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.
Introduction to American Cultures
English 11 / Prof. Silva
| This course is a gateway to the American Literature and Culture major. In a time when ideas of American exceptionalism, supremacy, and justice are as contested as they have ever been, our goal will be to examine what “America” and what the “United States” mean in national, hemispheric, and global contexts. Using interdisciplinary approaches, we will consider the literary and cultural currents that shaped how those terms were used over five centuries of colonial history and how they continue to shape literary and cultural studies. The key terms that will shape our discussions are origins (the making of a colony; the making of a nation; the making of culture), identities (the relation between individual, community, and culture), and media (how we access the past and how we narrate for the future).
This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the American Literature and Culture major. Non-majors seeking GE credit may enroll, space permitting, if they have completed the Writing II requirement. |
Topics in American Culture: Contemporary Latinx Poetry and Poetics
English 87 / Prof. Foote
| After Ada Limón’s appointment to Poet Laureate of the United States in 2022, she remarked in an interview, “I’m very interested in what it is to have identity be a doorway, a place where we can open up to different possibilities. I didn’t sign up for anything limited when I chose poetry. I signed up for something that is about trying on some level to harness the unsayable.” This class takes Limón’s words as a cue to focus on a special topic within American culture: contemporary Latinx poetry dating from 2010 to the present. This class is designed to support students’ skills in reading and analyzing poetry in the context of current Latinx politics to understand how poets’ choices on the page respond to and influence our political world. Together, we will examine how poetry (re)imagine the ever-shifting demographics of Latinx populations. As Limón suggests, poetry opens onto difference and openness. Through readings by Raquel Salas Rivera, Javier Zamora, and Natalie Diaz among others, this class asks how this openness of poetry and poetics can theorize “Latinx,” and how poetry can attune us to what is still “unsayable.”
This course will be reserved for American Literature and Culture majors on first pass and during summer orientation. Non-majors hoping to take the course for GE or Diversity credit may enroll after September 13. |
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.
Narrative Across Media
Variable Topics in Professional Writing
English 110V / Prof. Heise
| This course introduces students to basic concepts, theories, and methods in research on narrative across the media of fiction, nonfiction, fictional film, documentary film, videogames, graphic novels, and digital forms of narrative on and off social media. The class will explore storytelling situations, plot structure, character construction, fictionality and nonfictionality, cultural story templates, modes of reading/hearing narrative, image-text relations, and cross-media translation (text, film, games, Internet). It will survey different approaches to these issues, from structuralist and sociological approaches to narrative theory in the 1960s and 70s to recent ones that emphasize empirical study, quantitative tools, and digital media. Students will be encouraged to apply the theoretical and methodological tools to their own areas of interest and research.
This course counts as an elective for the Professional Writing Minor. |
Westwind Journal
Undergraduate Practicum in English
English M192.1 / Prof. Wilson
| 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 plan to attend the first Fall meeting (as listed in the Schedule of Classes)! |
Upper Division Courses in English
ORIGINS – Beginnings, Events, and Trajectories
Historical Survey of Asian American Literature
English M102A / Prof. Ling
| This course examines a range of Asian American literary works—autobiography, the realist novel, modernist narrative, short fiction, manifesto, and theatrical performance, among others—that depict Asians’ experiences in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1980s. Issues to look at include colonial subjugation and displacement, trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic migration, imperial wars, racialization, generational conflict, social activism, and identity formations along gender or class lines. Lectures will emphasize making sense of texts in contexts, with an emphasis on the narrative voice, thematic investment, and formal property of the texts examined as products of the interplay between evolving ethnic authorship and social and cultural constraints on Asian American creative expression as a minoritarian discourse. |
Early African American Literature
English M104A / Prof. Yarborough
| Survey of African American literature from the 18th century to World War I, including oral and written forms (folktales, spirituals, sermons; fiction, autobiography, poetry). Authors covered include Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The class will focus on the historical and cultural contexts of the works as well as on diverse strategies for engaging formal aspects of the assigned materials. Requirements include attendance and participation in section, a term paper, and a final exam. |
Colonial Beginnings of American Literature [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
English 166A / Prof. Mazzaferro
| This course offers a survey of colonial American literatures and cultures. While many of our texts were written in colonies that would become part of the United States, the course is not a literary history of the U.S. Instead, we’ll read works from the Chesapeake, New England, and the Caribbean on their own terms, stressing their local, regional, and Atlantic contexts and recovering the contingencies that made the new nation far from inevitable. Each week will focus on a pair of typical early American figures: the explorer, the native, the castaway, the captive, the convert, the heretic, the preacher, the witch, the master, the slave. Tackling a range of genres—settlement reportage, sermons, natural histories, political pamphlets, slave narratives, poetry—we’ll explore themes of discovery, indigeneity, providentialism, imperialism, cultural exchange, and the parallel rise of Enlightenment and slavery. We’ll conclude with a 1767 novel whose mixed-race, gender-inverted retelling of Robinson Crusoe recaps these themes by reconvening the course’s key character types.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors. |
IDENTITIES – Places, Communities, and Environments
The Queer 90s
Queer Literatures and Cultures since 1970
English M101C / Prof. S.K. Lee
| This course focuses on queer literature, art, film, and performance made in and about the 1990s in the U.S. What was happening in the 90s that both necessitated and made possible queer innovation and experimentation with style, aesthetics, medium, and genre? How are the 90s remembered, imagined, and historicized as a decade instrumental to the emergence of a transformative queer politics, but also of queer culture and queer theory? In the midst of the global AIDS crisis, and the heightened consolidation of U.S. neoliberalism and U.S. neoconservatism, as well as U.S. imperialism and military expansion abroad, what did queerness aim to disrupt and destroy, but also enable and create? We will consider how deviance, stigma, and bad taste were recuperated and reappropriated in queer culture and queer studies in the 90s for the means of claiming and constructing a critical queerness as something that felt different, radical, and new. We will ask how the queer 90s sheds light on our contemporary moment, and how it is that the recent queer past informs our sense of queerness in the present. |
The Queer American Short Story
Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures
English M101D / Prof. Looby
| Focusing on queer (non-normative) sexualities and genders, and the genre of the short story (itself a nineteenth-century American invention), this course will ask what their historical relationship has been. Is there something queer, as such, about the short story? It seems to be the case that the genre offered something like a literary laboratory in which queer genders and sexualities—queer identities, but also queer places, attachments, and things—could be explored, perhaps more freely than in, say, the novel. For example, the anonymous 1857 tale, “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” depicted a person we would now call a trans woman, but at the time there was no such label; and this fact about the main character was, perhaps surprisingly for that time, treated without alarm or negative judgment. Other writers we will encounter include some famous, and some not: Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Constance Fenimore Wilson, Octave Thanet, Herman Melville, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sui Sin Far, Charles W. Chesnutt, Louisa May Alcott, Sadakichi Hartmann, and Kate Chopin. Students will do original research in digital archives to discover—and share with the rest of the class—additional American short stories that may, under a broad definition, be claimed as “queer.” |
Historical Survey of Asian American Literature
English M102A / Prof. Ling
| This course examines a range of Asian American literary works—autobiography, the realist novel, modernist narrative, short fiction, manifesto, and theatrical performance, among others—that depict Asians’ experiences in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1980s. Issues to look at include colonial subjugation and displacement, trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic migration, imperial wars, racialization, generational conflict, social activism, and identity formations along gender or class lines. Lectures will emphasize making sense of texts in contexts, with an emphasis on the narrative voice, thematic investment, and formal property of the texts examined as products of the interplay between evolving ethnic authorship and social and cultural constraints on Asian American creative expression as a minoritarian discourse. |
Early African American Literature
English M104A / Prof. Yarborough
| Survey of African American literature from the 18th century to World War I, including oral and written forms (folktales, spirituals, sermons; fiction, autobiography, poetry). Authors covered include Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The class will focus on the historical and cultural contexts of the works as well as on diverse strategies for engaging formal aspects of the assigned materials. Requirements include attendance and participation in section, a term paper, and a final exam. |
Hip Hop Poetics
Topics in African American Literature and Culture
English M104E / Prof. Bradley
| Fifty years ago this fall, during a back-to-school party put on by two teenagers at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the South Bronx, hip hop was born. It’s a serviceable origin story, a blend of myth and fact that marks the public emergence of a deeply-rooted culture. In recognition of hip hop’s first half-century, this course will chart its past, present, and possible futures through close attention to the language of rap lyrics. Along the way, we’ll be asking a number of questions, including: How does rap extend the Western poetic tradition and how does it complicate it? What does virtuosity look and sound like in rap? How has rap changed over the past decade? How has poetry changed because of rap? Among the performers we’ll consider are: Kendrick Lamar, 2Pac, Nas, Megan thee Stallion, Mac Miller, Ice Spice, Nipsey Hussle and many more. |
Chicana/o/x Literature since el Movimiento, 1970s to Present
English M105C / Prof. Foote
| This class is a survey of Chicanx literature from the 1960s to the present. Organized chronologically, this class will explore how various works of Chicanx literature can enrich, complicate, and deepen our understanding of the histories and meanings of the term “Chicanx.” By exploring a range of genres—novels, short stories, plays, and poetry—we will analyze the formal interventions and innovations of Chicanx literature. We will also consider how these writers engage histories of coloniality in the political and social climates of the late twentieth century. In this way, we will seek to understand how literature responds to and shapes the political and social realities of Chicanx people. With attention to Chicanx interventions in social inequalities—including, but not limited to, race, gender, sexuality, and class—we will explore how Chicanx Literature speaks to both the past and the future. |
Crossing Racial Boundaries in Post-Civil Rights Era Fiction and Film
Interracial Encounters
English 108 / Prof. Streeter
| This class examines life narratives, fiction, film and popular cultural materials depicting interracial relationships and mixed-race identities in the United States. We pay particular attention to how writers engage intersecting categories of social identity, including gender, ethnicity, sexuality and economic class in plots and characters. The class also looks at how imaginative literature intersects with historical conditions, contemporary society and personal experience in its representation of racial crossing and mixing. The books we read include The Color of Water by James McBride, Caucasia by Danzy Senna, When Half is Whole by Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez, and Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience, edited by Chandra Prasad. Films include Multi-facial (Vin Diesel), The Rachel Divide (Laura Brownson), and Daughter from Danang (Vicente Franco and Gail Dolgin). |
Campus Satires
Topics in Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
English 109 / Prof. Bradley
| What’s so funny about the college campus? In recent years, campuses have emerged as sites for contesting urgent political and social issues: 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 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). |
California Literature
Literatures of California and American West
English 117 / Prof. Allmendinger
| California has always been a land of contestation, ruled by different nations and colonial empires; populated by various races, cultures, religious institutions, and commercial enterprises, each with its own conflicting claims to the region. The literature about California falls into one of two categories. Some works feature a utopian narrative, presenting California as a region with an ideal climate, valuable natural resources, and liberal attitudes—the site of the entertainment industry, a place where dreams come true. Other works feature a dystopian narrative, noting that the “real” California has been occupied by a succession of foreign oppressors, and remains a state divided by race wars and debates over immigration. According to this narrative, California is associated with overpriced real estate and superficial celebrities. It is also afflicted by droughts, earthquakes, and other forms of apocalyptic weather. The works in this course reflect one or both of these narratives, which have continued over time, from the original settlement of the region until today. Class requirements include regular attendance, participation in class discussion, occasional pop quizzes, and a final paper due on the last day of class. |
City on the Make: Chicago and Modernity
Literary Cities
English 119.2 / Prof. Dimuro
| Chicago occupies a central position in 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 have responded to the rapidly changing urban environment, engaging with the meaning and consequences of the world’s first skyscrapers and elevated railroads, extreme racial and economic inequality, a growing middle class and proliferation of multi-ethnic neighborhoods, as well as the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South. From its crude beginnings in the 1830s as a Western trading post to its hosting of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Chicago experienced exponential growth as the nation’s second-largest city. Poised between the regional and the cosmopolitan, the rawness of capitalism and the aspirations of high culture, the city of Chicago produced an astonishing diversity of literature over the course of its development. Some of the writers we consider in the context of urbanization, class, money, crime, and power include Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Sandra Cisneros, and several others over the last 150 years. |
Castaways, Captives, and Converts [PRE-1848 CREDIT] [CANCELED]
Transatlantic Literatures and Cultures
English 133.1 / Prof. Mazzaferro
| This course explores three quintessential New World experiences: being shipwrecked in an unfamiliar environment, becoming the captive of a foreign culture, and converting to a new religion. These experiences are frequently linked in early American literature. Castaways are taken captive; captives are forcibly relocated; and the victims of these traumas use new spiritual frameworks to make sense of them. We’ll examine both the castaway episodes and Native American captivities endured by European settlers and the dislocation and enslavement they inflicted on Indigenous and African people. And we’ll compare Europeans’ conversion experiences with those of non-Europeans, for whom Christianity could seem either to sanction an oppressive status quo or to offer new sources of dignity and power. Reimagining colonial America as a space of spectacular suffering and personal transformation, we’ll consider Christianity’s paradoxical take on liberty and slavery; the connections between castawayism and colonialism; and the role of faith, race, and gender in narrating tragedy.
Not open to students who completed ENGL 87 with Prof. Mazzaferro in Spring 2021.
Earns pre-1848 credit for the American Literature and Culture major. |
Lives of Property in the Colonial Atlantic World [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
Transatlantic Literatures and Cultures
English 133.2 / Prof. Turner
| In this course, we’ll ask how colonial models of property and personhood shaped both the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the world we continue to inhabit today. Drawing on critical work in Indigenous Studies and Black Studies, we’ll examine the ways in which political and economic ideas associated with the Enlightenment helped to produce racialized and gendered subject positions that were coded as pathological and subordinate. Through readings of eighteenth-century fiction and poetry, political and philosophical treatises, and autobiographical narratives, we will explore how the notion of a “possessive individual” affected the lives of laborers, women, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans. In addition to our eighteenth-century texts, we’ll turn to a number of more recent “texts” (including podcasts and contemporary new media) as a way of grappling with the ongoing reality of settler colonial histories. Throughout the class, we will look to find ways of moving beyond representations of violence and conquest.
Earns pre-1848 credit for the American Literature and Culture major. |
Major American Writers
English 168 / Prof. Mott
| 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? That identity has been scrutinized for several decades now, perhaps as part of an examination of the ideology of American exceptionalism, perhaps as part of a critique of colonial displacement and erasure of identity. This course will continue to investigate the marker. We will also put pressure on “writer” by reading texts not usually considered part of a literary canon. “Writer,” though gives us a bit of carte blanche to explore all kinds of writing that allows us to pursue some of the questions about “major” and “American.” |
US Fiction after the Cold War
Contemporary American Fiction
English 174C / Prof. Huehls
| This course examines recent trends in contemporary US fiction, focusing in particular on the past 20-25 years of literary output from US novelists. As this literary period is nascent and in constant flux, we’ll be particularly interested in establishing its thematic and formal departures from postmodernism. The class will examine the period’s critique of its postmodern predecessors and will then investigate various themes and techniques that contemporary authors engage to distinguish themselves and their literary moment. Readings include work by Colson Whitehead, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Paul Beatty, and Ling Ma. Not open for credit to students who completed course 174C in spring 2016, fall 2017, or spring 2021 titled What’s Happening Now? U.S. Fiction since 1990s. |
Ethnic Comedy, Family Drama
Interdisciplinary Studies in American Culture
English 177.1 / Prof. Decker
| 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). |
MEDIA – Aesthetics, Genres, and Technologies
Hip Hop Poetics
Topics in African American Literature and Culture
English M104E / Prof. Bradley
| In 2023, during what some consider the 50th anniversary of hip hop’s birth, this course will consider the evolution of hip hop’s poetics from its roots in the 1970s South Bronx to its worldwide influence in the present day. How does rap extend the Western poetic tradition and how does it complicate it? How might we best evaluate the merits of a given rap performance? How has rap changed–as music and as lyric–over the past decade? How has poetry changed because of rap? Among the rappers and poets we’ll consider are Tupac Shakur, Nipsey Hussle, Megan thee Stallion, Kendrick Lamar, Rapsody, Danez Smith, Morgan Parker, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Erica Dawson, and many others. Through a combination of lecture and discussion, we’ll work together to develop a language for talking about the poetics of hip hop. |
Introduction to Electronic Media
English 116B / Prof. Snelson
| We might begin by asking, what is not electronic literature today? Rather than introduce electronic literature or “e-lit” as a distinct literary category, this course wonders if it’s still possible to consider literature beyond the electronic circuits 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, Bandcamp 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 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 computation up to works published in the present, as they emerge throughout the quarter. In lockstep, the course considers the category of “electronic literature” as a way to think about historical works remediated to the internet, in a wide range of (post-)digital formats. The course requires short weekly critical experiments in an open format, as well as a mid-term and final assignment, which may be critical or creative in form, developed in conversation with the instructor. No previous experience in programming, poetry, or literature is required. |
Major American Writers
English 168 / Prof. Mott
| 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? That identity has been scrutinized for several decades now, perhaps as part of an examination of the ideology of American exceptionalism, perhaps as part of a critique of colonial displacement and erasure of identity. This course will continue to investigate the marker. We will also put pressure on “writer” by reading texts not usually considered part of a literary canon. “Writer,” though gives us a bit of carte blanche to explore all kinds of writing that allows us to pursue some of the questions about “major” and “American.” |
Crime, Culture, and In/Justice
Topics in Literature, circa 1700 – 1850
English 169 / Prof. Turner
| This course is motivated by two realities: the enormous popularity of true crime stories and police procedurals in contemporary media and the simultaneous fact of the U.S.’s status as the world’s largest jailor. Prison abolitionists working today emphasize the importance of understanding that the prison itself has a history: it is a product of human design, rather than a natural part of society. In this course, we’ll focus on the prison system’s inception in eighteenth-century Europe, when incarceration was first theorized as a more humane form of punishment than alternatives such as execution or transportation. In doing so, we’ll follow the lead of prison abolitionists to highlight incarceration’s non-inevitability. Our readings will be guided by some key questions: Why has criminality been such a popular subject for mass culture, both today and in the past? What role have cultural objects played in the transformation of institutions like the modern prison? And, finally, how might writing—and the arts broadly—help us to both imagine and build a more just world? |
US Fiction after the Cold War
Contemporary American Fiction
English 174C / Prof. Huehls
| This course examines recent trends in contemporary US fiction, focusing in particular on the past 20-25 years of literary output from US novelists. As this literary period is nascent and in constant flux, we’ll be particularly interested in establishing its thematic and formal departures from postmodernism. The class will examine the period’s critique of its postmodern predecessors and will then investigate various themes and techniques that contemporary authors engage to distinguish themselves and their literary moment. Readings include work by Colson Whitehead, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Paul Beatty, and Ling Ma. Not open for credit to students who completed course 174C in spring 2016, fall 2017, or spring 2021 titled What’s Happening Now? U.S. Fiction since 1990s. |
Ethnic Comedy, Family Drama
Interdisciplinary Studies in American Culture
English 177.1 / Prof. Decker
| 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). |
Senior/Capstone Seminars
Immigrant Stories: Literary and Cinematic
Topics in 20th and 21st Century American Literature
English 183C.1 / Prof. Decker
| This course examines literary and cinematic representations of the American immigrant experience over the last century. To live between cultures, to experience the confounding processes of racialization and assimilation, to labor to translate one’s deepest interiority into a foreign language––all these aspects of migration make a new imaginative relationship with the world a necessity for the migrant and, as such, are fertile ground for literary exploration and cinematic expression. In this class, we study novels and movies as distinct mediums even as we attend to their affinities, such as an impulse toward narrative storytelling. Among our films, one is from the silent era (Chaplin’s The Immigrant); among our novels, one is a wordless story of sequenced, illustrated panels (Tan’s The Arrival). Other novels include Eugenides’ Middlesex, Ozeki’s A Tale for a Time Being, Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. Other movies: Coppola’s The Godfather, Nair’s The Namesake, Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre.
Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting. |
The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Capstone Seminar
English 184.1 / Prof. Cohen
| In this capstone seminar we will study the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886). Although she was unknown during her lifetime, after her death Dickinson became perhaps the best known woman writer of the nineteenth century. We will approach our topic from several vantages: by studying Dickinson’s poetics and the form and style of her work; by examining the material practices of her compositions, including her use of letters and manuscript books; by analyzing the history of editing her poetry for publication; and by surveying 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. |
The “Bad” Kids: A New Generation of Asian-American Writing
Capstone Seminar
English 184.3 / Prof. Wang
| This 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 highlight the recent explosion of contemporary Asian American voices, 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 Ling Ma, Mira Jacobs, E. Alex Jung, Cathy Park Hong, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Yanyi, Elysha Chang, and others.
Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting. |
Los Angeles, 1992 [CANCELED]
Topics in African-American Literature
English M191A / Prof. Mullen
| From the journalists who struggled to report events as they unfolded, to the poets, dramatists, and others who continually return to it, the 1992 Los Angeles Riot remains a site of disputed memory and divergent interpretations, with commentators divided even on what to call it. Insurrection, riot, rebellion, urban unrest, uprising? This course surveys documents, literature, performances, and other works that grapple with the reality and the spectacle of interracial conflict and violence in Los Angeles. Reading may include works by Ai (Florence Anthony Ogawa), Lucille Clifton, Wanda Coleman, Walter Moseley, Anna DeVeare Smith, Courtney Faye Taylor, and others.
Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting. |