The Department of English offers a wide variety of courses at the general and advanced levels. Courses are divided into the following sections:
0-99 Lower Division Courses (Freshman, Sophomore)
100-199 Upper Division Courses (Junior, Senior)
200 & above Graduate Courses
Spring 2025
Lower Division Courses in English (Freshman, Sophomore)
Please note that these courses are intended as preparation for the major in American Literature and Culture. Limited space may be available for students wishing to take these courses for GE or Diversity credit.
Critical Reading and Writing
English 4HW; English 4WDescription
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 specifically marked sections may be reserved for Dept. of English majors and minors. All other sections are open to students of all majors.
English 4HW confers College Honors credit. Students participating in the College Honors program may contact a Dept. of English advisor to request a seat in the class.
Neither English 11 nor English 87 will be offered in Spring 2025. Students in the American Literature and Culture major may take English 100 – 119, English 135, English 139, or English 177 before completing their required lower-division prep coursework.
Upper Division Writing, Research, and Practicum Opportunities
Please note that these courses do not satisfy any ALC major requirements; however, they are valuable opportunities for upper-division credit that ALC students may wish to explore.
Life in Books: Memoirs in Reading and Writing
Variable Topics in Professional Writing
English 110V.2 / Prof. StephanDescription
In this writing-intensive course, students will consider the art and craft of memoir writing, with a specific focus on memoirs about reading and writing. What happens when authors use their own lives as readers and writers as a frame for larger stories about being human? Who gets to tell these stories, and how? Students will engage with 20th- and 21st-century examples of the form by reading them critically, writing about them analytically, and using them as models for their own work. Constructive participation in peer workshops, substantial revision of their own work, and active consideration of the writing process will all be important aspects of the class. Authors may include Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Mary Karr, Annie Dillard, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Bechdel, Maggie Nelson, Joan Didion, Hilary Mantel, Elif Batuman, Alberto Manguel, Haruki Murakami, and Margo Jefferson. This course counts as an elective for the Professional Writing Minor.
English 110V qualifies as an elective for the English major and the Professional Writing Minor.
Westwind Journal
Undergraduate Practicum in English
English M192.1 / Prof. WilsonDescription
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 Spring meeting (time and day posted in the Schedule of Classes.)
Upper Division Courses in English
Courses that meet the American Literature and Culture major requirement for pre-1848 material are marked with brackets.
ORIGINS – Beginnings, Events, and Trajectories
Literature and Personhood
Topics in Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Critical Theory
English 129.1 / Prof. HydeDescription
The word “citizen” is absent from the Bill of Rights. Instead, the document enumerates rights more broadly in terms of the “person.” What is the relationship between personhood and citizenship, and how were these important concepts imagined in the early United States? What role did literature play in shaping ideas about personhood and rights? This class offers an interdisciplinary survey of representations of personhood and rights in the century after the American Revolution. It invites students to understand fiction and literature broadly not as mere reflections of history, but as impactful cultural expressions that shape and challenge perceptions of personhood, citizenship, and rights. We will read fiction, essays, as well as select legal and political document. Readings will include selections by Phillis Wheatley Peters, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Washington Irving, William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony.
The Age of Phillis: Neoclassicism, Black Feminism, and the Life and Legacy of Phillis Wheatley [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
Individual Authors
English 139.3 / Prof. TurnerDescription
This course centers on Phillis Wheatley: her life, her poetry, her community, and her legacy. Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved Black woman and poet who was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and brought to New England when she was only seven years old. In our class, we’ll explore Wheatley’s writing by centering the insights of Black feminist scholars and makers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (from whose recent book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, our course title is drawn). We’ll dive deeply into Wheatley’s writing and neoclassical influences to understand how her work grapples with structures of oppression in often coded ways. And we’ll follow Hartman, whose notion of “critical fabulation” provided Jeffers with the conceptual tools for developing alternate ways of honoring and amplifying Wheatley’s world and work.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.
Colonial Beginnings of American Literature [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
English 166A / Prof. SilvaDescription
This is a survey of colonial American literatures and cultures. Although most of the texts on the syllabus were written in colonies that would eventually become part of the United States, the course itself is not designed to be a literary history of the US. Instead, we will consider these texts in their local, regional, and Atlantic contexts, and study the theological, political, and literary issues that framed the colonial experiences they describe. We will examine major concepts and themes that include indigeneity, exploration and captivity, puritan theology, and the parallel rise of Atlantic enlightenment and slavery. Our investigations will push us to test the conceptual limits of these categories as we trace their roles in shaping the modern language of community and nation.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.
American Literature, 1776 to 1832 [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
English 166B / Prof. CohenDescription
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.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.
American Poetry to 1900
English 167A / Prof. CohenDescription
Study of American poetry from Puritan period through end of 19th century.
IDENTITIES – Places, Communities, and Environments
Hip-Hop Poetics
Topics in African American Literature and Culture
English M104E / Prof. BradleyDescription
Some say hip hop was born just over fifty years ago when a creative kid with a big sound system threw a back-to-school party in the Bronx. But hip hop as we know it today is at once much older and much younger than that. This class will center on one facet of hip hop—the lyric performance of rap artists—against the backdrop of its expansive culture. We’ll consider dozens of artists, from Tupac and Biggie to Kendrick and Drake, MC Lyte and Ms. Lauryn Hill to Doechii and Rapsody. The goal of the course is (1) to build a literary-critical vocabulary for discussing rap’s poetics and (2) to gain a greater appreciation for the art and science of rapping to a beat.
Food Cultures & Food Politics
English M118F / Prof. HallDescription
Eating can be a fraught undertaking. As the food studies scholar 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 a range of texts – including a novel, poetry, 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.
Literature and Personhood
Topics in Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Critical Theory
English 129.1 / Prof. HydeDescription
The word “citizen” is absent from the Bill of Rights. Instead, the document enumerates rights more broadly in terms of the “person.” What is the relationship between personhood and citizenship, and how were these important concepts imagined in the early United States? What role did literature play in shaping ideas about personhood and rights? This class offers an interdisciplinary survey of representations of personhood and rights in the century after the American Revolution. It invites students to understand fiction and literature broadly not as mere reflections of history, but as impactful cultural expressions that shape and challenge perceptions of personhood, citizenship, and rights. We will read fiction, essays, as well as select legal and political document. Readings will include selections by Phillis Wheatley Peters, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Washington Irving, William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, and Susan B. Anthony.
Voices of the Early Black Atlantic [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
Literature of Americas
English 135 / Prof. SilvaDescription
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.
Reserved for Senior American Literature and Culture majors on first pass. All other Dept. of English majors and minors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.
The Age of Phillis: Neoclassicism, Black Feminism, and the Life and Legacy of Phillis Wheatley [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
Individual Authors
English 139.3 / Prof. TurnerDescription
This course centers on Phillis Wheatley: her life, her poetry, her community, and her legacy. Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved Black woman and poet who was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and brought to New England when she was only seven years old. In our class, we’ll explore Wheatley’s writing by centering the insights of Black feminist scholars and makers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (from whose recent book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, our course title is drawn). We’ll dive deeply into Wheatley’s writing and neoclassical influences to understand how her work grapples with structures of oppression in often coded ways. And we’ll follow Hartman, whose notion of “critical fabulation” provided Jeffers with the conceptual tools for developing alternate ways of honoring and amplifying Wheatley’s world and work.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.
Major American Writers
English 168 / Prof. MottDescription
The title of the course begs for interrogation: what is a “major” writer–by what standards do we measure major and minor (implied) writers? Historically, who has been excluded from the ranks of major writers and why have they been excluded? Is this even an academic, let alone equitable, way to measure the value a writer contributes to us? And speaking of us, who is American?
Modernist Form in the American 1920s
Interdisciplinary Studies in American Culture
English 177 / Prof. DimuroDescription
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 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 Willa Cather between the years 1919 and 1929. Because these works respond to the transformations brought about by the post-war era, we will read sections of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory for historical context.
Not open for credit to students who have previously taken ENGL 177 on the topic of The American 1920s with Prof. Dimuro.
MEDIA – Aesthetics, Genres, and Technologies
Hip-Hop Poetics
Topics in African American Literature and Culture
English M104E / Prof. BradleyDescription
Some say hip hop was born just over fifty years ago when a creative kid with a big sound system threw a back-to-school party in the Bronx. But hip hop as we know it today is at once much older and much younger than that. This class will center on one facet of hip hop—the lyric performance of rap artists—against the backdrop of its expansive culture. We’ll consider dozens of artists, from Tupac and Biggie to Kendrick and Drake, MC Lyte and Ms. Lauryn Hill to Doechii and Rapsody. The goal of the course is (1) to build a literary-critical vocabulary for discussing rap’s poetics and (2) to gain a greater appreciation for the art and science of rapping to a beat.
Indigenous Wonderworks, Feminisms, and Futurities
Science Fiction
English 115E / Prof. Mo’e’hahneDescription
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 by reading late 20th and early 21st century Indigenous non-realist texts. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous Wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use “wonder” to subvert genre conventions, challenge heteropatriarchal and anti-queer colonial violence, and imagine healing futures for human and more-than-human communities and ecologies. Our course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.
Algo-Lit: Introduction to AI Literature
Introduction to Electronic Literature
English 116B / Prof. SnelsonDescription
We might begin by asking, what is not algorithmic literature today? Or: how can literary and aesthetic interventions aid the emerging field of “Critical AI” studies? Rather than introduce algorithmic literature or “algo-lit” as a distinct literary category, this course wonders if it’s still possible to consider literature beyond the algorithmic conduits that characterize the networked present. The creation and study of literature today is facilitated by a range of digital formats and networked consoles, each of which introduce new practices of production, circulation, reception, and reading. Alongside these transformations, we’ll explore a range of new literary genres inhabiting, for example, computer scripts, image macros, social media, sound releases, interactive applications, video games, and print-on-demand books. Thinking through the present, this introduction examines the history and future of literature through the everyday experience of the algorithms that run computers and electronic devices. From the history of digital poetics to recent internet publications, we’ll track the development of literature under the influence of algorithmic computation up to works published in the present, as they emerge throughout the quarter. In lockstep, the course considers the category of “algorithmic literature” as a way to think about historical works remediated to the internet, in a wide range of (post-)digital and generative AI formats. The course requires short weekly critical experiments in an open format, as well as a final project, which may be critical or creative in form, developed in conversation with the instructor. No previous experience in programming, poetry, or literature is required.
American Poetry to 1900
English 167A / Prof. CohenDescription
Study of American poetry from Puritan period through end of 19th century.
Major American Writers
English 168 / Prof. MottDescription
The title of the course begs for interrogation: what is a “major” writer–by what standards do we measure major and minor (implied) writers? Historically, who has been excluded from the ranks of major writers and why have they been excluded? Is this even an academic, let alone equitable, way to measure the value a writer contributes to us? And speaking of us, who is American?
Modernist Form in the American 1920s
Interdisciplinary Studies in American Culture
English 177 / Prof. DimuroDescription
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 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 Willa Cather between the years 1919 and 1929. Because these works respond to the transformations brought about by the post-war era, we will read sections of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory for historical context.
Not open for credit to students who have previously taken ENGL 177 on the topic of The American 1920s with Prof. Dimuro.
Senior/Capstone Seminars
The Rural Novel
Topics in Interdisciplinary Studies
English 181B / Prof. McEachernDescription
The division and contention between the country and the city is the source of one of the greatest political chasms of our moment. What might the history of fiction set in the countryside have to tell us about this conflict, and the way in which rural life has portrayed and understood in our increasingly urbanized world? Agriculture is where nature meets culture: what is the result for fiction? What makes a novel (or a life) rural as opposed to urban or suburban? Does it have to be about farming? Why is rural fiction so often penned by city dwellers, and how does that matter? Why is the contemporary rural novel so frequently a study of poverty rather than an idyllic pastoral life? Why do so many universities have departments of urban studies, and so few of rural studies? Questions such as these will motivate our reading, which will primarily be concerned with the American fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Authors to be studied may include Cather, Steinbeck, Kingsolver, Wilson, Ward, among others. Long distance readers only need apply.
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.
Basque Literature in the American West
Capstone Seminar
English 184.1 / Prof. AllmendingerDescription
The Basques were the first people to settle central Europe. They have a unique language and the rarest blood type in the world. This course examines the culture and history of the Basques and their immigration to the American West. In this seminar, we will read a broad sampling of Basque American literature, including memoirs, novels and poetry, cookbooks, travel guides, children’s books, language instruction manuals, and detective fiction, as well as Basque literature in English translation—all of which documents the unusual and mysterious nature of this immigrant group.
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.
Topics in African American Literature
English M191A/ Prof. MullenDescription
Variable specialized studies course in African American literature. Topics may include Harlem Renaissance, African American literature in Nadir, black women’s writing, contemporary African American fiction, African American poetry.
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.
Queer Indigeneities
Topics in Gender and Sexuality
English M191E/ Prof. Mo’e’hahneDescription
This seminar considers the enmeshments of queerness, trans*ness, and Indigeneity in the contemporary Indigenous expressive cultures of North America. Reading fiction, poetry, visual media works, performance, and critical theory, we will trace the ways that artists and theorists craft decolonial conceptions of gender, sexuality, embodiment, sensation, kinship, and movement. Focusing on works published since 2012, we will follow the shifting contours of queer and gender-expansive Indigenous art and theory in the 21st century. We will also highlight the ways that writers imagine queer and trans* intimacies with the more-than-human world amidst world-ending structures and events. Our course materials engage trauma, colonial history, and sexuality in the Indigenous arts.
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.