Lower Division Courses: Major Prep (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 4W
| 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 Lit & 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.
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. |
Topics in American Culture- Narratives: Bodies/Health/Illness
English 87 / Prof. Stern
| This seminar will explore a range of literary and media forms that engage with the themes of bodies, health, and illness, including but not limited to memoirs, graphic novels, podcasts, and poetry. Students will learn about the field of health humanities, and the power of narrative in capturing and embodying human conditions associated with health and illness. This course will seek to highlight universal creative expression across a diverse set of writers, scholars, and creatives. This class will be largely discussion based and students will be able to choose a final project in a genre that interest them.
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 17. |
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.
Writing in the English Major: Analytical
English 110A / Prof. Stephan
| In this course, designed specifically for English/American Literature majors but now open to students from all majors, you will learn to build on your skills and abilities as a writer of literary and cultural analyses. You’ll find ways to ask richer literary questions, develop more nuanced analyses of complex texts, and shape your own voice as a writer. We’ll focus on literary arguments and begin with this basic question: what constitutes a good, rich, complex question in literary analysis? What makes a substantial topic that might lead to a top-notch persuasive argument? Because good writing (and thus good argumentation) is also a process, we will practice creation, revision, contemplation, and editing, as well as seeking and giving feedback. Throughout the course, we will workshop writing exercises with the goal of making ourselves and others more comfortable and more successful as writers of good academic prose.
This course counts as an elective for the Professional Writing minor. The course requisite is ENGL 4W. Students in the Professional Writing minor who have completed alternate Writing II credit may contact the English undergraduate advising office to enroll. |
First-Person Writing for Aspiring Professional Writers
Variable Topics in Professional Writing
English 110V / Prof. Allmendinger
| This course will prepare students who want to submit first-person writings to journals and magazines that publish works by and for young adults. Examples of such works include memoirs, humor, opinion pieces, and cultural criticism. We will study the marketplace to discover which outlets appeal to students, how to submit to those publishers, how to write a cover letter, and how to develop relationships with editors. Most importantly, we will spend the quarter writing and revising potential submissions, with the goal of submitting a piece to the students’ chosen venues by the end of the quarter. Requirements include attendance and participation, as well as a final revised piece of writing.
This course counts as an elective for the Professional Writing minor. The course requisite is ENGL 4W. Students in the Professional Writing minor who have completed alternate Writing II credit may contact the English undergraduate advising office to enroll. |
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 come to the first Fall meeting (time and day posted in the Schedule of Classes)! |
Upper Division Courses: American Literature & Culture Major
ORIGINS – Beginnings, Events, and Trajectories
Early African American Literature [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
English M104A / Prof. Yarborough
| Survey of African American literature from the 18th century to World War I, including both oral and written modes (folktales, spirituals, sermons; fiction, autobiography, poetry). Among the authors covered are Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. M104A focuses on the historical and cultural contexts of the works as well as on diverse strategies for engaging formal aspects of the assigned material. The class will be conducted in lecture format with TA-led discussion sections. Requirements include the following: attendance and participation in section, a midterm exam, a term paper, and a final exam.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors. |
American Literature, 1832 – 1865
English 166C / Prof. Colacurcio
| Historical survey of American literatures from Jacksonian era to end of Civil War, including emergent tradition of American Romanticism, augmented and challenged by genres of popular protest urging application of democratic ideals to questions of race, gender, and social equality. |
IDENTITIES – Places, Communities, and Environments
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 short story genre (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 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 the main character was, perhaps surprisingly for that time, treated without negative judgment. Other writers we will encounter include some famous, and some not: Whitman, Jewett, Melville, Alcott and Twain, but also Ambrose Bierce, Constance Fenimore Wilson, Octave Thanet, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Bret Harte, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sui Sin Far, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sadakichi Hartmann, George Parsons Lathrop, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, and Kate Chopin. Students will do original research in digital archives to discover—and share with the rest of the class—additional short stories that may, under a broad definition, be claimed as “queer.”
Not open to credit to students who completed ENGL M101D with Prof. Looby in Fall 2023. |
Early African American Literature [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
English M104A / Prof. Yarborough
| Survey of African American literature from the 18th century to World War I, including both oral and written modes (folktales, spirituals, sermons; fiction, autobiography, poetry). Among the authors covered are Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. M104A focuses on the historical and cultural contexts of the works as well as on diverse strategies for engaging formal aspects of the assigned material. The class will be conducted in lecture format with TA-led discussion sections. Requirements include the following: attendance and participation in section, a midterm exam, a term paper, and a final exam.
This course earns pre-1848 credit for American Literature & Culture majors. |
Topic TBA
Topics in African American Literature and Culture
English M104E / Prof. Mullen
| Topic & description coming soon! |
Chicana/o/x Literature since el Movimiento, 1970s to Present
English M105C / Prof. Perez-Torres
| Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature since 1970s, with particular emphasis on how queer and feminist activism as well as Central and South American migration have shaped 21st-century chicanidad. Oral, written, and graphic fiction, poetry, and drama by writers including John Rechy, Gloria Anzaldúa, Los Bros Hernández, Ana Castillo, and Dagoberto Gilb guide exploration of queer and feminist studies, Reagan generation, immigration debates, and emerging Latina/Latino majority. |
(Don’t) Take it Personal: Women of Color Writing the Self
Studies in Women’s Writing
English M107A / Prof. S.K. Lee
| In this course, we will consider how women of color writers and scholars narrate, theorize, and construct the self in ways that experiment with conventions of the personal essay, memoir, criticism, academic scholarship, and their various overlappings. We will address how women of color writers, speaking from personal experience, put pressure on the expectation to make themselves knowable, legible, and relatable, according to the rigidity of identities founded upon discrete categories of difference. Through an engagement with literary and theoretical texts, students will not just think about writing the self as acts of exposure, confession, and disclosure, but also as willful, ambivalent acts of obfuscation, fabulation, withholding, silence, and opacity. We will not work under the assumption that personal writing is authentic, politically good, or morally right, so much as we will discuss how women of color writers write out of a suspicion, critique, and negation of such assumptions.
Not open for credit to students who took ENGL M107A with Prof. Kim Lee in Fall 2021. |
Poetry of the Americas
Literature of the Americas
English 135 / Prof. Foote
| This course will explore how poetry has been integral to constructing what we now think of as “the Americas.” Beginning with the colonial period, we will develop a working poetic lineage of the Americas by exploring literary renderings of key historical moments. While we will attend to the role of poetry in history—including the recording of the Popol Vuh during crisis, and the hemispheric movements of poetry in the 19th century—our emphasis will be on 20th– and 21st-century poetry. What can poetry tell us about how the Americas have been, and still are, imagined? Further, does poetry offer a different construction of the Americas? These are some of the questions we will ask as we address topics such as New World “discovery” and conquest, settler colonialism, borderlands, enslavement and revolution, translation, and the endurance of colonial pasts in the present. We will consider the geographic divisions of the Americas—North, South, Central, and Caribbean—and the ways in which poetry probes geographies and histories of the hemisphere.
Not open for credit to students who took ENGL 135 with Prof. Foote in Winter 2024. |
Major American Writers
English 168 / Prof. Dimuro
| This course offers a survey of major American authors whose works have shaped a national literature over the last two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and demographic diversity, all these novelists grapple with issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each transformed literary conventions to express their visions of the place of America in the world. We will read the following works from different stages in this literary history, including Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; Chopin’s The Awakening; Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets; Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; and short stories by Cather, James, and Hemingway. |
American Poetry since 1945
English 173B / Prof. Stefans
| The first generation of American poets to make a large impact in the post-War period include Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and John Berryman, the latter three of whom are usually classed as “Confessional” poets. By the late 50s, several poets and movements emerged that worked as a counterbalance to writing that was, by their standards, not representative of American life and cut off from contemporary language usage. These included the Beats (the most famous of whom was Allen Ginsberg), the surrealistic New York School Poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others) who often sought inspiration in the visual arts, and writers in the 70s involved with the emerging Black Arts, Chicano and Asian American movements (Amiri Baraka, the Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman and others). Arising in the wake of this generation of “New Americans” were the highly experimental Language writers (Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian and others) who explored the notion of a “poetics” that merged the formal and political. The last week of the course will be given over to considerations of how digital technology (starting in the 90s) has impacted how poetry is created and distributed in the present day. Weekly writing assignments (some creative) and a final paper or creative project required. |
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. |
Ethnic Comedy, Family Drama
Interdisciplinary Studies in American Culture
English 177 / 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
Castaways and Containers: Modernity at Sea
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature
English 118A / Prof. Turner
| This course explores the ambitions, challenges, and failures of globalization through the lens of castaway literature, with works spanning from the eighteenth century to the present. In today’s postindustrial economies, labor has been outsourced to other parts of the world, and we depend on global shipping networks to supply us with commodities and to relieve us of our massive outputs of waste. Manufactured goods, raw materials, trash, people, and nonhuman species all circulate the globe via container ships and shipping networks that we rarely consider when we purchase something at a local Target. This course moves back and forth between early modernity and the present to consider the wastes generated by global economic circuits.
This course topic is eligible for credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. |
Critical Approaches to Race and Ethnicity in Performance
Performance, Media, and Cultural Theory
English 127 / Prof. McMillan
| 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. |
Major American Writers
English 168 / Prof. Dimuro
| This course offers a survey of major American authors whose works have shaped a national literature over the last two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and demographic diversity, all these novelists grapple with issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each transformed literary conventions to express their visions of the place of America in the world. We will read the following works from different stages in this literary history, including Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; Chopin’s The Awakening; Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets; Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; and short stories by Cather, James, and Hemingway. |
American Poetry since 1945
English 173B / Prof. Stefans
| The first generation of American poets to make a large impact in the post-War period include Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and John Berryman, the latter three of whom are usually classed as “Confessional” poets. By the late 50s, several poets and movements emerged that worked as a counterbalance to writing that was, by their standards, not representative of American life and cut off from contemporary language usage. These included the Beats (the most famous of whom was Allen Ginsberg), the surrealistic New York School Poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others) who often sought inspiration in the visual arts, and writers in the 70s involved with the emerging Black Arts, Chicano and Asian American movements (Amiri Baraka, the Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman and others). Arising in the wake of this generation of “New Americans” were the highly experimental Language writers (Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian and others) who explored the notion of a “poetics” that merged the formal and political. The last week of the course will be given over to considerations of how digital technology (starting in the 90s) has impacted how poetry is created and distributed in the present day. Weekly writing assignments (some creative) and a final paper or creative project required. |
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. |
Ethnic Comedy, Family Drama
Interdisciplinary Studies in American Culture
English 177 / 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, Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, 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, Sayles’ Lone Star, 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. |
Carribean U.S. Latinx Poetry and Poetics
Topics in 20th and 21st Century American Literature
English 183C.2 / Prof. Foote
| This is a comparative course examining Latinx Caribbean poetry from the 1960s to the present. Through poetry, we will attend to how the Caribbean archipelago extends far beyond its physical geography and into a U.S. Latinx cultural imaginary. In doing so, we will trace poetic counterhistories that critique nationalist and colonial frameworks by thinking through the ways in which history bears on the present. To do so, we will adopt various theoretical frameworks that draw from performance studies, ecopoetics, and translation studies to support our close readings practices. The class is designed to develop students’ skills and confidence in analyzing poetry in general while attending to the particular poetics of the Caribbean. Together, we will think critically about the geographies of Latinx literature—from various locales in the United States to the Caribbean itself—to ask what poetry in particular can tell us about the histories and constructions of these places. The poets include: Richard Blanco, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Oliver Baez Bendorf, and Jasminne Mendez among others.
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 184.1 / Prof. Wang
| This 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 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. |