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 American Literature & Culture major. Please note that 2-3 designated sections are reserved for Dept. of English majors and minors. All other sections are open to students of all majors.

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 & Culture major.

Designed to introduce fundamentals of creative writing and writing workshop experience. Emphasis on poetry, fiction, drama, or creative nonfiction depending on wishes of instructor(s) during any given term. Readings from assigned texts, weekly writing assignments (multiple drafts and revisions), and final portfolio required. Satisfies Writing II requirement.

 

Enrollment by instructor consent and NOT by enrollment pass time: Interested students should apply by 8 pm on September 15. Enrollment preference for English 20W will be given to first and second-year students. Approved applicants will receive a PTE directly from the instructor.

 

To apply, please prepare a brief (no more than 250 words) note explaining why you wish to take this course, and what previous experience you have with creative writing courses (if any—none required!).

Applications may be submitted through our approved web form, which you can access HERE beginning June 26. Students applying to English 20W should enroll in an alternate course during their enrollment passes, and should not assume that they will be admitted.

 

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

 

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

This seminar explores a range of literary and media forms related to the themes of bodies, health, and illness, including but not limited to memoirs, graphic novels, podcasts, film, and poetry. There will be at least one field trip to historical archives and/or local museums. 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. We also will discuss the value and limits of categories such as normality and wellness. This course will highlight universal creative expression and engage 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 16.

In this course, designed specifically for English 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.

Not open to students who previously completed ENGL 110T with Prof. Stephan.

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.

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 as listed in the Schedule of Classes!

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.

 

Earns pre-1848 credit for the American Literature & Culture major.

After a brief survey of the literatures of discovery and exploration, a close look at the motives and forms of Puritan writing, from Bradford to Edwards, ending with its challenge from Franklin and other texts of foreign-sourced Enlightenment. Regular quizzes, two papers, ID final. OLD SCHOOL: Not for the casual or the credit-motivated.

 

Earns pre-1848 credit for the American Literature & Culture major.

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.

Autobiography has been essential to the emergence of queer identities in the modern world. Autobiographies, memoirs, and other genres of self-writing have to do with selfhood and subjectivity; gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual and other queer forms of selfhood and subjectivity have often been articulated in such forms and even, it can be argued, were substantially created by autobiographical forms. This course will explore various self-authoring forms (including several diaries, a travel narrative, several memoirs, a medical case study, a graphic novel, and a film). Some of them are queer in ways anyone would recognize, such as Mary MacLane’s remarkable I Await the Devil’s Coming (first published in 1902 under a more innocuous title, The Story of Mary MacLane), Ralph Werther’s Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918), Jonathan Caouette’s film Tarnation (2003), and Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). Others will test the boundaries of what we mean by “queer,” for example the Diary of Michael Wigglesworth (1653-1657) and Margaret J. M. Sweat’s autobiographical novel, Ethel’s Love-Life (1859). Careful attention will be given to the ways in which queer gender and sexuality intersect with experiences of race, ethnicity, class, and nationality.

 

Texts:

Wigglesworth, Michael. The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653-1657.

Sweat, Margaret J. M. Ethel’s Love-Life. 1859.

Whitman, Walt. Memoranda During the War. 1875-76.

MacLane, Mary. The Story of Mary MacLane. 1902.

Werther, Ralph. Autobiography of an Androgyne. 1922.

Arenas, Reinaldo. Before Night Falls: A Memoir. 1992.

Caouette, Jonathan. Tarnation. 2004.

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. 2006.

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.

 

Earns pre-1848 credit for the American Literature & Culture major.

This course examines African diaspora theater concerned with questions of liberation, decolonization, and revolution. We begin with a history of African Americans in theater, considering lively debates about aesthetics and politics from the era of slavery and emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. We then turn to the development of revolutionary theater in the 1960s, animated by decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, and the proliferation of the Black Arts Movement in the United States. We end with a look at developments in contemporary theater that continue to expand the boundaries of race, performance, and spectacle. Readings may include Amiri Baraka, Aimé Césaire, Lorraine Hansberry, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

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.

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 those who endure such traumas use new spiritual frameworks to make sense of them. We’ll examine both the castaway episodes and Native American captivities experienced by European settlers and the dislocation and enslavement they inflicted on Indigenous and African people. And we’ll compare European 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 gender, faith, and race in narrating tragedy.

 

Earns pre-1848 credit for the American Literature & Culture major.

Not open for credit to students who took ENGL 87 with Prof. Mazzaferro in Spring 2021.

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, Nelson Algren, 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.

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 19^th century—our emphasis will be on 20^th– and 21^st-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.

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.

This course will primarily—but not exclusively—focus on younger voices in the contemporary poetry scene, including writers who have only recently published their first books. We will also read established poets who either live in Southern California or have some connection to the region, including selected Mexican poets in translation.

 

Course requirements include:

• Weekly writing assignments (e.g., short analytical essays, creative exercises, etc.)
• A group presentation on a poet or poetry-related topic
• A final project: either a short research paper or a creative work, due during finals week

Class sessions will primarily be discussion-based, with a focus on close reading of individual poems. Occasionally, short lectures will supplement our discussions. Additionally, 2–3 poets will be invited to visit the class—either in person or virtually—to read their work and engage with student questions.

This course examines recent trends in contemporary American fiction, focusing in particular on the past thirty years of literary output from U.S. 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, Jennifer Egan, and Tao Lin.

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).

This course studies U.S. culture through literature produced during a period of significant turmoil and crisis. Historically, this period is framed by two controversial figures emblematic of a kind of American repression: Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Focusing on literature, we will consider how music, visual arts, and media engage the socio-political conditions that shape U.S. society. This is a period where the US walks both in the shadow of nuclear annihilation and toward a hope for humanity’s progress. Race as a technology of modern social order proves central since the United States has played a unique role among nations in its struggles over the role race has played in the conflicts and hopes of U.S. social organization. While our focus will be on literature, we will approach the literary as one manifestation of cultural expression. We will analyze a variety of cultural texts – musical, visual, and mediatized – in order to assess their various meanings and significances.

 

The goals of the class will be: 1) to practice speaking and writing in clear and organized ways; 2) to analyze cultural texts critically; 3) to generate original ideas by synthesizing different critical thoughts and analyses; 4) to learn about U.S. life and culture in the post-war era. A large part of the class involves discussion and in-class writing, so attendance is required.

 

Not open for credit to students who completed ENGL 177 with Prof. Perez-Torres in 21F or 23W.

Science fiction is a tool for thinking about our relationship to natural and technological environments now and in the future. This course will focus on real and imagined nature in SF from different regions and languages to explore how the genre portrays environmental crises, and what solutions it envisions. Are human bodies and societies seen as part of nature or outside of it, and how does that affect what “being human” means? How do the activities of humans, animals, aliens, machines, and natural forces transform environments? How do social inequalities shape visions of nature? What work do genres such as apocalyptic narrative, disaster film, cli-fi and utopia do? Do visions of our environmental future have to be bleak, or are there optimistic possibilities? Readings will include novels, graphic novels/comics, short stories, and films by Bacigalupi, Dick, LeGuin, Miyazaki, Okorafor, Robinson, Yamashita, among others, and critical essays on science fiction.

 

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

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.

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 will primarily—but not exclusively—focus on younger voices in the contemporary poetry scene, including writers who have only recently published their first books. We will also read established poets who either live in Southern California or have some connection to the region, including selected Mexican poets in translation.

 

Course requirements include:

• Weekly writing assignments (e.g., short analytical essays, creative exercises, etc.)
• A group presentation on a poet or poetry-related topic
• A final project: either a short research paper or a creative work, due during finals week

Class sessions will primarily be discussion-based, with a focus on close reading of individual poems. Occasionally, short lectures will supplement our discussions. Additionally, 2–3 poets will be invited to visit the class—either in person or virtually—to read their work and engage with student questions.

This course examines recent trends in contemporary American fiction, focusing in particular on the past thirty years of literary output from U.S. 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, Jennifer Egan, and Tao Lin.

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).

This course studies U.S. culture through literature produced during a period of significant turmoil and crisis. Historically, this period is framed by two controversial figures emblematic of a kind of American repression: Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Focusing on literature, we will consider how music, visual arts, and media engage the socio-political conditions that shape U.S. society. This is a period where the US walks both in the shadow of nuclear annihilation and toward a hope for humanity’s progress. Race as a technology of modern social order proves central since the United States has played a unique role among nations in its struggles over the role race has played in the conflicts and hopes of U.S. social organization. While our focus will be on literature, we will approach the literary as one manifestation of cultural expression. We will analyze a variety of cultural texts – musical, visual, and mediatized – in order to assess their various meanings and significances.

 

The goals of the class will be: 1) to practice speaking and writing in clear and organized ways; 2) to analyze cultural texts critically; 3) to generate original ideas by synthesizing different critical thoughts and analyses; 4) to learn about U.S. life and culture in the post-war era. A large part of the class involves discussion and in-class writing, so attendance is required.

 

Not open for credit to students who completed ENGL 177 with Prof. Perez-Torres in 21F or 23W.

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.