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 certain 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 explores a range of prose fiction, poetry and drama produced in African, American, British, and Irish traditions from the antebellum period to the present. The wide range of writers studied include John Greenleaf Whittier, Harriet Jacobs, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Noël Coward, W.H. Auden, Audre Lorde, Ama Ata Aidoo, Edwidge Danticat, Javier Zamora, and Anthony Veasna So.

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

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

Enrollment by instructor consent and NOT by enrollment pass time: Interested students should apply by 8 pm on November 26, 2023. 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 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.

This course will introduce students to medieval genres such as the epic and romance along with related themes such as chivalry and courtly love that still flourish in modern literature and popular culture.  Authors and texts include Beowulf, Chaucer, the troubadours, Marie de France, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the early sonnet.  Students will explore “medievalism” according to their own interests, whether in Wagner, Tolkien, Harry Potter, “Monty Python,” “Game of Thrones,” “Shrek” or countless other books, plays, operas, art works, films, video games or TV shows.  Regular reading quizzes and in-class reports.

This course offers a survey of major American authors whose works have shaped a national literature over the last two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and demographic diversity, all these novelists grapple with issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each transformed literary conventions to express their visions of the place of America in the world. We will read the following works from different stages in this literary history, including Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; Chopin’s The Awakening; Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother; Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; and Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

We invite you to study the American novel as a cultural instrument, as an intervention in cultural conversations that reflect and shape the values, beliefs, and practices characteristic of U.S culture. We will provide you with guidance on and opportunities to practice asking questions about how novels (and other forms of representation) work in our culture. For example, how do the novels define and argue for racial justice? How do they define and argue for gender justice? How do the novels define and argue for social class justice? According to our novels, what values, beliefs, and practices threaten social justice? What practices and beliefs do our novels identify as anti-democratic (assuming a connection between social justice and democracy…)? How do these practices and beliefs challenge principles of equality and/or equity? How do they challenge individual rights? In addition to these thematic questions, we will consider how these novels question and/or extend the cultural logic of literary conventions and genres, and how they deploy satire, irony and parody–as well as other forms of play on social and literary conventions. We also aim to help students master analytical and synthetic skills by way of argumentative analysis, close reading, research, and comparison.

An intensive study of Shakespeare’s works, probably including the Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Students will write a brief close-reading essay and a longer final essay, and will take midterm and final exams. Careful reading of the plays in their original language before each class is essential, and regular attendance and active participation in discussions is required.

Introduction to prose narrative, its techniques and forms. Analysis of short and long narratives and of critical issues such as plot, characterization, setting, narrative voice, realistic and nonrealistic forms.

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 quarter meeting!

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. Open to American Literature and Culture majors as upper division units outside the major.

 

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

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, political crisis, popular revolt, and plague.  We will read the tales in Middle English, with regular quizzes and exams, a substantial research paper, and a required recitation of the 18-line proem to the General Prologue.

This class explores problems of literary and cultural translation by looking at four story-clusters that entangle Middle Period Asia and medieval Europe.  These stories raise the stakes of what is lost in translation and what is restored by mutual cultural intelligibility: whether of 1) gender and sexuality, 2) love, friendship, and solidarity, 3) of power and its social reproduction through memory.  From Africa comes the foundational epic of Mali, the Sundiata which represents continuous translation between written forms and oral griot performances, and also is a source text for The Lion King. From Syria and Egypt come tales of Salah al-Din or Saladin, represented in Arabic chronicles and stories in Old French, Middle English, Italian and Spanish, culminating in Tariq Ali’s The Book of Saladin.  From Persia comes Nezami’s Layla Majnun which blends the strictures of erotic love with those of divine pilgrimage.  Finally, from Arabia and France come two tales of warrior women, who challenge their culture’s templates for gender and sexuality, the Epic of Dhat al-Himma, and the Romance of Silence.  We will also discuss recent cruxes in translation theory and practice (such as: complete colloquialism or stylistic alterity? or English global hegemony or a multitude of English hybridization?). We will also compare different translations into English to explore the pragmatic difficulties and opportunities translation offers to engineer new thought and composition.

 

Requirements:  Path A: Two 2000-word papers OR Path B: One class project (group or lone; analytical or creative hybrid), with prospectus, 1000-word analytical debrief, and class presentation (50%); weekly 1-2 pp. response papers (30%); optional class presentation (replaces one of the papers in Path A) and lively class participation (20%).

Fraudsters, traders, and usurers have been with us ever since humans were infected by the love of vile profit or what in the Middle Ages was called “filthy lucre.” We may not like them but we sure have to deal with them. In dealing with them in our course, we will learn not just 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. On the medieval side, our readings include some of Chaucer’s works such as “The General Prologue,” “The Shipman’s Tale,” “The Merchant’s Tale,” “The Pardoner’s Tale,” and “The Summoner’s Tale,” excerpts from Piers Plowman, and several Robin Hood narratives such as A Gest of Robyn Hode, Robin Hood and the Potter, Robin Hood and the Monk; 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 Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. We will read our literary texts in light of premodern thinking about “filthy lucre” (“turpe lucrum”) found in treatises on usury, equitable exchange, and simony as well as on exchange-rate, the just price and proportion.

An intensive study of Shakespeare’s works from 1604 onward, including Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus and The Tempest (and possibly The Winter’s Tale). Students will likely write a brief close-reading essay and a longer final essay, and will take midterm and final exams. Careful reading of the plays in their original language before class is essential, and regular attendance and active participation is required.

A representative survey of works from the second half of Shakespeare’s career, including problem plays, tragedies, and romances.

Milton is the last Renaissance poet; his poetry, the culmination of the rebirth of Antiquity, both Classical and Christian, that began in Italy some three centuries earlier. Yet, if heir to the ancient traditions, Milton is also harbinger of what the dollar bill (look in your wallet) calls Novus Ordo Saeculorum, the New Order of the Ages. Of the perhaps sixty paintings that encircle the walls of the New York Public Library’s reference room, hung in chronological order to compose a visual narrative of American history, two (the second and third) are of Milton. . . . The course will focus on the major poetry, especially Paradise Lost, but since Milton was a political thinker and a fairly important figure in the English Revolution, we will also read some of the key prose tracts, including his seminal defense of a free press. There will be two papers and ten quizzes, but neither midterm nor final.

This course engages texts from across the Americas to enrich and complicate ideas of the U.S. and of “American” literature. We will first examine lasting tropes of encounter, established in texts from Columbus onwards, and a range of indigenous responses to European representations. We then turn to the adjacent and overlapping experiences of New Spain (Mexico and California), “Florida” (encompassing much of the southern United States), and the Caribbean that unsettle the narrative of an Anglo US. We will explore a range of different actors and writers—European, African, indigenous American—to analyze the contingency of national histories and national canons.

This course centers on Phillis Wheatley Peters: her life, her poetry, her community, and her legacy. Phillis Wheatley Peters was an enslaved Black woman and poet who was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and brought to New England when she was only seven years old. In our class, we’ll explore Wheatley Peters’s writing by centering the insights of Black feminist scholars and makers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (from whose recent book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, our course title is drawn). We’ll dive deeply into Wheatley Peters’ writing and neoclassical influences to understand how her work grapples with structures of oppression in often coded ways. And we’ll follow Hartman, whose notion of “critical fabulation” provided Jeffers with the conceptual tools for developing alternate ways of honoring and amplifying Wheatley Peters’s world and work.

Not open for credit to any student concurrently enrolled in English 184.2 on Phillis Wheatley.

Focuses on authors such as Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Anne Finch, John Gay and others, who wrote and battled during the first great age of print, the age that invented the professional author and saw the rise of the actress and the female reader, and above all the age of satire.

This is a course in the poetry of the British Romantic period. We will read a range of authors including William Cowper, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare while considering the period in terms of ecological, economic, and political—as well as literary—developments.

This course is a survey of American literature from the period broadly known as the Age of Revolutions. We will read a range of texts (including novels, poetry, autobiographies, essays, manifestos, and speeches) that respond to the major political, social, and aesthetic movements of the era. We will consider, for example, how colonies reimagined themselves as nations, how theorists reimagined the functions of liberalism and citizenship, and how writers in the Americas reimagined the work of history and literature. At each stage, we will be attentive to the diverse voices that shaped the modern world as well as to the many acts of resistance to dispossession and enslavement that define the ethical boundaries of our work.

This course offers a survey of major American authors whose works have shaped a national literature over the last two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and demographic diversity, all these novelists grapple with issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each transformed literary conventions to express their visions of the place of America in the world. We will read the following works from different stages in this literary history, including Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; Chopin’s The Awakening; Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother; Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; and Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

From the elegiac and tragic to the comic, this course begins with Walt Whitman and ends (most likely) with lesbian pulp fiction. The course surveys not only some of the most groundbreaking queer texts—novels, poems, plays (sometimes in the form of film)—written between 1860 and the late 1960s but also the intriguing personalities/authors behind so many of them.  Our course attends to how this literature and these personages resisted systemic efforts to disappear, silence, and erase queer bodies, voices, and subjectivities. Without resorting to autobiography (at least in any straightforward sense), the queer literature produced during this period makes emphatically evident the intimate relationship between life and narrative: importantly, literature in this era was far less a way of reporting on one’s life than a way of laying claim to one. Queer literature was indeed a way to demonstrate and perform the fact that queer folk, like non-queer folk, had intimate lives. This course serves as a literary and cultural introduction to the period under consideration as well as to some of the ideas that have come to shape our own contemporary queer epistemologies and sensibilities.

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.

This class traces the development of Chicana/o/x literature from its explosion in response to the radical politics of the 1960’s to its engagement with multiple and intersectional forms of identity through the 1990’s to the present. We consider how books by Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, Ana Castillo and others engage the various (social, sexual, racial, ethnic, cultural, political, economic) meanings marked by the terms Chicana, Chicano, and Chicanx. The meaning behind these terms of identity evolve and shift. What tensions and social dynamics do these terms generate as ethnic, racial, cultural, social, and even economic labels? Our goal is to generate clear, effective analyses about the texts we read.

This course will examine how British women writers develop and construct complex – even transgressive – female characters throughout the long nineteenth century. In the various literatures of the period, concerns about women’s changing roles in culture and society gave rise to a wide range of representations of evil and destructive women. Both male and female authors relied on the figure of the dangerous woman or femme fatale to express broader social and cultural anxieties, but our study of novels, short stories, and poetry will focus on the work of women writers, using a variety of critical lenses to reveal their experimentation with (and challenges to) this trope. Authors considered will include (but are not limited to) Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Vernon Lee.

 

There is no set way to adapt a novel to film: what makes a novel successful does not succeed in movies without significant alterations in the plotting, tone, beat structure, dialogue and so forth. “Hollywood” screenplays have their own rules, some of which are strict, but the screenwriter’s art is present in more than the details. We will read works of fiction—novels and short stories—and the screenplays, treated as a literary form, based on them. Films (subject to change) include One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), The Color Purple (1985), Fight Club (1999), Adaptation (2002), Brokeback Mountain (2005), No Country For Old Men (2007) and the two adaptations of Dune (1985/2021), the last based a long novel which we’ll read in excerpts. Screenplays will be distributed as PDFs. While viewing of the films is highly recommended, in some cases mandatory, we will be reviewing scenes from the movies in class. Weekly writing assignments, some creative, are required, along with a final paper or creative project.

 

Using the city of Dublin as our locus, students in this course will read a variety of major works written by Dublin writers, such as Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, W.B.Yeats, and more, including contemporary Irish writing. 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.

In an effort to call attention to planetary climate change, some geologists have named the ‘Anthropocene’ as a radical new geological epoch of environmental change akin to a meteor strike. They attribute the origins to the global rise of agriculture, nuclear radiation, and plastics. Yet scholars in the social sciences and humanities have pressed against this universal narrative to ask which humans are really making the impact? They point to histories of empire, militarism, and globalization as fundamental causes, and raise questions as to how to tell the Anthropocene story (or stories) with attention to both local context and planetary scale. This interdisciplinary course explores the Anthropocene debate from the perspective of writers, artists, and filmmakers, particularly from islands in the global south. It turns to key concepts in the emergent field of Anthropocene studies such as climate, weather, scale, and species. The course will be particularly concerned with Postcolonial, Indigenous, Caribbean, and Pacific Island perspectives, especially the relationship between land and (rising) sea. Requirements include active class participation, weekly posts on Bruin Learn, a short presentation, and a final research paper/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 the English Advising Office for enrollment assistance.

We read and view books and digital media from the UK by a sample of the descendants living there whose antecedents originate from a selection of the former British colonies. The course aims to: 1. Promote an understanding of the main currents in British literature written by Black writers living in the UK; 2. Provide a working knowledge of the formative ideas about the colonial and postcolonial experiences of Blacks operating as writers and artists in the UK.; 3. Foster familiarity with current subjects and themes in recent Black British literature.

This course explores the relationship between culture and imperialism through the lens of literary and theoretical texts. Focusing on European imperialism during the second half of nineteenth and twentieth century, we will discuss the shifting patterns and paradigms of imperial rule and the ways in which both metropolitan and peripheral or colonial spaces were transformed. We will study a wide range of theoretical texts—e.g., Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth—and literary texts—e.g., J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for Barbarians and Michelle Cliff’s Abeng, to address a wide range of issues such as Orientalism, race, gender, language, power, and resistance. In addition to mandatory attendance, a short class presentation, an annotated bibliography, and three short essays are the requirements of the course.

This course will explore how poetry has been integral to constructing what we now think of as “the Americas.” Beginning with the colonial period, we will construct a working poetic lineage of the Americas by exploring key historical moments up through modern and contemporary literature. While we will attend to the role of poetry in history—including the recording of the Popol Vuh during crisis, and the hemispheric movements of poetry in the 19th century—our emphasis will be on 20th- and 21st-century poetry. What can poetry tell us about how the Americas have been, and still are, imagined? Further, does poetry offer a different construction of the Americas? These are some of the questions we will ask as we address topics such as New World “discovery” and conquest, settler colonialism, borderlands, enslavement and revolution, and the endurance of colonial pasts in the present. We will consider the geographic divisions of the Americas—North, South, Central, and Caribbean—and the ways in which poetry probes geographies and histories of the hemisphere.

This course offers a survey of major American authors whose works have shaped a national literature over the last two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and demographic diversity, all these novelists grapple with issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each transformed literary conventions to express their visions of the place of America in the world. We will read the following works from different stages in this literary history, including Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; Chopin’s The Awakening; Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother; Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; and Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

Historical survey of American literature from end of Civil War to beginning of 20th century, including writers such as Howells, James, Twain, Norris, Dickinson, Crane, Chesnutt, Gilman, and others working in modes of realist and naturalist novel, regional and vernacular prose, and poetry.

This course covers major plays of the early to mid-20th century, including works by Rice, Odets, O’Neill, Hellman, Miller, Saroyan, Williams and Albee, with a special focus on how they related to developments in Europe including Realism, the Theater of the Absurd, Expressionism, Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theater,” metaphysical theater and the early 20th-century vogue for the Noh Theater from Japan. More contemporary playwrights include David Mamet, Paula Vogel, Suzi-Lori Parks and several underground, experimental figures such as Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), María Irene Fornés, and Mac Wellman. Assignments include short papers, creative assignments and a final paper or project.

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).

This course will look at crime fiction—primarily novels, some films—over the past century or so.  Mystery, crime, and suspense stories have a long history but a special place in a modern world.  What can such stories tell us about how we experience our personal lives and our public life?  What form do these stories take?  Why do we like them?   How can they help us understand the ways in which we work and play today?  Readings will include writers such as Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Patricia Highsmith, James M. Cain, Cormac McCarthy, Tom McCarthy, and Natsuo Kirino.   Focused literary analysis will center the course discussions and the required papers.

From the elegiac and tragic to the comic, this course begins with Walt Whitman and ends (most likely) with lesbian pulp fiction. The course surveys not only some of the most groundbreaking queer texts—novels, poems, plays (sometimes in the form of film)—written between 1860 and the late 1960s but also the intriguing personalities/authors behind so many of them.  Our course attends to how this literature and these personages resisted systemic efforts to disappear, silence, and erase queer bodies, voices, and subjectivities. Without resorting to autobiography (at least in any straightforward sense), the queer literature produced during this period makes emphatically evident the intimate relationship between life and narrative: importantly, literature in this era was far less a way of reporting on one’s life than a way of laying claim to one. Queer literature was indeed a way to demonstrate and perform the fact that queer folk, like non-queer folk, had intimate lives. This course serves as a literary and cultural introduction to the period under consideration as well as to some of the ideas that have come to shape our own contemporary queer epistemologies and sensibilities.

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.

This class traces the development of Chicana/o/x literature from its explosion in response to the radical politics of the 1960’s to its engagement with multiple and intersectional forms of identity through the 1990’s to the present. We consider how books by Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, Ana Castillo and others engage the various (social, sexual, racial, ethnic, cultural, political, economic) meanings marked by the terms Chicana, Chicano, and Chicanx. The meaning behind these terms of identity evolve and shift. What tensions and social dynamics do these terms generate as ethnic, racial, cultural, social, and even economic labels? Our goal is to generate clear, effective analyses about the texts we read.

This course will examine how British women writers develop and construct complex – even transgressive – female characters throughout the long nineteenth century. In the various literatures of the period, concerns about women’s changing roles in culture and society gave rise to a wide range of representations of evil and destructive women. Both male and female authors relied on the figure of the dangerous woman or femme fatale to express broader social and cultural anxieties, but our study of novels, short stories, and poetry will focus on the work of women writers, using a variety of critical lenses to reveal their experimentation with (and challenges to) this trope. Authors considered will include (but are not limited to) Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Vernon Lee.

In an effort to call attention to planetary climate change, some geologists have named the ‘Anthropocene’ as a radical new geological epoch of environmental change akin to a meteor strike. They attribute the origins to the global rise of agriculture, nuclear radiation, and plastics. Yet scholars in the social sciences and humanities have pressed against this universal narrative to ask which humans are really making the impact? They point to histories of empire, militarism, and globalization as fundamental causes, and raise questions as to how to tell the Anthropocene story (or stories) with attention to both local context and planetary scale. This interdisciplinary course explores the Anthropocene debate from the perspective of writers, artists, and filmmakers, particularly from islands in the global south. It turns to key concepts in the emergent field of Anthropocene studies such as climate, weather, scale, and species. The course will be particularly concerned with Postcolonial, Indigenous, Caribbean, and Pacific Island perspectives, especially the relationship between land and (rising) sea. Requirements include active class participation, weekly posts on Bruin Learn, a short presentation, and a final research paper/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 the English Advising Office for enrollment assistance.

This course will explore how poetry has been integral to constructing what we now think of as “the Americas.” Beginning with the colonial period, we will construct a working poetic lineage of the Americas by exploring key historical moments up through modern and contemporary literature. While we will attend to the role of poetry in history—including the recording of the Popol Vuh during crisis, and the hemispheric movements of poetry in the 19th century—our emphasis will be on 20th- and 21st-century poetry. What can poetry tell us about how the Americas have been, and still are, imagined? Further, does poetry offer a different construction of the Americas? These are some of the questions we will ask as we address topics such as New World “discovery” and conquest, settler colonialism, borderlands, enslavement and revolution, and the endurance of colonial pasts in the present. We will consider the geographic divisions of the Americas—North, South, Central, and Caribbean—and the ways in which poetry probes geographies and histories of the hemisphere.

This course centers on Phillis Wheatley Peters: her life, her poetry, her community, and her legacy. Phillis Wheatley Peters was an enslaved Black woman and poet who was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and brought to New England when she was only seven years old. In our class, we’ll explore Wheatley Peters’s writing by centering the insights of Black feminist scholars and makers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (from whose recent book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, our course title is drawn). We’ll dive deeply into Wheatley Peters’ writing and neoclassical influences to understand how her work grapples with structures of oppression in often coded ways. And we’ll follow Hartman, whose notion of “critical fabulation” provided Jeffers with the conceptual tools for developing alternate ways of honoring and amplifying Wheatley Peters’s world and work.

Not open for credit to any student concurrently enrolled in English 184.2 on Phillis Wheatley.

Focuses on authors such as Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Anne Finch, John Gay and others, who wrote and battled during the first great age of print, the age that invented the professional author and saw the rise of the actress and the female reader, and above all the age of satire.

This course engages texts from across the Americas to enrich and complicate ideas of the U.S. and of “American” literature. We will first examine lasting tropes of encounter, established in texts from Columbus onwards, and a range of indigenous responses to European representations. We then turn to the adjacent and overlapping experiences of New Spain (Mexico and California), “Florida” (encompassing much of the southern United States), and the Caribbean that unsettle the narrative of an Anglo US. We will explore a range of different actors and writers—European, African, indigenous American—to analyze the contingency of national histories and national canons.

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).

This class traces the development of Chicana/o/x literature from its explosion in response to the radical politics of the 1960’s to its engagement with multiple and intersectional forms of identity through the 1990’s to the present. We consider how books by Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, Ana Castillo and others engage the various (social, sexual, racial, ethnic, cultural, political, economic) meanings marked by the terms Chicana, Chicano, and Chicanx. The meaning behind these terms of identity evolve and shift. What tensions and social dynamics do these terms generate as ethnic, racial, cultural, social, and even economic labels? Our goal is to generate clear, effective analyses about the texts we read.

In an effort to call attention to planetary climate change, some geologists have named the ‘Anthropocene’ as a radical new geological epoch of environmental change akin to a meteor strike. They attribute the origins to the global rise of agriculture, nuclear radiation, and plastics. Yet scholars in the social sciences and humanities have pressed against this universal narrative to ask which humans are really making the impact? They point to histories of empire, militarism, and globalization as fundamental causes, and raise questions as to how to tell the Anthropocene story (or stories) with attention to both local context and planetary scale. This interdisciplinary course explores the Anthropocene debate from the perspective of writers, artists, and filmmakers, particularly from islands in the global south. It turns to key concepts in the emergent field of Anthropocene studies such as climate, weather, scale, and species. The course will be particularly concerned with Postcolonial, Indigenous, Caribbean, and Pacific Island perspectives, especially the relationship between land and (rising) sea. Requirements include active class participation, weekly posts on Bruin Learn, a short presentation, and a final research paper/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 the English Advising Office for enrollment assistance.

We read and view books and digital media from the UK by a sample of the descendants living there whose antecedents originate from a selection of the former British colonies. The course aims to: 1. Promote an understanding of the main currents in British literature written by Black writers living in the UK; 2. Provide a working knowledge of the formative ideas about the colonial and postcolonial experiences of Blacks operating as writers and artists in the UK.; 3. Foster familiarity with current subjects and themes in recent Black British literature.

This course explores the relationship between culture and imperialism through the lens of literary and theoretical texts. Focusing on European imperialism during the second half of nineteenth and twentieth century, we will discuss the shifting patterns and paradigms of imperial rule and the ways in which both metropolitan and peripheral or colonial spaces were transformed. We will study a wide range of theoretical texts—e.g., Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth—and literary texts—e.g., J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for Barbarians and Michelle Cliff’s Abeng, to address a wide range of issues such as Orientalism, race, gender, language, power, and resistance. In addition to mandatory attendance, a short class presentation, an annotated bibliography, and three short essays are the requirements of the course.

This course will explore how poetry has been integral to constructing what we now think of as “the Americas.” Beginning with the colonial period, we will construct a working poetic lineage of the Americas by exploring key historical moments up through modern and contemporary literature. While we will attend to the role of poetry in history—including the recording of the Popol Vuh during crisis, and the hemispheric movements of poetry in the 19th century—our emphasis will be on 20th- and 21st-century poetry. What can poetry tell us about how the Americas have been, and still are, imagined? Further, does poetry offer a different construction of the Americas? These are some of the questions we will ask as we address topics such as New World “discovery” and conquest, settler colonialism, borderlands, enslavement and revolution, and the endurance of colonial pasts in the present. We will consider the geographic divisions of the Americas—North, South, Central, and Caribbean—and the ways in which poetry probes geographies and histories of the hemisphere.

This course is a survey of American literature from the period broadly known as the Age of Revolutions. We will read a range of texts (including novels, poetry, autobiographies, essays, manifestos, and speeches) that respond to the major political, social, and aesthetic movements of the era. We will consider, for example, how colonies reimagined themselves as nations, how theorists reimagined the functions of liberalism and citizenship, and how writers in the Americas reimagined the work of history and literature. At each stage, we will be attentive to the diverse voices that shaped the modern world as well as to the many acts of resistance to dispossession and enslavement that define the ethical boundaries of our work.

This course engages texts from across the Americas to enrich and complicate ideas of the U.S. and of “American” literature. We will first examine lasting tropes of encounter, established in texts from Columbus onwards, and a range of indigenous responses to European representations. We then turn to the adjacent and overlapping experiences of New Spain (Mexico and California), “Florida” (encompassing much of the southern United States), and the Caribbean that unsettle the narrative of an Anglo US. We will explore a range of different actors and writers—European, African, indigenous American—to analyze the contingency of national histories and national canons.

There is no set way to adapt a novel to film: what makes a novel successful does not succeed in movies without significant alterations in the plotting, tone, beat structure, dialogue and so forth. “Hollywood” screenplays have their own rules, some of which are strict, but the screenwriter’s art is present in more than the details. We will read works of fiction—novels and short stories—and the screenplays, treated as a literary form, based on them. Films (subject to change) include One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), The Color Purple (1985), Fight Club (1999), Adaptation (2002), Brokeback Mountain (2005), No Country For Old Men (2007) and the two adaptations of Dune (1985/2021), the last based a long novel which we’ll read in excerpts. Screenplays will be distributed as PDFs. While viewing of the films is highly recommended, in some cases mandatory, we will be reviewing scenes from the movies in class. Weekly writing assignments, some creative, are required, along with a final paper or creative project.

Using the city of Dublin as our locus, students in this course will read a variety of major works written by Dublin writers, such as Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, W.B.Yeats, and more, including contemporary Irish writing. 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.

In an effort to call attention to planetary climate change, some geologists have named the ‘Anthropocene’ as a radical new geological epoch of environmental change akin to a meteor strike. They attribute the origins to the global rise of agriculture, nuclear radiation, and plastics. Yet scholars in the social sciences and humanities have pressed against this universal narrative to ask which humans are really making the impact? They point to histories of empire, militarism, and globalization as fundamental causes, and raise questions as to how to tell the Anthropocene story (or stories) with attention to both local context and planetary scale. This interdisciplinary course explores the Anthropocene debate from the perspective of writers, artists, and filmmakers, particularly from islands in the global south. It turns to key concepts in the emergent field of Anthropocene studies such as climate, weather, scale, and species. The course will be particularly concerned with Postcolonial, Indigenous, Caribbean, and Pacific Island perspectives, especially the relationship between land and (rising) sea. Requirements include active class participation, weekly posts on Bruin Learn, a short presentation, and a final research paper/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 the English Advising Office for enrollment assistance.

This course presents an overview of the deep history of the apocalyptic imagination, from biblical antiquity to contemporary expressions in literature, philosophy, film, and musical soundscapes.  The course’s informing questions: How does the current popularity of apocalyptic expression reshape or deform narrative tropes associated with the apocalyptic mode in premodern and early modern cultures? How does the apocalyptic “toolkit” alter notions of futurity, pastness, risk, and what it means to inhabit the present?  Texts include biblical touchstones (Revelation, Daniel), together with philosophical interventions (Benjamin, Blumenberg, Derrida, Agamben), and literary inquiries ranging from Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to early modern utopian science fiction (Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World) and fictive treatments of the Holocaust and the Atomic Age (D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, Kelly Cherry’s Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer).

This course will explore how poetry has been integral to constructing what we now think of as “the Americas.” Beginning with the colonial period, we will construct a working poetic lineage of the Americas by exploring key historical moments up through modern and contemporary literature. While we will attend to the role of poetry in history—including the recording of the Popol Vuh during crisis, and the hemispheric movements of poetry in the 19th century—our emphasis will be on 20th- and 21st-century poetry. What can poetry tell us about how the Americas have been, and still are, imagined? Further, does poetry offer a different construction of the Americas? These are some of the questions we will ask as we address topics such as New World “discovery” and conquest, settler colonialism, borderlands, enslavement and revolution, and the endurance of colonial pasts in the present. We will consider the geographic divisions of the Americas—North, South, Central, and Caribbean—and the ways in which poetry probes geographies and histories of the hemisphere.

This course centers on Phillis Wheatley Peters: her life, her poetry, her community, and her legacy. Phillis Wheatley Peters was an enslaved Black woman and poet who was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and brought to New England when she was only seven years old. In our class, we’ll explore Wheatley Peters’s writing by centering the insights of Black feminist scholars and makers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (from whose recent book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, our course title is drawn). We’ll dive deeply into Wheatley Peters’ writing and neoclassical influences to understand how her work grapples with structures of oppression in often coded ways. And we’ll follow Hartman, whose notion of “critical fabulation” provided Jeffers with the conceptual tools for developing alternate ways of honoring and amplifying Wheatley Peters’s world and work.

Not open for credit to any student concurrently enrolled in English 184.2 on Phillis Wheatley.

This class explores problems of literary and cultural translation by looking at four story-clusters that entangle Middle Period Asia and medieval Europe.  These stories raise the stakes of what is lost in translation and what is restored by mutual cultural intelligibility: whether of 1) gender and sexuality, 2) love, friendship, and solidarity, 3) of power and its social reproduction through memory.  From Africa comes the foundational epic of Mali, the Sundiata which represents continuous translation between written forms and oral griot performances, and also is a source text for The Lion King. From Syria and Egypt come tales of Salah al-Din or Saladin, represented in Arabic chronicles and stories in Old French, Middle English, Italian and Spanish, culminating in Tariq Ali’s The Book of Saladin.  From Persia comes Nezami’s Layla Majnun which blends the strictures of erotic love with those of divine pilgrimage.  Finally, from Arabia and France come two tales of warrior women, who challenge their culture’s templates for gender and sexuality, the Epic of Dhat al-Himma, and the Romance of Silence.  We will also discuss recent cruxes in translation theory and practice (such as: complete colloquialism or stylistic alterity? or English global hegemony or a multitude of English hybridization?). We will also compare different translations into English to explore the pragmatic difficulties and opportunities translation offers to engineer new thought and composition.

 

Requirements:  Path A: Two 2000-word papers OR Path B: One class project (group or lone; analytical or creative hybrid), with prospectus, 1000-word analytical debrief, and class presentation (50%); weekly 1-2 pp. response papers (30%); optional class presentation (replaces one of the papers in Path A) and lively class participation (20%).

Focuses on authors such as Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Anne Finch, John Gay and others, who wrote and battled during the first great age of print, the age that invented the professional author and saw the rise of the actress and the female reader, and above all the age of satire.

This is a course in the poetry of the British Romantic period. We will read a range of authors including William Cowper, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare while considering the period in terms of ecological, economic, and political—as well as literary—developments.

This course covers major plays of the early to mid-20th century, including works by Rice, Odets, O’Neill, Hellman, Miller, Saroyan, Williams and Albee, with a special focus on how they related to developments in Europe including Realism, the Theater of the Absurd, Expressionism, Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theater,” metaphysical theater and the early 20th-century vogue for the Noh Theater from Japan. More contemporary playwrights include David Mamet, Paula Vogel, Suzi-Lori Parks and several underground, experimental figures such as Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), María Irene Fornés, and Mac Wellman. Assignments include short papers, creative assignments and a final paper or project.

This course engages texts from across the Americas to enrich and complicate ideas of the U.S. and of “American” literature. We will first examine lasting tropes of encounter, established in texts from Columbus onwards, and a range of indigenous responses to European representations. We then turn to the adjacent and overlapping experiences of New Spain (Mexico and California), “Florida” (encompassing much of the southern United States), and the Caribbean that unsettle the narrative of an Anglo US. We will explore a range of different actors and writers—European, African, indigenous American—to analyze the contingency of national histories and national canons.

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).

Course Description:

 

A weekly poetry reading and writing workshop format. Students write an original poem each week and read assigned published poems for discussion in class.

 

How to Apply:

 

Students submit four of their original poems (Word Doc) along with two paragraphs about their recent reading of published poetry. In the body of the e-mail, provide your name, UID number, major, and class level. Please indicate any other creative writing courses to which you are applying this quarter.

 

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

 

YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY EMAIL AND MUST CONTAIN YOUR LAST NAME AND “136B.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 29, 2023

Acceptance Notifications

An announcement of the class list of admitted students will be posted in the Department of English main office (149 Kaplan Hall) on the Friday before the first week of classes (January 5, 2024).

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 you can expect many of the same experiences you’d have in any other writing course: discussion of exemplary published work, group work, and peer critique. You’ll also be expected to write a review of a recent single-author book of poems, and submit a collection of your revised poems at the end of the quarter. Enrollment is by instructor consent (PTE). If admitted, you must attend the first class.

How to Apply

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

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

YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY EMAIL AND MUST CONTAIN YOUR LAST NAME AND “136B.3” 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 29, 2023

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:

Are there stories you are aching to tell but you don’t feel equal to the task? This workshop is geared towards helping you identify and flex the “literary muscles” every great writer needs to develop. Through readings and in-class exercises you will be exposed to new tools, forms, devices, and narrative strategies to experiment with when creating your own stories.

You are required to write two original short stories, and give thoughtful feedback to your peers. You will be asked to bear down and pay strong attention on your own and each other’s writing.

How to Apply:

Please email me (xuanjuliana@gmail.com and creativewriting@english.ucla.edu) a sample of your short fiction (5- 8 pages, double-spaced) and a note introducing yourself. Tell me what you’re reading and your current creative writing habits. Also, please include your class standing (sophomore, junior, etc.), your 9-digit UID number, your email address, and any previous workshop experience.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2023.

In the subject line of your email, please include your last name and the course and section number in the subject line (example: “O’Connor 137A”). YOUR APPLICATION MUST BE SUBMITTED BY EMAIL AND MUST CONTAIN YOUR LAST NAME AND “137A” IN THE SUBJECT LINE. YOUR SUBMISSION MAY NOT BE READ IF YOU OMIT THIS TAG IN THE SUBJECT LINE.

Acceptance notifications:

Accepted applicants will be notified before the first class meeting. 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. Indicate any other creative writing courses to which you are applying this quarter.

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 FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2023.

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

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 137B.2)

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

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2023.

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

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

This seminar explores the competing modes of political knowledge-making that emerged during the colonization of North America and the Caribbean. We’ll track the era’s major transformations—including settlement, slavery, and nation-building—and the violent rebellions they elicited. Focusing on three key modes of knowing (reasoning, observing, and imagining), we’ll consider how European ideas were adapted to New World circumstances. What literary strategies did elite writers use to represent the outbreaks of mutiny, heresy, Native warfare, and slave revolt they faced? And how did these depictions relate to enduring assumptions about politics and contemporaneous accounts of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions? We’ll read texts by William Strachey, John Winthrop, Aphra Behn, Tom Paine, and Leonora Sansay alongside works by Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Edmund Burke. And we’ll conclude with two retrospective attempts to know New World rebellion: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) and a graphic novel about the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

For various cultural reasons, sexuality is a particularly sensitive political subject. Indeed, sexual representation remains one of the few cultural forms that is guaranteed to elicit a strong response. Our class will provide students with the research and analytical tools to investigate the causes and effects of those personal and political responses. More specifically, we will use contemporary gender, race, class, and sexuality theories (among others) to help us examine sexual representations in terms of the shaping force they have in our lives. Our examination of a 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. In other words, students will learn to interpret and explicate representations of sexuality in terms of their manipulation of power. Students will learn to define key terms and interpret cultural representation in an academic dialogue with their peers and with scholars in their field.

By the end of the course students will have initiated and executed a research plan that explores an issue based on the student’s personal interest

 

By the end of the course students will understand and use productively the rhetoric of scholarship, the ways of enriching, honing, and bolstering an interpretation by way of secondary sources

 

By the end of the course students will know how to provide helpful feedback about their peers’ works-in-progress; as authors, they will know how to assess and make use of the feedback they receive

 

By the end of the course students will demonstrate–in a 12-15 pp essay–effective organizational strategies leading to a coherent and compelling large-scale argumentative analysis.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

250 years after the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, this seminar aims to situate Phillis Wheatley within her eighteenth-century social and intellectual milieu, to consider the literary legacy of her poetry, and to understand the state of Wheatley scholarship. We will pursue these aims through careful readings of Wheatley’s poetry and correspondence, studying along the way the formal, aesthetic, and religious currents that shaped her work while also being attentive to ways in which she adopted and strained against those currents.

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

 

Not open for credit to any student concurrently enrolled in English 139 on Phillis Wheatley.

The unlikely story of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, has fascinated scholars and general readers alike—how could it be that not one or two but three authors whose works would live on after their untimely deaths could emerge from a single family in an isolated Yorkshire village? Indeed, the legend of the Brontës is always in danger of eclipsing the works themselves. In this capstone seminar, we will read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). We will consider these novels in their social, historical, and artistic contexts, examining each through a variety of critical lenses, and will discuss how the mystique of the Brontë family story and its r/Romantic backdrop has shaped our expectations as 21st-century readers of these novels.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors on the first enrollment pass.

This seminar investigates the extent to which premodern “literary” writers engaged and even transformed highly technical concepts of credit, need, excess, balance, doubt, risk, profit and loss central to the medieval legal discourse on usury. Texts including The Ballads of Robin Hood, Langland’s Piers Plowman, Gower’s Vox Clamantis and Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale will be explored alongside technical discussions of usury by writers such as Gratian, Giles of Lessines, Peter of John Olivi, John Freiburg, and Nicholas Oresme. Questions for discussion and research would include: to what extent, if any, did our “literary” writers contribute to, or even intervene in, the legal discourse about usury? What role did technical notions of usury play in the crafting of literature?

 

Enrollment is restricted to senior English majors.

This class examines the influence and presence of popular U.S. and Mexican cultures on modern Chicana/o/x literature. Chicano cultures result from a mixture of different societies and cultures coming together – often as the result of military and economic aggression – to forge creative new identities of adaptation and resistance. We will read books by Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other writers in conjunction with selections from films, videos, musical performances, and visual arts to explore how Chicana/o/x culture transforms the cultural material in playful and critical cultural mestizaje. Our goal is to generate clear, effective analyses about the texts we explore.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

From border corridos to the Nuyorican Poets Café’s poetry slams, Latinx poetry has a long tradition of performance. In this class, we will consider how these traditions of performance manifest in Latinx poetry of the 21st century. Together, we will explore how contemporary Latinx poetry offers its own theories of embodiment, as well as how the body has been and remains central to the ways in which Latinx literature continues to reckon with history and disrupt national spaces. To do so, we will examine poems that reside at the intersection of the page and the stage. Among the poets we will consider are Elizabeth Acevedo, Aracelis Girmay, J. Michael Martinez, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Angel Dominguez. Each week, we will read a poetry collection and discuss its performance poetics to ask not what contemporary Latinx poetry is, or what it means, but rather to develop our own theory of what the poetry can do as a performance in and of itself.

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.