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. In Winter 2025, sections 1 and 3 are the reserved sections. All other sections are open to students of all majors.

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

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

The syllabus for English 10C in winter 2025 covers a wide range of American, British, and Irish writings by authors including Samuel Beckett, Octavia Butler, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Willa Cather, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Audre Lorde, Lynn Nottage, Carmen Maria Machado, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde.

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major.

Exploration of question of what is meant by America, and hence what is meant by American culture and American studies. Addresses concepts of origins (real or imagined beginnings of cultural formations), identities (narratives of people and places), and media (creative process as manifest in aesthetic forms, artistic movements, and information systems).

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the American Literature & Culture 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 27, 2024. 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 when second pass begins. 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.

Introduction to core themes, questions, and methods within interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities. Examination of how different culture forms (e.g., fiction, journalism, poetry, visual art) represent environmental issues. Topics may include biodiversity, wilderness, food, urban ecologies, postcolonial ecologies, environmental justice, and climate change.

 

Fulfills a lower-division requirement for the Literature & the Environment minor. Current minors should contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu for enrollment assistance.

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

As a way of introducing students to the American Literature and Cultures major, this seminar examines the gothic origins and traditions of early U.S. literature and culture. Readers long have been fascinated by the gothic excesses of early U.S. literature— its haunted origins stories, murderous plots, and unreliable narrators. However, critics have not always taken the gothic tendencies of early U.S. literature seriously—seeing in its overblown conventions the signs of an underdeveloped and almost juvenile culture. This seminar uses the nineteenth gothic to introduce students to the interdisciplinary connections between American literature, culture, and politics. We will approach the gothic—and its unreliable narrators, doppelgangers, and obsession with foreignness and race—as an opportunity to understand the political and cultural anxieties about identity and power that divided and haunted the tumultuous century between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Readings will include secondary criticism, as well as primary texts by Jefferson, Brown, Poe, Sigourney, Apess, Melville, Jacobs, and Crafts. Students will write short weekly posts, give a presentation, and submit a final paper.

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the American Literature & Culture major. Non-majors who wish to take the course for Diversity or Foundations credit may enroll on second pass, space permitting.

Not open for credit to English majors or students with credit for course 150A or 150B. Survey of Shakespeare’s plays, including comedies, tragedies, and histories, selected to represent Shakespeare’s breadth, artistic progress, and total dramatic achievement.

Introduction to popularity and important cultural work of comic books and graphic novels. Emphasis on how text and image combine to create meaning, including problem of appropriateness of comics for serious cultural topics.

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

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

 Not open for credit to students who have previously taken ENGL 110A with Dr. Stephan.

A rattle bag of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow entertainments and edifications, the Canterbury Tales resist easy categorization. This quarter, we’ll engage Chaucer’s obsessive attention to how language functions and fails to function, how speech can instruct or mislead, educate or confuse, and how it can become more or less meaningful through repetition. Among other types of speech in the Canterbury Tales, we’ll encounter gossip, prophecy, prayer, promises of love, and oaths of friendship, and we’ll analyze their workings as they construct gender, faith, and sexuality over a number of the individual tales.

 

There will be a Middle English quiz, a creative translation project and accompanying 2-page analytical essay, and two papers: a 4 page paper and a final 10-12 page paper. Weekly reading responses and class participation are required.

We will spend the next ten weeks reading the Auchinleck manuscript, a medieval book written in London in the 1330s. The manuscript contains a fascinating and bizarre array of texts, including saints’ lives, romances, and history writing, which are set amidst shorter pieces of satire, social and political complaint, and religious instruction.

Research is a fundamental skill. It can be transferred across periods and disciplines. The greatest challenge of learning how to research anything is how to develop a meaningful research question. From there, we will learn how to conduct literary and historical research, and how to assemble it into the grounds of substantial literary critical argument.

All readings will be in the original Middle English.

There will be a Middle English quiz, a short close reading paper, and two research papers: a 5 page paper and a final 12-15 page paper. Each student will make a formal 10 minute presentation during the second half of the quarter. Weekly reading responses and vigorous, thoughtful, well-prepared participation is required.

Fraudsters, traders, and usurers have been with us ever since humans were infected by what in the Middle Ages was called “filthy lucre.” In this course, we will learn not 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; 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.

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously completed ENGL 149 or ENGL 184 on the same topic with Prof. Thomas.

An intensive study of Shakespeare’s works from 1604 onward, including Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Students will write a brief exposition 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 participation is required.

 

Enrollment restricted to Senior English majors on first pass. Enrollment will open up to all class standings and majors during second pass, space permitting.

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.

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

 

Enrollment restricted to Senior English or American Literature majors on first pass. Enrollment will open up to all class standings and majors during second pass, space permitting.

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.

This course examines the dynamic array of voices, forms, and styles in Asian American prose from the 2000s to the present day. We will consider how work (including short fiction, memoir, essays, and comic novellas) by Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Nami Mun, Adrian Tomine, and others grapple with issues of cultural identity, displacement, and stereotypes, utilizing distinct narrative techniques and perspectives. By critically engaging with this increasingly complex body of writing, we will explore and challenge prevailing notions surrounding race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and the immigrant experience.

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

This course 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.

A century after the invention of photography, Walter Benjamin wrote that “the illiterates of the future will be the people who know nothing of photography rather than those who are ignorant of the art of writing.” This course will look at the ways in which photography has become the most significant modern mode of representation and will draw from a corpus of images and writing on photography from its beginnings until now. Of particular interest will be the interactions between word and image that the photograph provokes.

Chicago is central to the geography and literary history of the United States, both as a thoroughfare for the nation’s goods and a crossroads for its cultural energies. This course traces how writers from different periods in the city’s history have responded to its urban landscape and the meaning of its built environment, as well as to its racial and economic inequalities. From its humble beginnings as a frontier trading post, to hosting the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Chicago experienced exponential growth to become the nation’s second-largest and most important modern city. Poised between the regional and the cosmopolitan, commercialism and high culture, Chicago produced an astonishing array of writers like Henry B. Fuller, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, Willa Cather, and Stuart Dybek. Using William Cronon’s acclaimed eco-history of the city, as well as Erik Larson’s best-selling Devil in the White City as a starting point, the class will explore some of the best works of fiction from Chicago writers over the last 150 years or so.

 

Not open for credit to students who previously completed ENGL 119 with Prof. Dimuro on the topic of Chicago.

In our introduction to Black British Literature we read, watch and hear the recent novels, poetry and plays, as well as a selection of films, music and art, produced by Blacks and Asians in contemporary Britain.

Requirements

Students post weekly response papers to the assigned course work and write one long research paper based on two or more texts, as well as participate in class and small group discussions.

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 two short essays are the requirements of the course.

This course satisfies the College of Letters & Science Diversity requirement.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes about the importance of inheritance, both financial and literary, as a means to secure a place for women writers. In this course, we will study a number of Woolf’s major works, as well as consider who her influences and contemporary inheritors might be. We will address the central questions of how Woolf cultivates discourses of British modernism and how she responds to modernism’s particular aesthetic charges. We will consider how she experiments with genre: in particular, how she charts the territory between fiction and biography in her work. In addition to her novels and short fiction, we will supplement with readings from her critical essays, diary entries, letters, and autobiographical writings.

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

 

Enrollment restricted to Senior English or American Literature majors on first pass. Enrollment will open up to all class standings and majors during second pass, space permitting.

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 fulfills the College of Letters & Science Diversity requirement.

In this class we will read major British poets from 1900 to the present.  We’ll begin with study of Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and incorporate the poets of World War I. The greater part of the course will be given over to detailed study of the writings of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Our term will conclude with introduction to contemporary British poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and others. The class will have two mid-term examinations, and require one paper.

This course will focus on understanding the origins of modern drama in its intellectual, aesthetic, and social contexts, from ancient ritual to modern questions of consciousness and language. We’ll begin with major works from the mid- to late- nineteenth-century British and continental traditions as we prepare ourselves for the innovations of the English-speaking stage up to the end of WWII.  Readings will be drawn from playwrights such as Buchner, Strindberg, Ibsen, Wilde, Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, O’Casey, Jarry, Jousse, Pirandello, Eugene O’Neill, and more.

World War II, with its Nazi death machines and the US nuclear horrors, proved traumatic in world history. Two convulsive reactions occurred in the US. One sought comfort: structuring differences and definitions, marking national, racial, sexual, and class boundaries. The rise of McCarthyism and the birth of the Cold War embody these dynamics that distinguish between “us” and “other.” The other reaction was to embrace change that addresses profound historical injustices. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote about the Civil Rights Movement as lightning that makes no sound until it strikes, and which then displays a force of frightening intensity. These opposite convulsive reactions form the dynamic poles that still shape US society. This course considers novels, poetry, and short stories whose fictional worlds help reveal the contradictions, problems, and potential of a nation at change. In the process, we will focus on precise textual and literary analyses. The goals of the class will be: 1) to express oneself in clear and organized ways; 2) to analyze literary material critically; 3) to generate original ideas from a synthesis of different critical thoughts and analyses and, 4) to consider how post-war socio-political dynamics establish the patterns for modern life today.

This course is about American writers in the decade following World War One. Our goal is to understand these modernist works as products of a creative ferment in the art and culture of the 1920s. That creative ferment had to do with the remaking of older forms of artistic expression, the result of changing economic circumstances, post-war malaise, speculation and new technologies of image and sound reproduction. We will examine the multiple contexts out of which these literary works emerged, including modern painting, art photography, early cinema, atonal musical composition, avant-garde poetry, and abstract sculpture. The texts we read will focus upon new narrative techniques, controversial subject matter, and the formal innovations that distinguish the prose of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner between the years 1919 and 1929. Because these works respond to the transformations brought about by the post-war era, we will read sec8tions of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.

 

Not open for credit to students who completed ENGL 177 with Prof. Dimuro in 24S.

English 100 is an interdisciplinary course that will prepare you to perceive and analyze how race and ethnicity shape our lives. The course has the following objectives:  1) to demonstrate how verbal, visual, and performing arts shape our worldview, 2) to help you feel comfortable and confident speaking about race and ethnicity, 3) to develop concrete skills (in collaboration, public speaking, research, and writing) that will translate into other academic and future professional contexts. This course unfolds in two parts. The first is an overview of the main intellectual paradigms that have structured the academic study of race and ethnicity in the United States since World War II. The second will introduce you to the methods used by key disciplines, in which we will see the insights of critical race and ethnic studies enacted. English 100 is interdisciplinary by necessity and begins from the premise that race and ethnicity are multifaceted phenomena that must be approached from diverse angles.

This course fulfills the College of Letters & Science Diversity requirement.

This course puts eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture in conversation with contemporary queer and trans theories/methods in order to explore alternative ways of being in the period associated with the rise of traditional gender norms and companionate marriage. We will also look at recent adaptations and historical fiction to consider how seemingly anachronistic accounts of the past can help us better understand the past—and liberate our present and future.

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.

This course examines the dynamic array of voices, forms, and styles in Asian American prose from the 2000s to the present day. We will consider how work (including short fiction, memoir, essays, and comic novellas) by Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Nami Mun, Adrian Tomine, and others grapple with issues of cultural identity, displacement, and stereotypes, utilizing distinct narrative techniques and perspectives. By critically engaging with this increasingly complex body of writing, we will explore and challenge prevailing notions surrounding race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and the immigrant experience.

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.

Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature from poetry of Triple Alliance and Aztec Empire through end of Mexican Revolution (1920), including oral and written forms (poetry, corridos, testimonios, folklore, novels, short stories, and drama) by writers such as Nezahualcoyotl (Hungry Coyote), Cabaza de Vaca, Lorenzo de Zavala, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Eusebio Chacón, Daniel Venegas, and Lorena Villegas de Magón.

 

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

This course fulfills the College of Letters & Science Diversity requirement.

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

This course offers an introduction to the 20^th and 21^st century Indigenous literatures from Canada and the United States by reading fiction, poetry, and visual culture through decolonial and feminist frameworks. Centering feminist and queer literatures and theory, we will trace authors’ meditations on colonial violence, intergenerational memory, gender, decolonial love, sexuality, and the erotic. We will analyze how authors depict Indigenous cosmological knowledges, ecologies, and kinship practices as part of decolonial worldmaking and colonial critique. And we will consider how Indigenous literatures represent vital sites of ecological, feminist, and queer theorizing. Course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.

 

Not open to students who have taken ENGL 106 with Prof. Mo’e’hahne in a previous term.

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.

This course engages with the ways that racial, sexual, and gender difference can be produced, felt, and made knowable through sensation. How is difference experienced for racialized, sexed, gendered subjects on, through, and in the body? How does sensation—pleasurable, painful, or both—become a site of knowledge? In this course, we will not debate Western philosophical dualistic divides between mind/body, interiority/exteriority, so much as disrupt, trouble, and unravel such divides. Through an engagement with literature, poetry, performance, and visual culture, in relation to theoretical texts in critical race studies, Black and women of color feminism, and queer studies, we will consider how minoritized subjects, marked by difference, forge new worlds, but also bear histories of enslavement, dispossession, genocide, and colonialism, in ways that might not always be visible, but instead are sensed and embodied.

What’s so funny about the college campus? In recent years, campuses have emerged as sites for contesting urgent political and social issues: geopolitical conflict, racial justice, gender identity and expression, disability rights, labor relations, and more. No wonder that satire—as both a literary genre and as an expressive mode—is everywhere these days, on page and on screen. The college campus is an ideal environment for satire because it offers a nexus of social relations: courtship, custom, identity formation, instruction, service, competition, and hierarchy. It’s governed by a seasonal calendar, marked by periods of intense activity and of rest. In this course, we’ll consider recent works of campus satire that confront matters of racial and gender identity. Among our readings and viewings will be Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation (2022), Julia May Jonas’ Vladimir (2022), Freeform’s Grown-ish (2018-present), and Netflix’s The Chair (2021).

This course troubles dominant conceptions of “science fiction” by reading Indigenous horror, science fiction, fantasy, comics, and speculative storytelling through decolonial, feminist, and queer frameworks. We will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres. And working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous Wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use “wonder” to subvert genre conventions, challenge heteropatriarchal colonial violence, and imagine healing futures for human and more-than-human communities and ecologies. Course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.

This course investigates key concepts and debates in the study of gender, sexuality, and kinship, focusing on their interrelated significance for the making of culture.  Our interdisciplinary readings cover key frameworks (e.g., materialist feminism, standpoint, discourses of sexuality, intersectionality, embedded embodiment, disability and care). In class discussion, we will pay attention to the debates addressed as well as generated by these theories.  In addition, the readings will introduce students to the alternative rubrics, of gender, sexuality, race, and class, that challenge “feminism,” and of knowledge, epistemology, and criticism, that challenge “theory.”

 

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students interested in applying to the departmental honors program.

This course addresses negative affects such as ugly feelings, depression, melancholia, rage, and dysphoria in feminist and queer theory, alongside contemporary literature, performance, and visual culture. We will put pressure on the notion that negative affects are antisocial, irrational, apolitical, apathetic, or nonproductive. How do negative affects give us a sense of what is not right, of what can and should change for the better? How, in other words, do negative affects provoke and incite us, enabling us to act and think critically, rather than give us an excuse to do nothing? We will take seriously the political, aesthetic possibilities in feeling bad, as personal and political, as individual and structural, as feelings that shape psychic and social life. We will consider how feeling down, feeling backward, feeling out of time and place, provide afford the means to grasp and move through history, structural inequality, and categories of racial, sexual, gender difference. Please note that reading theory is a significant part of the course, therefore texts will be dense—this is something we will work through together.

 

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students interested in applying to the departmental honors program.

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

 

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

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes about the importance of inheritance, both financial and literary, as a means to secure a place for women writers. In this course, we will study a number of Woolf’s major works, as well as consider who her influences and contemporary inheritors might be. We will address the central questions of how Woolf cultivates discourses of British modernism and how she responds to modernism’s particular aesthetic charges. We will consider how she experiments with genre: in particular, how she charts the territory between fiction and biography in her work. In addition to her novels and short fiction, we will supplement with readings from her critical essays, diary entries, letters, and autobiographical writings.

Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature from poetry of Triple Alliance and Aztec Empire through end of Mexican Revolution (1920), including oral and written forms (poetry, corridos, testimonios, folklore, novels, short stories, and drama) by writers such as Nezahualcoyotl (Hungry Coyote), Cabaza de Vaca, Lorenzo de Zavala, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Eusebio Chacón, Daniel Venegas, and Lorena Villegas de Magón.

 

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

This course fulfills the College of Letters & Science Diversity requirement.

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

This course offers an introduction to the 20^th and 21^st century Indigenous literatures from Canada and the United States by reading fiction, poetry, and visual culture through decolonial and feminist frameworks. Centering feminist and queer literatures and theory, we will trace authors’ meditations on colonial violence, intergenerational memory, gender, decolonial love, sexuality, and the erotic. We will analyze how authors depict Indigenous cosmological knowledges, ecologies, and kinship practices as part of decolonial worldmaking and colonial critique. And we will consider how Indigenous literatures represent vital sites of ecological, feminist, and queer theorizing. Course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.

 

Not open to students who have taken ENGL 106 with Prof. Mo’e’hahne in a previous term.

This course troubles dominant conceptions of “science fiction” by reading Indigenous horror, science fiction, fantasy, comics, and speculative storytelling through decolonial, feminist, and queer frameworks. We will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres. And working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous Wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use “wonder” to subvert genre conventions, challenge heteropatriarchal colonial violence, and imagine healing futures for human and more-than-human communities and ecologies. Course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.

In our introduction to Black British Literature we read, watch and hear the recent novels, poetry and plays, as well as a selection of films, music and art, produced by Blacks and Asians in contemporary Britain.

Requirements

Students post weekly response papers to the assigned course work and write one long research paper based on two or more texts, as well as participate in class and small group discussions.

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 two short essays are the requirements of the course.

This course satisfies the College of Letters & Science Diversity requirement.

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

 

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

This course engages with the ways that racial, sexual, and gender difference can be produced, felt, and made knowable through sensation. How is difference experienced for racialized, sexed, gendered subjects on, through, and in the body? How does sensation—pleasurable, painful, or both—become a site of knowledge? In this course, we will not debate Western philosophical dualistic divides between mind/body, interiority/exteriority, so much as disrupt, trouble, and unravel such divides. Through an engagement with literature, poetry, performance, and visual culture, in relation to theoretical texts in critical race studies, Black and women of color feminism, and queer studies, we will consider how minoritized subjects, marked by difference, forge new worlds, but also bear histories of enslavement, dispossession, genocide, and colonialism, in ways that might not always be visible, but instead are sensed and embodied.

What’s so funny about the college campus? In recent years, campuses have emerged as sites for contesting urgent political and social issues: geopolitical conflict, racial justice, gender identity and expression, disability rights, labor relations, and more. No wonder that satire—as both a literary genre and as an expressive mode—is everywhere these days, on page and on screen. The college campus is an ideal environment for satire because it offers a nexus of social relations: courtship, custom, identity formation, instruction, service, competition, and hierarchy. It’s governed by a seasonal calendar, marked by periods of intense activity and of rest. In this course, we’ll consider recent works of campus satire that confront matters of racial and gender identity. Among our readings and viewings will be Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation (2022), Julia May Jonas’ Vladimir (2022), Freeform’s Grown-ish (2018-present), and Netflix’s The Chair (2021).

This course troubles dominant conceptions of “science fiction” by reading Indigenous horror, science fiction, fantasy, comics, and speculative storytelling through decolonial, feminist, and queer frameworks. We will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres. And working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous Wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use “wonder” to subvert genre conventions, challenge heteropatriarchal colonial violence, and imagine healing futures for human and more-than-human communities and ecologies. Course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.

This course surveys the literature of California from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century.  It examines the contexts in which these works were created, including the Mission Era, the Gold Rush, the rise of Hollywood, the Depression, gay liberation, urban race riots, and other forms of social protest.  Requirements include daily participation and discussion in class, two quizzes, and a final research paper due on the last day of term.

A century after the invention of photography, Walter Benjamin wrote that “the illiterates of the future will be the people who know nothing of photography rather than those who are ignorant of the art of writing.” This course will look at the ways in which photography has become the most significant modern mode of representation and will draw from a corpus of images and writing on photography from its beginnings until now. Of particular interest will be the interactions between word and image that the photograph provokes.

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

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

Chicago is central to the geography and literary history of the United States, both as a thoroughfare for the nation’s goods and a crossroads for its cultural energies. This course traces how writers from different periods in the city’s history have responded to its urban landscape and the meaning of its built environment, as well as to its racial and economic inequalities. From its humble beginnings as a frontier trading post, to hosting the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Chicago experienced exponential growth to become the nation’s second-largest and most important modern city. Poised between the regional and the cosmopolitan, commercialism and high culture, Chicago produced an astonishing array of writers like Henry B. Fuller, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, Willa Cather, and Stuart Dybek. Using William Cronon’s acclaimed eco-history of the city, as well as Erik Larson’s best-selling Devil in the White City as a starting point, the class will explore some of the best works of fiction from Chicago writers over the last 150 years or so.

 

Not open for credit to students who previously completed ENGL 119 with Prof. Dimuro on the topic of Chicago.

Investigation of texts and ideas in history of aesthetics, critical theory, and interpretation from Greeks through 18th century. Readings may include Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Biblical hermeneutics, Hume, Descartes, Kant, Schiller, and Hegel.

 

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students interested in applying to the departmental honors program.

This course investigates key concepts and debates in the study of gender, sexuality, and kinship, focusing on their interrelated significance for the making of culture.  Our interdisciplinary readings cover key frameworks (e.g., materialist feminism, standpoint, discourses of sexuality, intersectionality, embedded embodiment, disability and care). In class discussion, we will pay attention to the debates addressed as well as generated by these theories.  In addition, the readings will introduce students to the alternative rubrics, of gender, sexuality, race, and class, that challenge “feminism,” and of knowledge, epistemology, and criticism, that challenge “theory.”

 

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students interested in applying to the departmental honors program.

This course addresses negative affects such as ugly feelings, depression, melancholia, rage, and dysphoria in feminist and queer theory, alongside contemporary literature, performance, and visual culture. We will put pressure on the notion that negative affects are antisocial, irrational, apolitical, apathetic, or nonproductive. How do negative affects give us a sense of what is not right, of what can and should change for the better? How, in other words, do negative affects provoke and incite us, enabling us to act and think critically, rather than give us an excuse to do nothing? We will take seriously the political, aesthetic possibilities in feeling bad, as personal and political, as individual and structural, as feelings that shape psychic and social life. We will consider how feeling down, feeling backward, feeling out of time and place, provide afford the means to grasp and move through history, structural inequality, and categories of racial, sexual, gender difference. Please note that reading theory is a significant part of the course, therefore texts will be dense—this is something we will work through together.

 

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students interested in applying to the departmental honors program.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes about the importance of inheritance, both financial and literary, as a means to secure a place for women writers. In this course, we will study a number of Woolf’s major works, as well as consider who her influences and contemporary inheritors might be. We will address the central questions of how Woolf cultivates discourses of British modernism and how she responds to modernism’s particular aesthetic charges. We will consider how she experiments with genre: in particular, how she charts the territory between fiction and biography in her work. In addition to her novels and short fiction, we will supplement with readings from her critical essays, diary entries, letters, and autobiographical writings.

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

 

Enrollment restricted to Senior English or American Literature majors on first pass. Enrollment will open up to all class standings and majors during second pass, space permitting.

In this class we will read major British poets from 1900 to the present.  We’ll begin with study of Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and incorporate the poets of World War I. The greater part of the course will be given over to detailed study of the writings of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Our term will conclude with introduction to contemporary British poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and others. The class will have two mid-term examinations, and require one paper.

This course will focus on understanding the origins of modern drama in its intellectual, aesthetic, and social contexts, from ancient ritual to modern questions of consciousness and language. We’ll begin with major works from the mid- to late- nineteenth-century British and continental traditions as we prepare ourselves for the innovations of the English-speaking stage up to the end of WWII.  Readings will be drawn from playwrights such as Buchner, Strindberg, Ibsen, Wilde, Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, O’Casey, Jarry, Jousse, Pirandello, Eugene O’Neill, and more.

World War II, with its Nazi death machines and the US nuclear horrors, proved traumatic in world history. Two convulsive reactions occurred in the US. One sought comfort: structuring differences and definitions, marking national, racial, sexual, and class boundaries. The rise of McCarthyism and the birth of the Cold War embody these dynamics that distinguish between “us” and “other.” The other reaction was to embrace change that addresses profound historical injustices. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote about the Civil Rights Movement as lightning that makes no sound until it strikes, and which then displays a force of frightening intensity. These opposite convulsive reactions form the dynamic poles that still shape US society. This course considers novels, poetry, and short stories whose fictional worlds help reveal the contradictions, problems, and potential of a nation at change. In the process, we will focus on precise textual and literary analyses. The goals of the class will be: 1) to express oneself in clear and organized ways; 2) to analyze literary material critically; 3) to generate original ideas from a synthesis of different critical thoughts and analyses and, 4) to consider how post-war socio-political dynamics establish the patterns for modern life today.

This course is about American writers in the decade following World War One. Our goal is to understand these modernist works as products of a creative ferment in the art and culture of the 1920s. That creative ferment had to do with the remaking of older forms of artistic expression, the result of changing economic circumstances, post-war malaise, speculation and new technologies of image and sound reproduction. We will examine the multiple contexts out of which these literary works emerged, including modern painting, art photography, early cinema, atonal musical composition, avant-garde poetry, and abstract sculpture. The texts we read will focus upon new narrative techniques, controversial subject matter, and the formal innovations that distinguish the prose of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner between the years 1919 and 1929. Because these works respond to the transformations brought about by the post-war era, we will read sec8tions of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.

 

Not open for credit to students who completed ENGL 177 with Prof. Dimuro in 24S.

Course Description:

In this advanced poetry workshop, you’ll write a new poem each week, and can expect many of the same experiences you’d have in any other writing course: discussion of exemplary published work, group work, and peer critique. 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.

How to Apply:

Enrollment is by instructor consent. If admitted, you must attend the first class. 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 literary poets, any other creative writing courses you may have taken (none required!), and any other creative writing courses to which you are applying this quarter.  The subject line of your message should be your last name, followed by the course number (example: Smith 136B.1).

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2024

Acceptance Notifications

Accepted students will be notified by e-mail.

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

Course Description:

In this advanced poetry workshop, you’ll write a new poem each week, and can expect many of the same experiences you’d have in any other writing course: discussion of exemplary published work, group work, and peer critique. 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.

How to Apply:

Enrollment is by instructor consent. If admitted, you must attend the first class. 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 literary poets, any other creative writing courses you may have taken (none required!), and any other creative writing courses to which you are applying this quarter. The subject line of your message should be your last name, followed by the course number (example: Smith 136B.2).

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2024

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:

The short story form allows you to write directly to the heart of what fascinates you—what you’re passionate about, what makes you think, what aches from you during this very real period in your life. This class is for students who want to read and write short stories right now.

We will be reading a piece of contemporary short fiction each week, focusing on the forms and techniques used by the author. The purpose is to expose you to a variety of authors, styles, tones, and subject matter—new possibilities! Short writing exercises will inspire creativity and encourage experimentation.

You are required to write two original stories and provide thoughtful feedback to your peers.

How to Apply:

Please email me (xuanjuliana@gmail.com AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu) one PDF attachment of your best short fiction (5-8 pages, double-spaced, 12 pt serif font). In the body of the email, provide your name, major, class standing, and a brief note about yourself. Tell me about your favorite writers, your experience with short stories, and your current creative writing habits. If you’ve taken any other creative writing workshops, either at UCLA or elsewhere, please let me know.

In the subject line of your email, please include your last name and the course and section number in the subject line (example: “Garcia 137B.1”).

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2024.

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:

The compression of short stories challenges fiction forms. We read, write and discuss short stories in a workshop format to distill the various facets of the art and craft. Published exemplars of the form along with original student work comprise the class reading and discussion.

The course website requires students to post weekly remarks for each of the original stories set for class discussion. A portion of class time examines examples of published work. Students write three stories and revise them based on the class commentary. Students submit a final portfolio of revised stories at the end of the quarter.

How to Apply:

Students send an example of their short fiction (one short story or an extract from a longer work or a few pieces of flash fiction, or a combination of these, of up to 12 pages) and a paragraph that describes their recent readings of fiction and states if they have had any creative writing class experience.

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

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2024.

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.

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.

This course traces the evolution of the ancient Mediterranean epic into the medieval romance, with a focus on character types, narrative patterns, imagery and themes — especially war, eros, justice, spirituality, the city or the kingdom, and the personal quest.  The books change year by year but are typically drawn from the following list: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot, The Romance of the Rose, The Lais of Marie de France, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. Assignments include weekly reports presented in class and a (10-12 pp.) research essay due at the end and presented at a concluding tenth-week mini-conference.

 

Admission by instructor’s permission (PTE) only.  Applicants should submit a list of literature courses taken so far, a brief (100-200 word) description of their educational goals, and 5-10 pp. writing sample from a previous course.  Materials may be delivered to the English Department Main Office (149 Kaplan) or sent via email to <ejager@humnet.ucla.edu>.  PDF attachments only; no Google.docs!

Seminar in the history and practice of writing for an informed public audience, introducing students to different prose styles suited for publication in literary journals, etc., and helping them develop their own voice. Seminar includes a deep-dive into important texts in the history of modern criticism, beginning with Samuel Johnson and including William Hazlitt, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Parker, James Baldwin, Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Andrea Long Chu, and others.

 

Enrollment is restricted to senior English majors during first pass. Junior English majors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This seminar is eligible for capstone credit toward the Professional Writing and Creative Writing minors. Limited seats are available and priority will go to students graduating in Winter 2025 who have not yet completed their minor capstone. Please contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu for enrollment information.

We live in a world of systems and networks, ceaseless communications and social media.

But what that means, and what it looks like, and feels like, may be another story—or range of stories.

This course will look at some contemporary novels, and visual culture, that stage those stories, and consider how we live in and with these circuits and networks today.

Readings will include recent novels by, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ling Ma, Cormac McCarthy, Rachel Cusk, Sayaka Murata, and China Miéville–accompanied by film and anime.

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

 

Enrollment is restricted to senior English majors during first pass. Junior English majors 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 21^st 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 in various ways at the intersection of the page and the stage. Among the poets we will consider are Elizabeth Acevedo, Aracelis Girmay, J. Michael Martinez, and Oliver Baez Bendorf. 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 juniors/seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.