiography (The Godfather, The Woman Warrior, Autobiography of Malcolm X) will be paired with comic novels (Portnoy’s Complaint, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, The Sellout). Telenovela-inspired Chicana literature (Caramelo and So Far from God) will be read alongside TV comedy and drama adapted from Latin American telenovelas (Ugly Betty, Jane the Virgin, Queen of the South).

Historically, this period is framed by two controversial figures: Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. We will look at literature, music, visual arts, and other media and consider their relationship to the socio-political conditions shaping an emerging post-war U.S. society. Race as a technology of modern social order will be central in our analysis since the United States has played a unique role among nations in its struggles over the function of race as central to and outside U.S. social order. While our focus will be on literature, we will approach the literary as one manifestation of cultural expression. A large part of the class will involve participation and so attendance in class is required.

We live in a world of systems and networks, mass 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 some modern and contemporary novels, and visual culture, that stage those stories.  And we will reconsider how we live in and with systems and media today.  Readings will include novels by, for example, Sayaka Murata, Cormac McCarthy, Ling Ma, Kazuo Ishiguro, China Miéville, and Tom McCarthy, accompanied by film and anime. The course will require frequent writing assignments, close analysis of the materials, and active participation in class discussion.  Contributions to discussion and on-time papers are required:  no exceptions.

 

Not open for credit to students who have taken English 179 on the same topic with Prof. Seltzer in the past.

Course Description

A weekly poetry writing and reading class devoted to generating a clutch of original poems and to reading exemplars of contemporary published and digital poetry.

How to Apply

To apply for the course, submit by e-mail attachment four of your best poems. In the body of the e-mail, provide your name, UID number, major, class level, and a supporting paragraph or two about the poetry you’ve read recently. 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: Sandburg 136.1) and it should be sent to Fredd@humnet.ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY EMAIL AND MUST CONTAIN YOUR LAST NAME AND “136.1” IN THE SUBJECT LINE. YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU OMIT THIS TAG IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2022

Acceptance Notifications

A list of accepted students’ names will be posted in the English department main office, 149 Kaplan Hall, before the beginning of winter quarter 2023.

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

 

Course Description:

 

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

Enrollment is by instructor consent (PTE).

 

How to Apply:

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

 

When e-mailing submissions, please put your last name and the course and section number in the subject line (example: Garcia 137.1). Submissions must be e-mailed to jtorres7@ucla.edu and creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY EMAIL AND MUST CONTAIN “137.1” IN THE SUBJECT LINE. YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU OMIT THIS TAG IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2022.

Acceptance Notifications:

 

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

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

 

Course Description:

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 take turns presenting to the class. All students will be expected to read these stories multiple times and annotate them to identify the mechanics and the magic.

Students will write one short story every week for the first five weeks. After that, they will write two slightly longer stories and work on revisions. The goals of the class are 1) to help the students develop a regular practice of writing, 2) to foster and train technical skills, and 3) to develop a sound critical faculty. Emphasis will be on developing the student writer’s individual voice and writing ability. Enrollment is by instructor consent (PTE).

How to Apply:

Please submit no more than 5 (double-spaced) pages of your FICTION (please don’t send in plays, screenplays, or poems) and list any workshops you’ve taken in the past. Please list your three favorite short stories and their authors. Also, please tell me your class standing (sophomore, junior, etc.) and include your email address. If you are applying to multiple workshops and have a preference, please indicate that preference so we can try to accommodate it.

Submissions must be e-mailed to huneven@me.com and creativewriting@english.ucla.edu. When e-mailing submissions, please put your last name and the course and section number in the subject line (example: Moore 137.2)

YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY EMAIL AND MUST CONTAIN “137.2” IN THE SUBJECT LINE. YOUR SUBMISSION MIGHT NOT BE READ IF YOU OMIT THIS TAG IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2022.

You will be notified if you are accepted before classes begin in January.

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

 

 

Course Description:

 

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

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

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

 

Enrollment is by instructor consent (PTE).

 

How to Apply:

 

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

 

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

 

Submissions must be e-mailed to monasimpson@mac.com and creativewriting@english.ucla.edu. When e-mailing submissions, please put your last name and the course and section number in the subject line (example: Jackson 137.3)

 

YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY EMAIL AND MUST CONTAIN “JACKSON 137.3” IN THE SUBJECT LINE. YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU OMIT THIS TAG IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2022.

 

NOTE: A class list will be posted in English Department Office, 149 Kaplan Hall, before the start of classes.

 

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

 

Course Description:

 

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

 

Enrollment by instructor consent (PTE).

 

How to Apply:

 

Interested students should submit a 250-word personal statement about their writing goals, a list of literature, writing AND OTHER courses taken so far (to indicate the full extent of their academic interests), and a 5-10 page double-spaced nonfiction writing sample.

 

Submissions must be emailed to ejager@humnet.ucla.edu.

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2022.

 

Acceptance Notifications:

 

Accepted applicants will be notified by email and receive a PTE# to enroll in the class.

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

 

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

 

 

In this class, we will learn to read short stories with a writer’s eye in order to enlarge our understanding of that difficult, capacious form and thus enrich our own fiction writing. Students will read 10 assigned stories, each at least three times: once for pleasure, once critically, and once more, to approach the deep familiarity in which we glimpse the writer at work, making decisions and solving problems. We will read about 100 pages a week, much of it re-reading. Weekly response papers, student presentations, final project. This class is designed for serious fiction writers but will also serve those who wish to acquire a deep, critical appreciation of the genre.

Shakespeare studies has witnessed a boom in race studies, especially over the past decade. Still, these critical examinations have not homed in more precisely on Critical Race Theory, that is, the theoretical conversations centered in law schools that has found some further explorations in education and to a lesser extent in literary-cultural studies. This seminar, somewhat exploratory in its nature, seeks to bring together CRT (as it’s often referred to in law) and Shakespeare. What kinds of critical readings do this twain produce? What kind of questions does CRT bring to Shakespeare and, importantly for us, what kind of questions does Shakespeare bring to CRT? Students can expect to read a Shakespeare play and at least one CRT selection each week; students can also expect to complete a presentation and submit smaller writing assignments and a final seminar paper.

This course focuses on the recently published quartet of seasonal novels by the contemporary Scottish writer Ali Smith. Begun in 2016 and completed in 2020, the novels were conceived initially as a series about the changing seasons and the present moment of their writing, which, unbeknownst to the author at the outset, spans a worst of times cycle: from the schisms of the Brexit referendum and the COVID pandemic. These works will provide the context for considering the relationship between time and the novel, art and literature, description and narration, truth and lies, and questions of form, style, structure, intertextuality, and the point of art.

For various cultural reasons, sexuality is particularly sensitive political subject. Indeed, sexual representation remains one of few cultural forms guaranteed to elicit strong response. Study provides research and analytical tools to investigate causes and effects of personal and political responses. More specifically, use of contemporary gender, race, class, and sexuality theories (among others) to help examine sexual representations in terms of shaping force they have in our lives. Examination of cultural force involves defining key terms, such as power, to interrogate how details of key representations manifest their cultural and personal work (effects on people’s values and conditions of existence, for example) on social justice. Students learn to interpret and explicate representations of sexuality in terms of their manipulation of power. Students learn to define key terms and interpret cultural representation in academic dialog with their peers and with scholars in their field.

 

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

This course proceeds on a counter-intuitive premise: that the greatest hindrances to our understanding of what is “real” are those elements of literature and film that confirm our sense of the “everyday.” Instead, we will read and view speculative works as a form of “weird realism,” perhaps as examples of philosophy themselves that animate an ontology (the nature of being) that the world of appearances obscures. Fiction writers include H.P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas Ligotti among others; films include The Thing (1982), eXistenZ (1999) and Arrival (2016). Short works of philosophy by George Berkeley, David Hume, Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers and Quentin Meillassoux will also be assigned. Please be warned: some of the material is not for the faint of heart, so please do some research on the works and creators above prior to enrolling.

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

This seminar will focus mainly on major 17th-century English lyric poets–Donne, Herbert, Jonson, and Marvell–with frequent reference to less famous contemporaries such as Carew, Lanyer, and Traherne. Through careful reading and open discussion, we’ll attempt to understand what these poems say—often no small task—but also their place in the traditions and revolutions of their society. What tensions and changes in that culture, as well as in the lives of the poets, might these works have helped to negotiate? Why did the Metaphysical and Cavalier modes emerge in a period of intense theological and political struggle? What do they suggest about sex and nature? Although the word-count of the readings won’t be high, the course will be strenuous, and no one will be allowed to coast. Students will write five brief response-papers and a substantial final paper. Most importantly, students must come to each class prepared to raise questions of all sizes and to participate in an honest, energetic, courteous, and informed discussion of the assigned poems and their contexts.

 

NOT OPEN FOR CREDIT TO STUDENTS WHO COMPLETED ENGLISH 184 WITH THE SAME TITLE WITH PROF. WATSON IN 17S or 19W.

This course examines writing about cognitive impairment from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Our primary focus will be on how mental illness was understood and treated hundreds of years before the advent of the asylum and the development of psychoanalysis. As we will see, medieval thinking about eccentric minds often reflects a tension between theories about individual cognition and beliefs in divine or diabolical influences from angels, demons, fairies, and ghosts. At the same time, visions, voices, and other devotional experiences trouble the distinction between reason and insanity. Readings include medieval medical treatises, chronicles, and restorative charms as well as saints’ lives, first-hand accounts, and poems, supplemented by selections from contemporary theorists.

This course examines key developments in contemporary African American literature, tracing lively debates about authenticity, identity, and tradition over the last four decades. We explore the links between aesthetic and political worlds, the interplay of race, gender, class, sexuality, and region, and the innovative responses of writers to the ongoing contradictions of emerging racial formations, neither reducible to what came before, nor radically in breach from it. In what ways is contemporary African American literature a coherent entity? To what extent does resistance form a central problematic in the field today? How do contemporary writers open up restrictive ideas about racial identity and community and highlight the multiplicity of African American identities, interrogating notions of authenticity and the demands of representation? How do they make sense of the contradictions of historical developments over the last four decades, where advances in racial justice have been haunted by the persistence of pernicious forms of discrimination and dispossession? The writers and artists we study not only reckon with these developments, they shape our understanding of their impact on ordinary lives by chronicling the psychic and social architecture of lived experiences of racism. They also take up the question of how and why contemporary forms of discrimination relate to previous racial regimes, probing whether the new century inaugurated a new racial order or documented the persistence of old forms of injustice and precarity. In doing so, they reshape our understanding of white supremacy, offering resources for imagining a more just world. Major topics we cover include: the literature of protest and dissent; memory, history, and the legacy of slavery; literary experimentation and speculation; satire, humor, and the search for new forms; the new African diaspora, migration, and displacement.

 

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