CoursesCourses for the American Literature & Culture 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.

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.

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.

 

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. 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 Prof. Stephan.

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!

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 completed ENGL 119 with Prof. Dimuro in 23F.

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.

Detailed description coming soon!

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.

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.

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 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.

Detailed description coming soon!

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.

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.

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 juniors/seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

From border corridos to the Nuyorican Poets Café’s poetry slams, Latinx poetry has a long tradition of performance. In this class, we will consider how these traditions of performance manifest in Latinx poetry of the 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.