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 American Literature & Culture 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.

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 2026 covers a wide range of American, British, and Irish writings by authors including Samuel Beckett, Octavia Butler, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, David Henry Hwang, Henry James, Claire Keegan, Audre Lorde, Carmen Maria Machado, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, W. B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde.

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major or the English minor.

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 20. 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 beginning November 13. Students applying to English 20W should enroll in an alternate course during their enrollment passes, and should not assume that they will be admitted.

Questions should be directed to the English Undergraduate Advising Offices via MyUCLA MessageCenter.

Students who are interested in taking English 20W in lieu of English 4W while working on their preparatory requirements should contact a Dept. of English advisor

NOTE: This course is highly interactive and in-class participation is expected.

 

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the study of natural and built environments has often involved visions of the future along with proposals for social and political change. Disciplines ranging from biology, ecology, and atmospheric science to urban studies, urban and regional planning, architecture, design, and landscape architecture as well as writers, film-makers, and videogame designers have generated a multitude of narratives and images of what better futures might look like, and how worse futures might be avoided. Implicitly or explicitly, these narratives of future environments are enmeshed with underlying assumptions about what the best social order would be, how a more just society might function, and how human communities should relate to nonhuman species and systems. This course will focus on this connection between stories about urban, ecological, and planetary futures; the technologies involved in their creation, use, and maintenance; and the underlying assumptions that shape them.

The course will approach these questions through the study of narrative across media in conjunction with theories of justice. You will learn how narrative functions and how major types of narrative differ from each other: When and in what context did a particular story emerge? Who is its author? What are the author’s intentions? Who are the major characters – the protagonists and antagonists? Whom are readers invited to sympathize with or distrust? How do narrative plots shape our sense of time, turning points, and progress or decline in the future? Where does the author (or narrator) choose to set the beginning and ending of the story, and how does that inform our view of just outcomes?

We will apply narrative analysis to stories about future environments – from the manifestoes of biotech engineers and architectural avantgarde movements to science fiction stories about climate change – as well as to the stories that are implicit in plans and artifacts. The materials in this class will include futuristic narrative in both fictional and nonfictional contexts: science fiction (including graphic novels), nonfiction texts, feature and documentary film, and videogames. The class will engage with three areas that technology has been imaginatively envisioned to create or transform:

1. Bodies and Ecosystems: genetic engineering, new forms of agriculture, technologies to restore ecosystems/endangered species;
2. Cities: buildings, infrastructure, urban planning, extraterrestrial habitats;
3. Planetary environments: terraforming, geoengineering.

 

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.

Not open for credit to English majors or students with credit for any courses in 170 series. Introduction to chief American authors, with emphasis on poetry, nonnarrative prose, and short fiction of such writers as Poe, Dickinson, Emerson, Whitman, Twain, Frost, and Hemingway.

As a way of introducing students to the American Literature and Culture major, this seminar examines the gothic aspects of early U.S. literature and culture. Readers have long been fascinated by the gothic excesses of nineteenth-century U.S. literature. 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-century gothic to introduce students to the interdisciplinary connections between American literature and culture. We will approach the gothic—and its unreliable narrators, doppelgangers, and obsession with the uncanny—as an opportunity to understand the 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, Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Sigourney, Apess, and Crafts. Assignments will include a presentation, weekly in-class reading responses, a quote outline, and an essay-based final.

 

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.

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.

This writing-intensive course will focus on the literary essay. Students will study examples of the essay across the history of literature in English, and we will practice writing essays in a variety of styles and genres, from personal and reflective to moral, descriptive, social, and political.

 

English 110V 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.

The course requisite is ENGL 4W. PWM students who have completed an alternate Writing II course may contact the English undergraduate advising office to request enrollment.

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.

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

 

Note: English 141B is a required (and fun!) prerequisite for English 141C: Beowulf, which will meet at the same time in Spring quarter.

Both English 141B and 141C are eligible to satisfy the pre-1500 requirement OR to apply toward the English major’s foreign language/literature requirement.

Orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and heresy are not fixed terms, and they span both matters of faith and politics. We will explore the ways in which medieval English literature navigated and debated the troubling (and sometimes fatal) lines between these ideas, and attempted to make sense of the self as embedded in competing political and religious discourses. Texts will include selections from the poem *Piers Plowman*, medieval drama including *Mankind* and *The Croxton Play of the Sacrament*, Lollard and Wycliffite texts and dialogues, Julian of Norwich’s *Revelations of Divine Love*, and *The Book of Margery Kempe*. Readings for the course will be in Middle English.

 

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.

Framed story-collections put narrators in the same rooms as their imagined audiences, making them visible and vulnerable, and thus highlight tactics of storytelling as a form of world-building — a story teller’s circle can envision new and different possible worlds.  Through multi-story narrative architectures, they can meditate on the social and aesthetic power of under-represented voices, while inviting reader to envision social change, or hold the line against it. Drawing on narrative theory, possible-worlds theory, feminism, disability, animal, and cultural studies, this class explores four premodern story collections that put social worlds at issue: Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, The Thousand and One Nights, Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis, and the Brotherhood of Purity’s The Case of the Animals vs. Man Before the King of the Jinn. Students may also consider South Asian, Persian, and Mediterranean story-collections that fed these works, including Vikram aur Betaal, The Book of Sindbad, and Boccaccio’s Decameron.

 

Requirements: 

1. Weekly response papers (30%)
2. 2 2000-word papers, one of which can be replaced by a 10-minute class presentation; OR both can be replaced by a creative-analytical term project (including proposal, working bibliography and cross media plan, 10-minute class presentation/discussion, and final 1000-word debrief) (40%);
3. Active class discussion/reading/in-class collaborations (30%)

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 will study a range of Shakespeare’s plays through a focus on love in its various forms. We will ask what love has to do with literature, whether love is universal, or historically invented (or something else), and also what kind of morality or ethics might be organised through thinking about love in literary arts. In the process, we will think about the extremes of passions and emotions in Shakespeare’s plays, such as hatred and jealousy, in order to probe the boundaries between love and other emotions. Finally, we will explore what, if anything, Shakepeare has to teach us about the experience of love in our own times. The course will study a wide range of the plays as texts, and also the records of particular performances on film.

This class will be focused around the four history plays by Shakespeare known as the “Henriad”: Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V, as well as two other plays that can be included to expand the sequence: Edward III, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Although the Henriad plays were likely not performed as a sequence in Shakespeare’s day, the plays echo and respond to each other. We will explore connections between the plays such as the medieval historical throughline, the appearance of the same characters in person or in memory, and recurrent themes around sovereignty, community, and nationhood. Exploring the genealogy of the term Henriad, we will think about its persistent resonance in modern repertory performance, when theater companies take on the cycle as a whole, and what it might mean to expand the sequence.

Allowing Shakespeare to our discussions of early modern English drama has really obscured the fact that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were teeming with plays and playwrights who could more than hold their own to Shakespeare, if not, for some, surpass him. Some of these plays and creators crossed lines, we can say, that Shakespeare dared not even to approach, as he and they both responded to, shaped, and gave definition to a robust cosmopolitan and emerging global-oriented culture. More than serving as a touchstone for early modern culture so many of the plays of this period have provided some of the literal and figurative materials for what’s called (in Anglo-American culture, at least) “the modern world.” Some of the possible playwrights for our course are Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Elizabeth Cary, and Philip Massinger. Possible requirements for the course include class participation, a term paper, and a midterm and final exam.

From the Middle Ages to the mid-20^th, Greco-Roman texts written between 750 BC and ca 200 AD—aka “the Classics”–dominated the curriculum from grade school through college in England and its colonies. These are works of extraordinary importance (e.g., the checks-and-balances structure of the American constitution comes from the 1^st century BC Greek historian, Polybius), and often of extraordinary beauty and intelligence. (Some of the stuff can also make one’s hair stand on end, but we’ll deal with that when the time comes.) The course focuses on English Renaissance translations of the Classics because the Renaissance was the rebirth (the re-naissance) of classical learning and literature, and the class will engage the Tudor-Stuart contexts of these translations; but it also offers a general introduction to the classical foundations on which virtually all English and American literature rest. Readings include selections from Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, Plutarch, Xenophon on topics as far-flung as love, duty, sex, science, and empire.

 

There will be a weekly short paper and a final exam.
No late enrollments.

This course puts eighteenth-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.

What does it mean to be a “good reader”? What does it mean to be a “bad reader”? In this class, we will be focusing on three Romantic-era British novels — Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, Waverley by Sir Walter Scott, and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley — that are, in different but related ways, grappling with these questions. These novels all focus on protagonists whose reading preferences and skills significantly shape the way they experience and perceive the (fictional) world around them.

 

As we work our way through the novels, we will learn more about the cultural history that shaped them. We will also consider how the legacy of Cervantes’ Don Quixote — perhaps the original “bad” fiction reader — impacts the novels we are reading. Over the course of the quarter, we will also engage with the history — and present — of literary criticism, as we discuss different critical approaches (including but not limited to: close reading, distant reading, surface reading, paranoid reading, and reparative reading) to the practice of reading. Throughout the class, we will pay attention to how and why writers and critics are interested in analyzing the ways that people consume fictional work — and popular culture more broadly.

This class will explore in depth one of the novels of Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop. We will travel into the grotesque and tragic, rosy and comic world Dickens imagined in this strange fiction, and we will reconstruct aspects of Victorian England relevant to it, including how this novel appeared in serial form, issues of sexuality and gender, and questions about child exploitation and economically marginalized people. The class is specially designed around one novel so as to introduce you to what is involved in writing a longer paper in multiple drafts. Please understand in advance that though we are studying only one long novel there is actually a heavy reading and writing load in this class. Lively class participation is expected.

Historical survey of American literatures from Revolution through early republic, with emphasis on genres that reflect systematic attempts to create representative national literature and attention to American ethnic, gender, and postcolonial perspectives.

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.

(Same as African American Studies M104B.) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Enforced requisite: English Composition 3 or 3H. 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. P/NP or letter grading.

This course examines novels and poems written in nonstandard English—unofficial or marginalized dialects and creoles, eye-dialects, hybrid forms, and author-invented sociolects. Some works use constructed futurespeak and other speculative idioms; others refract the lived vernaculars of communities far from centers of linguistic power. Authors include Russell Hoban, Anthony Burgess, Iain M. Banks, Percival Everett, Jessica Hagedorn, Harryette Mullen, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and others. Weekly writing assignments, a required class presentation, and a final paper.

This course focuses on the stories and metaphors we use to think about and discuss current ecological problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, pollution, waste, and environmental injustice. How do environmental stories differ or even conflict between different regions, countries, cultures, and social groups? We will also explore differences environmental stories told in print, in film, on television, or on social media. How do these stories relate to wild, rural, and urban settings, and to local, national, and planetary scales?  How does science figure in these stories? We will ask which stories are old, which new, and how effective they are for environmental communication.

 

The class will include two types of readings. The first group will include narrative theory and environmental communication research that explores dimensions of storytelling such as narrator, character, point of view, plot, genre, style, intended and real audiences, cognitive and emotional impacts of particular stories, and how to research them. The second group of readings will include environmental stories across a variety of media and genres from novels and journalism to disaster movies, videogames, and social media posts, and from pastoral to apocalyptic and utopian visions.

 

Students will learn how to access, analyze, and evaluate the effectiveness of contemporary environmental stories, and they will be encouraged to create new environmental narratives in different media.

 

This course is eligible for upper-division credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. Currently declared minors may contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu to enroll.

This course explores the often unglamorous side of Los Angeles—through novels, nonfiction, poetry, music, and film—during the turbulent years from the Watts Uprising to the Reagan/Punk era. Authors include Joan Didion, Charles Bukowski, Dennis Cooper, Wanda Coleman, Bret Easton Ellis, and architecture critic Reyner Banham, among others. Films include The Exiles (1961), The Long Goodbye (1973), and Repo Man (1984). Musical acts include the Watts Prophets, The Doors, the Germs, and X. Weekly writing assignments, a required class presentation, and a final paper.

During 1960s-80s, the port city of Bombay (now Mumbai) was a global hub of radical arts and politics. Its mills were swept by wildcat strikes, while its chawls (tenements) staged pitched battles between Dalit Panthers and Hindu supremacists. Against this volatile backdrop, new movements of little magazines, modernist art, and Parallel Cinema came to flourish. Into this already heady mix of art and politics, the Cold War introduced yet more unexpected characters: US jazz musicians and Soviet diplomats. This course will explore how these political struggles and cultural movements shaped the postcolonial identity of Bombay, and how their eclipse accelerated its transformation into a global hub of finance capitalism. Readings will include poetry, paintings, films, as well as ethnographies and histories of industrial laborers, cultural activists, and sex workers.

This course traces out the recent oceanic turn in the humanities, with an emphasis on postcolonial methods and approaches. We will examine contemporary postcolonial literature (poetry, short stories and the novel), visual arts, and films that represent the ocean as a space of migration, climate change, embodiment, fluidity, habitation, mining, and a place for an engagement with nonhuman others as well as alternative knowledges and ontologies. We will examine the relationship between empire and the oceans through postcolonial, feminist, and Indigenous methodologies, with a particular emphasis on texts from the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a short presentation/discussion starter, and a final essay/project.

 

This course is eligible for upper-division credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. Currently declared minors may contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu to enroll.

 

This course explores the forty-year literary career of the acclaimed writer, Joan Didion. Working across multiple genres, Didion’s corpus includes iconic essay collections, novels, long-form journalism, and autobiographies that capture the changing values of the post-war period in United States history. We pay particular attention to the development of her inimitable style, which she used in probing accounts of early California history; critiques of 1960s counter-culture; dissections of America’s dubious politics in the 1980s; and in describing her psychological struggles with grief and the challenges of her art.

This class will explore in depth one of the novels of Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop. We will travel into the grotesque and tragic, rosy and comic world Dickens imagined in this strange fiction, and we will reconstruct aspects of Victorian England relevant to it, including how this novel appeared in serial form, issues of sexuality and gender, and questions about child exploitation and economically marginalized people. The class is specially designed around one novel so as to introduce you to what is involved in writing a longer paper in multiple drafts. Please understand in advance that though we are studying only one long novel there is actually a heavy reading and writing load in this class. Lively class participation is expected.

This course tracks the emergence of literary realism in the United States as it was developed by Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Kate Chopin, Charles W. Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser. Topics include racial conflict, the growth of cities, advances in technology, the rising political and sexual consciousness of women, and the growing prevalence of consumer capitalism. The course explores the connection between art and society, representation and reality, and literary value in a capitalist nation. We study the narrative innovations of each author, as well as the ethical dimensions and social questions raised in their work.

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. This course will feature a detailed study of the writings of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Our term will conclude with introduction to contemporary British and Irish poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and others. The class will have two blue book mid-term examinations, and require one paper.

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).

Black British writers living in the U.K. publish fiction, poetry, plays and essays against a stream of official literature in those genres. Recent books by Black British writers appear to negotiate all the usual strictures of good art but with the added need to clear an authentic space of legitimacy and right to belong in the company of the UK’s canonized texts.  Reading Black British writers from the recent past to the present, shows how attuned the literature remains to the complex history of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonization and their morphologies in the present urgent condition of a trifecta of the so-called post-colonial, the dubious Anthropocene in the context of our climate catastrophe and imaginary post-humanity.

 

This course will look at crime fiction over the past century or so.

Mystery, crime, and suspense stories have a long history, but a special place in a modern world: That is, a special place in a world that comes to itself by staging, viewing, and reporting  its own conditions. It might even be said that everything we know about the world today comes second hand—from the media. Crime stories detect and disclose these mysteries and motives, and styles of violence and detection that make up a fictional reality. Hence they provide a penetrating look at a modern violence felt on the body, bound to the world interior of capital, and the reality of the  media—and the ties that bind them—in contemporary life.

 

Readings will include novelists such as Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith,

Kazuo Ishiguro, and Natsuo Kirino.

 

Several short papers on the core readings required.

Both funny and avant-garde, no work has inspired as much doubt about its readability as James Joyce’s final book, Finnegans Wake.   Literary and popular culture abound in famous remarks about its lack of linear plot, its verbal complexity, and its all-around difficulty.  This class won’t make that list go away, but it will give you various frameworks for understanding the book, including challenging what it means to “read” a book in the first place. We’ll take a look at several famous set pieces, as well as chapters and long sections.  As with various Wake group reading practices, our approach will be interactive and reliant upon individual research to uncover Joyce’s strategies for character, plot, and language.  In lieu of a long final paper, there will be several shorter ones throughout the term that will build skills for reading the book.

This course puts eighteenth-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.

(Same as African American Studies M104B.) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Enforced requisite: English Composition 3 or 3H. 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. P/NP or letter grading.

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 troubles dominant conceptions of science fiction and genre by reading Indigenous horror, fantasy, and speculative storytelling. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, queer, and ecological frameworks, we will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use wonder to subvert genre conventions and challenge colonial violence (past and present). We will also contemplate how Indigenous fiction, visual culture, and sonic media depict diverse understandings of space-time, embodiment, being, kinship, and ecology. Content considerations: our materials engage ecological violence, gender and sexual violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously completed ENGL 115E with Prof. Mo’e’hahne.

Course description coming soon!

Femininity is a set of traits, qualities, and behaviors associated with, but not proprietary to, women. Through readings in queer and feminist theory and trans studies, with works of literature, performance, art, and media, we will critically address how femininity is socially, historically, culturally, and medically constructed, and positioned as Other, subordinate and supplementary to men and the masculine. From femme lesbians, pop stars, to trad wives, how is femininity posed as a problem because of its connections—either claimed or disavowed—to heterosexism, submissiveness, passivity, dependency, domesticity, consumption, the body, and emotions? How is femininity a racialized, classed ideal, as well as a condition for inequality and violence against cis and trans women and people with marginalized genders? We will consider how femininity can be a site of injury and harm, but also intervention, empowerment, and play, reclaimed in some feminist, queer, and trans contexts as a source of survival, pleasure, sexual expression, and critiques of power.

 

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

This course utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to examine U.S. culture writ large, specifically “America” itself, as an imagined and often-contested idea, a trenchant source of belonging and exclusion, through the lens of performance and race. We will examine the manifestation of these ideals across a variety of contemporary textual, media-based, and embodied forms—including visual culture, film, performance art, photography, sports, music videos, fashion blogs, dance, and everyday life. In doing so, we will explore how performers enact “America” and/or the “American dream” and their relationship to it and how artists use performance as a kinesthetic medium to theatricalize race, gender, and queerness. This class will center on introducing students to some of the key writings (and debates) within performance studies, a field of study devoted to a) treating performative behavior, not just the performing arts, as the subject of serious scholarly study and b) expanding our vision of performance, treating it not only as art but as a means of understanding historical, social, and cultural processes. We will explore key questions including: how do we study that which disappears? How do we isolate the ‘strips of behavior’ that we enact daily? And what constitutes the “live”? By situating the study of American culture in an interdisciplinary context, specifically performance and race, this course encourages students to think rigorously, expansively, and creatively about the varied meanings of belonging, identity, and ‘doing’ one’s body.

 

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to apply to the departmental honors program.

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).

Black British writers living in the U.K. publish fiction, poetry, plays and essays against a stream of official literature in those genres. Recent books by Black British writers appear to negotiate all the usual strictures of good art but with the added need to clear an authentic space of legitimacy and right to belong in the company of the UK’s canonized texts.  Reading Black British writers from the recent past to the present, shows how attuned the literature remains to the complex history of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonization and their morphologies in the present urgent condition of a trifecta of the so-called post-colonial, the dubious Anthropocene in the context of our climate catastrophe and imaginary post-humanity.

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 troubles dominant conceptions of science fiction and genre by reading Indigenous horror, fantasy, and speculative storytelling. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, queer, and ecological frameworks, we will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use wonder to subvert genre conventions and challenge colonial violence (past and present). We will also contemplate how Indigenous fiction, visual culture, and sonic media depict diverse understandings of space-time, embodiment, being, kinship, and ecology. Content considerations: our materials engage ecological violence, gender and sexual violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously completed ENGL 115E with Prof. Mo’e’hahne.

During 1960s-80s, the port city of Bombay (now Mumbai) was a global hub of radical arts and politics. Its mills were swept by wildcat strikes, while its chawls (tenements) staged pitched battles between Dalit Panthers and Hindu supremacists. Against this volatile backdrop, new movements of little magazines, modernist art, and Parallel Cinema came to flourish. Into this already heady mix of art and politics, the Cold War introduced yet more unexpected characters: US jazz musicians and Soviet diplomats. This course will explore how these political struggles and cultural movements shaped the postcolonial identity of Bombay, and how their eclipse accelerated its transformation into a global hub of finance capitalism. Readings will include poetry, paintings, films, as well as ethnographies and histories of industrial laborers, cultural activists, and sex workers.

This course traces out the recent oceanic turn in the humanities, with an emphasis on postcolonial methods and approaches. We will examine contemporary postcolonial literature (poetry, short stories and the novel), visual arts, and films that represent the ocean as a space of migration, climate change, embodiment, fluidity, habitation, mining, and a place for an engagement with nonhuman others as well as alternative knowledges and ontologies. We will examine the relationship between empire and the oceans through postcolonial, feminist, and Indigenous methodologies, with a particular emphasis on texts from the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands. Requirements include active class participation, weekly forum postings, a short presentation/discussion starter, and a final essay/project.

 

This course is eligible for upper-division credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. Currently declared minors may contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu to enroll.

From the Middle Ages to the mid-20^th, Greco-Roman texts written between 750 BC and ca 200 AD—aka “the Classics”–dominated the curriculum from grade school through college in England and its colonies. These are works of extraordinary importance (e.g., the checks-and-balances structure of the American constitution comes from the 1^st century BC Greek historian, Polybius), and often of extraordinary beauty and intelligence. (Some of the stuff can also make one’s hair stand on end, but we’ll deal with that when the time comes.) The course focuses on English Renaissance translations of the Classics because the Renaissance was the rebirth (the re-naissance) of classical learning and literature, and the class will engage the Tudor-Stuart contexts of these translations; but it also offers a general introduction to the classical foundations on which virtually all English and American literature rest. Readings include selections from Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, Plutarch, Xenophon on topics as far-flung as love, duty, sex, science, and empire.

 

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

No late enrollments.

Historical survey of American literatures from Revolution through early republic, with emphasis on genres that reflect systematic attempts to create representative national literature and attention to American ethnic, gender, and postcolonial perspectives.

Black British writers living in the U.K. publish fiction, poetry, plays and essays against a stream of official literature in those genres. Recent books by Black British writers appear to negotiate all the usual strictures of good art but with the added need to clear an authentic space of legitimacy and right to belong in the company of the UK’s canonized texts.  Reading Black British writers from the recent past to the present, shows how attuned the literature remains to the complex history of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonization and their morphologies in the present urgent condition of a trifecta of the so-called post-colonial, the dubious Anthropocene in the context of our climate catastrophe and imaginary post-humanity.

This course troubles dominant conceptions of science fiction and genre by reading Indigenous horror, fantasy, and speculative storytelling. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, queer, and ecological frameworks, we will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use wonder to subvert genre conventions and challenge colonial violence (past and present). We will also contemplate how Indigenous fiction, visual culture, and sonic media depict diverse understandings of space-time, embodiment, being, kinship, and ecology. Content considerations: our materials engage ecological violence, gender and sexual violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously completed ENGL 115E with Prof. Mo’e’hahne.

This course examines novels and poems written in nonstandard English—unofficial or marginalized dialects and creoles, eye-dialects, hybrid forms, and author-invented sociolects. Some works use constructed futurespeak and other speculative idioms; others refract the lived vernaculars of communities far from centers of linguistic power. Authors include Russell Hoban, Anthony Burgess, Iain M. Banks, Percival Everett, Jessica Hagedorn, Harryette Mullen, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and others. Weekly writing assignments, a required class presentation, and a final paper.

This course surveys the literature of California from the mid-nineteenth through the early twenty-first century.  It examines the cultural and historical contexts that inspired these works, focusing on the Mission Era, the Gold Rush, the rise of Hollywood, the Depression, gay liberation, urban race riots, and other forms of social protest.  Authors include John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Anna Deavere Smith, Nathanael West, and Richard Rodriguez.  Requirements include attendance and participation in class, one brief in-class midterm writing assignment, and a final paper due on the last day of class.  No final exam.

This course focuses on the stories and metaphors we use to think about and discuss current ecological problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, pollution, waste, and environmental injustice. How do environmental stories differ or even conflict between different regions, countries, cultures, and social groups? We will also explore differences environmental stories told in print, in film, on television, or on social media. How do these stories relate to wild, rural, and urban settings, and to local, national, and planetary scales?  How does science figure in these stories? We will ask which stories are old, which new, and how effective they are for environmental communication.

 

The class will include two types of readings. The first group will include narrative theory and environmental communication research that explores dimensions of storytelling such as narrator, character, point of view, plot, genre, style, intended and real audiences, cognitive and emotional impacts of particular stories, and how to research them. The second group of readings will include environmental stories across a variety of media and genres from novels and journalism to disaster movies, videogames, and social media posts, and from pastoral to apocalyptic and utopian visions.

 

Students will learn how to access, analyze, and evaluate the effectiveness of contemporary environmental stories, and they will be encouraged to create new environmental narratives in different media.

 

This course is eligible for upper-division credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. Currently declared minors may contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu to enroll.

This course explores the often unglamorous side of Los Angeles—through novels, nonfiction, poetry, music, and film—during the turbulent years from the Watts Uprising to the Reagan/Punk era. Authors include Joan Didion, Charles Bukowski, Dennis Cooper, Wanda Coleman, Bret Easton Ellis, and architecture critic Reyner Banham, among others. Films include The Exiles (1961), The Long Goodbye (1973), and Repo Man (1984). Musical acts include the Watts Prophets, The Doors, the Germs, and X. Weekly writing assignments, a required class presentation, and a final paper.

During 1960s-80s, the port city of Bombay (now Mumbai) was a global hub of radical arts and politics. Its mills were swept by wildcat strikes, while its chawls (tenements) staged pitched battles between Dalit Panthers and Hindu supremacists. Against this volatile backdrop, new movements of little magazines, modernist art, and Parallel Cinema came to flourish. Into this already heady mix of art and politics, the Cold War introduced yet more unexpected characters: US jazz musicians and Soviet diplomats. This course will explore how these political struggles and cultural movements shaped the postcolonial identity of Bombay, and how their eclipse accelerated its transformation into a global hub of finance capitalism. Readings will include poetry, paintings, films, as well as ethnographies and histories of industrial laborers, cultural activists, and sex workers.

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.

Thinking through living traditions, textual materiality and ritual performances, this course explores the ritual evolution of different forms of Hindu goddesses: the mobilization of indigenous goddesses within the Hindu pantheon, formation of divine Hindu identity, and the defining role played by the social construction of gender. It highlights deities pertaining to Saktism, Mother Goddesses, yoginis and dus mahavidya, the ten forms of terrifying Mahavidyas, akin to the ten incarnations of Hindu male god Vishnu. Besides providing with a basic layout of Hindu Studies, the course will be classified in the following lines of inquiry: fierce Goddesses, marginal goddesses and the goddess-women dynamics at the background of a patriarchal and patrilineal Hindu society. It paints a larger picture of not just the migration of deities from indigenous communities to the periphery of Hindu pantheon and their subsequent hinduisation, but also the cultural change brought in by several religious waves that has affected the entire South Asia from colonial to contemporary period. The course introduces textual traditions like Kalikapurana, Yoginitantra, Devi Mahatmya, Mangalkavyas, theophanic performance traditions like embodied dance, jatras, and ritual theatre.

 

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

Femininity is a set of traits, qualities, and behaviors associated with, but not proprietary to, women. Through readings in queer and feminist theory and trans studies, with works of literature, performance, art, and media, we will critically address how femininity is socially, historically, culturally, and medically constructed, and positioned as Other, subordinate and supplementary to men and the masculine. From femme lesbians, pop stars, to trad wives, how is femininity posed as a problem because of its connections—either claimed or disavowed—to heterosexism, submissiveness, passivity, dependency, domesticity, consumption, the body, and emotions? How is femininity a racialized, classed ideal, as well as a condition for inequality and violence against cis and trans women and people with marginalized genders? We will consider how femininity can be a site of injury and harm, but also intervention, empowerment, and play, reclaimed in some feminist, queer, and trans contexts as a source of survival, pleasure, sexual expression, and critiques of power.

 

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

This course utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to examine U.S. culture writ large, specifically “America” itself, as an imagined and often-contested idea, a trenchant source of belonging and exclusion, through the lens of performance and race. We will examine the manifestation of these ideals across a variety of contemporary textual, media-based, and embodied forms—including visual culture, film, performance art, photography, sports, music videos, fashion blogs, dance, and everyday life. In doing so, we will explore how performers enact “America” and/or the “American dream” and their relationship to it and how artists use performance as a kinesthetic medium to theatricalize race, gender, and queerness. This class will center on introducing students to some of the key writings (and debates) within performance studies, a field of study devoted to a) treating performative behavior, not just the performing arts, as the subject of serious scholarly study and b) expanding our vision of performance, treating it not only as art but as a means of understanding historical, social, and cultural processes. We will explore key questions including: how do we study that which disappears? How do we isolate the ‘strips of behavior’ that we enact daily? And what constitutes the “live”? By situating the study of American culture in an interdisciplinary context, specifically performance and race, this course encourages students to think rigorously, expansively, and creatively about the varied meanings of belonging, identity, and ‘doing’ one’s body.

 

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to apply to the departmental honors program.

This course explores the forty-year literary career of the acclaimed writer, Joan Didion. Working across multiple genres, Didion’s corpus includes iconic essay collections, novels, long-form journalism, and autobiographies that capture the changing values of the post-war period in United States history. We pay particular attention to the development of her inimitable style, which she used in probing accounts of early California history; critiques of 1960s counter-culture; dissections of America’s dubious politics in the 1980s; and in describing her psychological struggles with grief and the challenges of her art.

Allowing Shakespeare to our discussions of early modern English drama has really obscured the fact that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were teeming with plays and playwrights who could more than hold their own to Shakespeare, if not, for some, surpass him. Some of these plays and creators crossed lines, we can say, that Shakespeare dared not even to approach, as he and they both responded to, shaped, and gave definition to a robust cosmopolitan and emerging global-oriented culture. More than serving as a touchstone for early modern culture so many of the plays of this period have provided some of the literal and figurative materials for what’s called (in Anglo-American culture, at least) “the modern world.” Some of the possible playwrights for our course are Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Elizabeth Cary, and Philip Massinger. Possible requirements for the course include class participation, a term paper, and a midterm and final exam.

What does it mean to be a “good reader”? What does it mean to be a “bad reader”? In this class, we will be focusing on three Romantic-era British novels — Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, Waverley by Sir Walter Scott, and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley — that are, in different but related ways, grappling with these questions. These novels all focus on protagonists whose reading preferences and skills significantly shape the way they experience and perceive the (fictional) world around them.

 

As we work our way through the novels, we will learn more about the cultural history that shaped them. We will also consider how the legacy of Cervantes’ Don Quixote — perhaps the original “bad” fiction reader — impacts the novels we are reading. Over the course of the quarter, we will also engage with the history — and present — of literary criticism, as we discuss different critical approaches (including but not limited to: close reading, distant reading, surface reading, paranoid reading, and reparative reading) to the practice of reading. Throughout the class, we will pay attention to how and why writers and critics are interested in analyzing the ways that people consume fictional work — and popular culture more broadly.

This class will explore in depth one of the novels of Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop. We will travel into the grotesque and tragic, rosy and comic world Dickens imagined in this strange fiction, and we will reconstruct aspects of Victorian England relevant to it, including how this novel appeared in serial form, issues of sexuality and gender, and questions about child exploitation and economically marginalized people. The class is specially designed around one novel so as to introduce you to what is involved in writing a longer paper in multiple drafts. Please understand in advance that though we are studying only one long novel there is actually a heavy reading and writing load in this class. Lively class participation is expected.

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.

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).

Black British writers living in the U.K. publish fiction, poetry, plays and essays against a stream of official literature in those genres. Recent books by Black British writers appear to negotiate all the usual strictures of good art but with the added need to clear an authentic space of legitimacy and right to belong in the company of the UK’s canonized texts.  Reading Black British writers from the recent past to the present, shows how attuned the literature remains to the complex history of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonization and their morphologies in the present urgent condition of a trifecta of the so-called post-colonial, the dubious Anthropocene in the context of our climate catastrophe and imaginary post-humanity.

This course will look at crime fiction over the past century or so.

Mystery, crime, and suspense stories have a long history, but a special place in a modern world: That is, a special place in a world that comes to itself by staging, viewing, and reporting  its own conditions. It might even be said that everything we know about the world today comes second hand—from the media. Crime stories detect and disclose these mysteries and motives, and styles of violence and detection that make up a fictional reality. Hence they provide a penetrating look at a modern violence felt on the body, bound to the world interior of capital, and the reality of the  media—and the ties that bind them—in contemporary life.

 

Readings will include novelists such as Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith,

Kazuo Ishiguro, and Natsuo Kirino.

 

Several short papers on the core readings required.

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 20. 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 beginning November 13. Students applying to English 20W should enroll in an alternate course during their enrollment passes, and should not assume that they will be admitted.

 

Questions should be directed to the English Undergraduate Advising Offices via MyUCLA MessageCenter.

 

Students who are interested in taking English 20W in lieu of English 4W while working on their preparatory requirements should contact a Dept. of English advisor

Course Description

To be a writer you have to be a reader. That is so obvious a foundation for teaching poetry that it almost goes without saying. The big difference in a creative writing course is the focus on reading as a writer in order to write as a reader. I include the scribal, auditory and visual arts in this formation of a writing persona. Students write one poem each week and read and discuss set texts. Students complete a final portfolio of their poems, revised as a result of the workshop process of discussion and feedback.

How to Apply

Students submit four of their original poems (Word Doc) along with two paragraphs about their recent reading of published poetry.

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

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2025

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 (in one document) 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, literary poets who interest and/or influence you, 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 136A) and it should be sent to rwilson@english.ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2025

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:

 

Not open for credit to students who have previously completed ENGL 137A, 137B, or 137.

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 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 week, based on a prompt the teacher will offer, connected to the story they’ve read all week and studied. Most weeks, we’ll write in class. Some weeks you’ll write at home and bring the story to class.

 

The goals of the class are:

1) to turn every student in the class into a lifelong reader FOR PLEASURE

2) to help the students develop a regular practice reading and writing

3) to foster and recognize each student’s specific talent and train her/his/their technical skills. We’ll work the development of a sound critical faculty. Emphasis will be on developing the student writer’s voice.

 

SCHEDULING NOTE: Three times over the course of the quarter, we’ll have an opportunity to meet with a contemporary writer and hear their work. These three days, you’ll be required to come to class and then to a reading, which will end by 8:30 or 9:00. Attendance is mandatory. Please clear your calendars to accommodate these exciting events.

 

How to Apply:

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

 

If you are applying to more than one workshops and have preferences, please indicate those preferences.

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Chiang 137A.1) and it should be sent to monasimpson@mac.com AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2025.

Acceptance notifications:

A class list will be posted in the English Department Main Office (Kaplan 149.)

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 complete 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 one PDF attachment of your best short fiction (5-8 numbered 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 writing workshops, either at UCLA or elsewhere, please let me know.

 

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 xuanjuliana@gmail.com AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2025.

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:

 

Creative Nonfiction is a rather cumbersome way to describe beautiful writing, from the lyric essay, to the prose poem, to narrative reportage and beyond. This class is an intensive workshop focussed on the reading and writing of creative nonfiction. We will consider the expansive form of the essay, with weekly readings from writers like Hilton Als, Joan Didion, Dorothy Allison, and many more. Students will write both shorter weekly exercises and two longer creative pieces. The teacher’s primary goal in the class is to help the students develop a daily practice of writing and to foster and train their ability to recognize what’s best in their work. We’ll also discuss revision and the development of a sound critical faculty.

How to Apply

To be considered for the class, please submit five pages (double spaced) of your best creative prose writing. The sample may be either creative nonfiction or fiction. A Word document of PDF is preferable. In the body of the email, tell me what workshops you’ve taken in the past. Also, please list three pieces of creative writing you’ve recently read that have moved you.

The subject line of your message should be your last name followed by the course number (example: Rodriguez M138) and it should be sent to jtorres7@ucla.edu AND creativewriting@english.ucla.edu.

SUBMISSIONS ARE DUE BY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2025.

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.

In this seminar, we read Laurence Sterne’s genre-defying novel Tristram Shandy (published between 1759 and 1767). And then we read it again. The course has two broad aims. The first is to immerse ourselves in a rich and influential text and to develop accounts of it that toggle between formal and political analysis. The second aim is to reflect on the process and temporality of encountering a text. To this end, we’ll read a selection of additional texts that consider what it means to re-read or re-encounter an aesthetic object. The course is grounded in the view that recursivity, and dilating the time we spend with a text, are special features of literary study—and that foregrounding these aspects of our discipline might be ways of resisting the capitalist demands of hyper-productivity and burnout culture.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

What do we do when we “do theory”? Is theory a universal, objective mode of “critical thinking,” or is this specialized discourse itself molded by histories of global capitalism? We will start by studying a staple Western genealogy of theory: the rise of the Frankfurt School, followed by the French structuralist and post-structuralist turns. We will examine how the professionalization of theory came to valorize high philosophy at the expense of other plebeian forms, such as reportage and pamphlet. In the second half, we will excavate an altogether different genealogy of theory from the trenches of anticolonialism. We will examine how mass political movements in the Global South transformed the professional idea of a “theorist,” and also challenged the existing divisions of intellectual labor. Students will revisit the popular debates between Western Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and Subaltern Studies. They will also immerse themselves in a variety of new theoretical writings that blend ethnography and philosophy, literary criticism and political economy.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

The literary critic Raymond Williams has persuasively identified “nature” as “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language.” In this class, we will grapple with how Romantic literature contributed to making “nature” such a complex word — and where humans do or do not fit into the nature(s) we will be reading about and discussing. For most of the class, we will be focusing on texts from British Romanticism (and learning about / debating what that term means in the first place). However, we will also be making a trip across the Atlantic to consider just a few of the ways that British Romanticism shaped American ideas about nature. Throughout the class, we will also engage with recent scholarly writing that will help illuminate different facets of our readings.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

Elizabeth Gaskell is at once both one of the most famous and one of the most underappreciated authors of nineteenth-century England. Her fame largely comes from her realist novels depicting brutal capitalist factory relations in Manchester, where she lived. “Industrial novels,” they were called. But Gaskell also wrote ghost stories and other short tales about all kinds of things. These short works have mostly remained unstudied. In this course, we will recover some of Gaskell’s short stories that seem especially concerned with gender. How do her tales address gender? What does she do with the gothic tradition? Mysteries? How do her tales render sexuality? What formal techniques does Gaskell develop in writing her short stories? This course involves generating questions together about Gaskell’s short fiction and individually pursuing a research essay on a topic of your choice.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

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.

In Public Shakespeares we will explore ideas of the public, and consider the state of the humanities, as well as the history of Shakespeare as a cultural commodity. In project based work we will develop ways of using Shakespeare as a resource to engage with the public to effect change. Alongside our readings of five Shakespeare plays, we will consider how Shakespeare can be used to engage different publics, and develop plans to leverage Shakespeare to reach diverse audiences, whether it be through use of media platforms, or through live drama in public spaces on and beyond our campus. This class also includes the opportunity to run a Shakespeare performance workshop for students in a local elementary school.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

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 21^st-century readers of these novels.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

This Senior Capstone seminar delineates and interrogates the idea of a homogeneous “Asian American Experience” by way of texts that challenge, subvert, or simply chuck that model minority myth out the window. Readings will focus on contemporary Asian American voices publishing within the last five years, writers who are introducing new perspectives, styles and subject matters to the English language literary canon. We will analyze and discuss notions of “bad” and “bad kids” in the works of Asian American writers who portray themes that include but are not limited to: race, ethnicity, boredom, sexuality, mental health, religious marginalization and rebellion. We will also look at issues of class, family, love, and friendship as portrayed by second-generation, first-generation, and one-point-five generation immigrant writers. How do their voices differ and what stylistic and thematic similarities are shared?  The course covers work by Anthony Veasna So, Ling Ma, Rachel Khong, Ed Park, Cathy Park Hong, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Hua Hsu and others.

 

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

This capstone seminar is eligible for credit towards the Creative Writing minor. Students in the minor who are graduating in Winter 2026 may contact the English undergraduate advising office to request enrollment, space permitting.

This seminar will study a wide range of poems from 1600 to the present. Students will write brief response-papers and a substantial final paper, in addition to some in-class writing. Most importantly, students must come to each session well prepared to participate in an honest, energetic, courteous, and informed discussion of all the assigned poems.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

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 and Indigenous perspectives, especially the relationship between land and (rising) sea. Requirements include active class participation, weekly posts on our website, a short presentation, and a final research paper/project.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to senior English majors.

COLLEGE HONORS STUDENTS: 10 additional seats are being held in reserve for College Honors students in need of Honors Collegium credit. To request enrollment, please contact the English undergraduate advising office via MyUCLA MessageCenter.

This course is eligible for capstone credit towards the Literature & the Environment minor. Declared L&E minors may contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu to request enrollment.

This capstone seminar will study the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886). We will approach our subject from several vantages, studying Dickinson’s poetics and the form and style of her work; the material practices of her compositions, including her use of letters and manuscript books; the history of editing her poetry for publication; and the history of her reception by readers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and literary critics. Since this is a capstone course, students will have the option to write a research paper on a topic of their design, or to create another kind of project inspired by Dickinson’s work.

 

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

Since the 1960s and 70s, during the feminist movement and up until the present, women have been making performance art that centers around their bodies, rendered excessive, vulgar, imperiled, or beautiful. Through a range of feminist performance, this course considers the body as a site for interrogating gender and sexual difference, alongside texts in feminist theory, queer theory, and performance studies. How does the differentially marked body in performance expose and collapse the gendered, racialized divides between subject/object, power/powerlessness, pleasure/pain? How does performance not only repeat and maintain gender norms, but interrupt and transform them? Rather than ask what the body in feminist performance is, we will ask what it does. Artists in the course may include Marina Abramovic, Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, Vaginal Davis, Zackary Drucker, Coco Fusco, Sharon Hayes, Xandra Ibarra, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann, and Julie Tolentino, among others.

 

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