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 sections 1-3 are reserved for Dept. of English majors and minors. All other sections are open to students of all majors.

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, and a fecund site of aesthetic and cultural production. We will explore the manifestation of these ideals across various contemporary literary and media-based forms—including poetry, visual culture, film, performance, photography, music, and art. In doing so, we will examine how artists, writers, and musicians perform “America” and/or “the American dream” and their relationship to it.

 

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: Continuing UCLA students should apply by 11:59 pm on July 3. 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 25. 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.

Readers have long been fascinated by the gothic excesses of nineteenth-century U.S. literature. However, critics have not always taken the gothic tendencies of early U.S. literature seriously—seeing in its overblown conventions the signs of an underdeveloped and almost juvenile culture. This seminar uses the early U.S. Gothic to introduce students to the interdisciplinary methods of the American Literature and Culture major. We will approach the Gothic—and its unreliable narrators, doppelgangers, and obsession with the uncanny—as an opportunity to understand the anxieties about identity and power that divided and haunted the tumultuous century between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Readings will include secondary criticism, as well as primary texts by Jefferson, Brown, Cusick, Sigourney, Apess, Poe, Hawthorne, and Crafts. Assignments will include a presentation, weekly in-class reading responses, a quote outline, and an essay-based final.

 

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 15.

In this course, students will learn the art and craft of literary criticism for a general (rather than for a specifically academic) 21^st-century audience. We will look at reviews of literary texts from the 18^th century to the present and examine the recent developments in literary and cultural criticism that have led to the emergence of internet publications dedicated to those forms, including sites like Public Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as the ways in which national and global periodicals have successfully adapted their book review sections to reach a wider internet-based audience. Finally, we will examine the ways in which contemporary book reviews encompass other forms of culture, especially visual and digital culture. Students will compile a portfolio of criticism and other writing culminating in a final pair of reviews of recent works, as well as a critical analysis of the role of book reviews and cultural criticism in historical and current contexts.

 

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 will prepare students to submit first-person writings to journals and magazines that publish works for college students and young adults.  Such works include memoirs and autobiographies, humor, opinion pieces, reviews, and cultural criticism.  We will explore the literary marketplace to determine which publishing venues are best suited to each individual’s work.  We will also learn how to submit one’s writing to 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.  Several editors will visit the class, offering advice about the publishing process.  Requirements:  2-3 pages of writing each week, participation in student critiques, and attendance.

 

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!

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.

 

Satisfies the pre-1848 requirement for the American Literature & Culture major.

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.

This course examines black revolutionary drama as a distinct genre. Beginning with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, we consider a longer history of African Americans in theater, considering lively debates about aesthetics and politics from the era of slavery and emancipation to the present. We also study the development of black theater in various historical contexts, across the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. We end with a look at developments in contemporary theater that continue to expand the boundaries of race, performance, and spectacle, including the turn to satire, theater and social movements, and collaborative writing. Students are expected to participate extensively during class, including discussion, in-class writing, and group assignments. Readings include Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Wole Soyinka, George C. Wolfe, Cheryl Dunye, Marlon Riggs, and Anna Deavere Smith.

This course engages with the ways that racial, sexual, and gender difference is produced, represented, and experienced as embodied sensation. How is difference felt on and in the body? How does sensation—pleasurable, painful, or a mix of both—become a site of knowledge, history, and power? Through literature, performance, and visual culture, alongside texts in critical race studies, Black and women of color feminisms, and queer theory, we will consider how subjects marked by difference forge new worlds at the same time that they bear histories of violence, in ways that might not be visible, but are felt.

Eating can be a fraught undertaking. As the food studies scholar Maggie Kilgour point 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 the material and the 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, fictional and documentary films, life writing, recipes, and critical essays – that grapple with the complicated issues surrounding food, appetite, hunger and taste.

This course will cover the major works of American dramatist Edward Albee (1928-2016), probably best known for his play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” made into a startling film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 1966. Albee’s plays, ranging from early work that bore resemblance to European trends such as the “Theatre of the Absurd” to his mid- and late-career plays that boldly satirized and critiqued American society — especially our shared illusions, interpersonal power games and inability to communicate — are at once hilarious and brutally frank. Albee’s complex relationship with the queer literary community — “I am not a gay writer. I am a writer who happens to be gay,” he said when receiving the Lambda Literary Pioneer award in 2011 — further complicates a reading of his work. We’ll read some of his most controversial and experimental plays as well as several that won the Pulitzer Prize. Weekly writing assignments and a final paper or creative project.

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.

This course examines black revolutionary drama as a distinct genre. Beginning with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, we consider a longer history of African Americans in theater, considering lively debates about aesthetics and politics from the era of slavery and emancipation to the present. We also study the development of black theater in various historical contexts, across the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. We end with a look at developments in contemporary theater that continue to expand the boundaries of race, performance, and spectacle, including the turn to satire, theater and social movements, and collaborative writing. Students are expected to participate extensively during class, including discussion, in-class writing, and group assignments. Readings include Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Wole Soyinka, George C. Wolfe, Cheryl Dunye, Marlon Riggs, and Anna Deavere Smith.

This course will cover the major works of American dramatist Edward Albee (1928-2016), probably best known for his play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” made into a startling film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 1966. Albee’s plays, ranging from early work that bore resemblance to European trends such as the “Theatre of the Absurd” to his mid- and late-career plays that boldly satirized and critiqued American society — especially our shared illusions, interpersonal power games and inability to communicate — are at once hilarious and brutally frank. Albee’s complex relationship with the queer literary community — “I am not a gay writer. I am a writer who happens to be gay,” he said when receiving the Lambda Literary Pioneer award in 2011 — further complicates a reading of his work. We’ll read some of his most controversial and experimental plays as well as several that won the Pulitzer Prize. Weekly writing assignments and a final paper or creative project.

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.

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.

This Senior 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 Charles Yu, Ling Ma, Rachel Khong, Ed Park, Cathy Park Hong, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and others.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This capstone seminar includes a creative project option for students meeting the capstone requirement for the Creative Writing minor.

Grounded in performance studies, this seminar focuses on aesthetic practices of endurance, surrender, failure, woundedness, and vulnerability in contemporary queer art and performance. What can we learn from the body pushed to its limits, on the line and laid bare for another? What happens when confronted with capacity that veers into debility? Through scholarship on queer form, disability and illness, trans studies, mad studies, kink and BDSM, and psychoanalysis, we will discuss what enduring queer performance teaches us about the openness of the self and the body, putting pressure on how we understand desire, survival, and repair, or, as Lauren Berlant writes, “how best to live on, considering.”

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.