Spring 2023

Introduction to literary analysis, with close reading and carefully written exposition of selections from principal modes of literature: poetry, prose fiction, and drama. Minimum of 15 to 20 pages of revised writing. Satisfies Writing II requirement.

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major. Please note that specifically marked sections may be reserved for Dept. of English majors and minors. All other sections are open to students of all majors.

English 4HW confers College Honors credit. Students participating in the College Honors program may contact a Dept. of English advisor to request a seat in the class.

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.

“Careers in Humanities” challenges misassumptions regarding Humanities majors and their practical applications to life after graduation. In this course, students will explore a wide range of careers, with hands-on practice in crafting a personal professional narrative. Guest lectures will be given by UCLA professionals and alumni–all experts in career planning and local industries. Students will engage with workplace leaders, and simultaneously build a professional dossier–on paper or online–in preparation for life after UCLA with a humanities degree.

This course counts as an elective for the Professional Writing Minor.

This course is NOT a Dept. of English senior seminar; students in search of a senior seminar should enroll in ENGL 181B – 184 or M191A – M191E.

This course does NOT qualify for foreign literature in translation credit.

This course is for the staff of Westwind, UCLA’s Journal for the Arts. If you are interested in joining the Westwind staff, please familiarize yourself with the journal at www.westwind.ucla.edu, and come to the first Spring meeting (time and day posted in the Schedule of Classes.)

This course examines a range of Asian American literary writings—autobiography, realist novel, modernist narrative, short fiction, manifesto, and drama, among others—which depict Asians’ experiences in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1980s. Issues to look at include colonialism, empire-building, trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic migration, war memory, diaspora, interethnic and generational relations, social activism, and race/gender/class dynamics. Lectures will emphasize making sense of texts in contexts, with attention paid to how the narrative voice, thematic focus, and formal property of the works examined are shaped by the interplay between emergent ethnic authorship, evolving audiences, and social and cultural constraints on this Asian American discourse as a minoritarian formation.

Introduction to indigenous literatures of North America through reading fiction, poetry, and visual media. Consideration of how authors imagine indigenous lifeworlds, affective experiences, and genders and sexualities in ways that index and transcend colonial violence. Examination of how authors craft decolonial forms of memory, intergenerational connection, and relationships with more-than-human life. Study asks how indigenous literatures represent significant spaces of cultural, ecological, feminist, and queer theorizing, with the power to enact a decolonial future.

The genre of the novel has had a long association with conventional narratives of normative personal development and with stories of compulsory heterosexual marriage. This has meant that writers who wanted to queer the novel have had to find innovative ways to disrupt the form and interfere with those normative trajectories. American novels, in particular, have sometimes been claimed as generally queerer than the novels of other national traditions. This course will study some nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century queer American novels, all of which feature such formal and thematic disruptions. The course will have a dual focus: on a particular literary genre (the novel, in various forms) and a particular content (queer experience, very broadly understood). We will read Charles Brockden Brown’s Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (1799-1800), Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite (c. 1846-47), Margaret J. M. Sweat’s Ethel’s Love-Life (1859), Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme (1861), Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Marsh Island (1885), Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1891/1924), Charles Warren Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company (1904) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), all of them offering unsettling variations on novelistic form and content.

This course examines a range of Asian American literary writings—autobiography, realist novel, modernist narrative, short fiction, manifesto, and drama, among others—which depict Asians’ experiences in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1980s. Issues to look at include colonialism, empire-building, trans-Pacific or trans-Atlantic migration, war memory, diaspora, interethnic and generational relations, social activism, and race/gender/class dynamics. Lectures will emphasize making sense of texts in contexts, with attention paid to how the narrative voice, thematic focus, and formal property of the works examined are shaped by the interplay between emergent ethnic authorship, evolving audiences, and social and cultural constraints on this Asian American discourse as a minoritarian formation.

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.

Chicana/Chicano literature from 1920s through Great Depression and World War II, ending with Chicana/Chicano civil rights movement. Oral and written narratives by writers including Conrado Espinoza, Jovita González, Cleofas Jaramillo, Angelico Chávez, Mario Suárez, Oscar Acosta, and Evangelina Vigil.

Introduction to indigenous literatures of North America through reading fiction, poetry, and visual media. Consideration of how authors imagine indigenous lifeworlds, affective experiences, and genders and sexualities in ways that index and transcend colonial violence. Examination of how authors craft decolonial forms of memory, intergenerational connection, and relationships with more-than-human life. Study asks how indigenous literatures represent significant spaces of cultural, ecological, feminist, and queer theorizing, with the power to enact a decolonial future.

In this seminar we examine 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. Novels include Caucasia (Danzy Senna) and A Feather on the Breath of God (Sigrid Nunez). Films include Banana Split (Kip Fulbeck) and Multifacial (Vin Diesel).

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. Always been 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.

This course traces the rifts and relations between queer theory and feminist theory with particular attention given to how race structures theoretical debates around gender and sexuality. Students will consider the critical interventions of black and women of color feminisms, postcolonial feminism, queer of color critique, trans of color critique, and queer crip of color critique to engage ongoing discussions around Western colonial formations of modern human subjectivity, what constitutes care, consent, and capacity, how we make sense of intimacy, desire, and deviance, and the limits of aesthetic and political representation.

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to pursue departmental honors.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), a quintessentially American poet of widespread and indelible influence, was the first black person to win a Pulitzer Prize, for Annie Allen, in 1950. After Robert Hayden, of Detroit, Brooks was the second African American to serve as U.S. Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the equivalent of today’s U.S. Poet Laureate. Born in Topeka, Kansas (landmark of a transformational 1954 Supreme Court case), at age six Brooks moved with her family to Chicago, home of the poet Carl Sandburg, where she would spend the rest of her life. As a resident of the racially red-lined neighborhood of Bronzeville, Brooks observed and experienced the indignities as well as the triumphs of 20^th-century African Americans, turning their everyday struggles and celebrations into vital literary expressions of the human spirit.

Spanning from the end of World War I to the beginning of the 21^st century, the poet’s life and work encompass significant developments of modernity, from the struggle for civil rights and black empowerment to feminism and other liberation movements. The poet’s family was part of the great migration of African Americans from the rural South, where her grandparents had been enslaved in Kentucky and Tennessee, to the urban North where her father worked as a janitor, never realizing his dream of becoming a physician. Planting seeds of hope in their offspring, her parents were keen to support their daughter’s literary aspirations.

As a poet, Brooks participated in important literary movements that signaled her transition from traditional metered verse to alternative forms such as the sonnet-ballad, to modernist free verse and poems crafted with urgent messages for black readers. Having been encouraged in her youth by Langston Hughes, Brooks was known throughout her life for mentoring and encouraging younger poets. Our reading for this course will include a substantial selection of her poetry as well as her distinctive novel, Maud Martha.

This course offers a broad survey of major American authors whose enduring works have shaped a distinctive national literature over more than two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and growing demographic diversity, all of these writers grappled with fundamental issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the abstract ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each in their own way transformed literary conventions to express their unique visions of their place in America and in the world. We will read the following works selected from different crucial stages in this developing literary history of the United States, including Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography; Hannah W. Foster’s novel, The Coquette; Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Fanny Fern’s novel, Ruth Hall; Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Stephen Crane’s short novels, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother; Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Ernest Hemingway’s first collection of short stories, In Our Time.

This course offers both a survey of major poets and poetic movements in the United States since World War II and close engagement with the work of a handful of contemporary poets. In the first half of the term, we shall chart the course of American poetry since 1945 so as to establish a common foundation and a sense of the evolving critical, aesthetic, and political concerns of the times. We shall read poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, and many others. In the second half of the course, we shall dedicate each week to a book by a living poet. The goal here is to foster a deeper immersion in the work of that poet and a greater appreciation for the craft of composing a sequence of poems. All of these contemporary poets will make virtual visits to our class, which will allow students the opportunity to hear them read and to engage them in discussion. Throughout the term, class meetings will focus on honing different ways of reading poems and writing about them.

American Sex will be an interdisciplinary exploration of a series of significant episodes in the long and complicated history of American sex. From the secret diary of a Puritan minister, Michael Wigglesworth (1652-57), in which he recorded his sexual transgressions, to the scandalous “bad book affair” in Jonathan Edwards’s congregation (1744), to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s famous sex scandal (1790s), and on through the nineteenth century, what counted as “sex” constantly changed and what we call “sexuality” gradually emerged. To trace these changes and this emergence we will also study novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Julia Ward Howe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Margaret Sweat and Theodore Winthrop. In addition we will study notorious neoclassical marble sculptures by Hiram Powers (The Greek Slave, 1843), Harriet Hosmer (Zenobia in Chains, 1859), and Benjamin Paul Akers (The Dead Pearl Diver, 1858), as well as a scandalous painting by Thomas Eakins (Swimming, 1885). In each case, we will ask: how did these texts and art works understand and represent the acts, identities, and pleasures that today are organized under the rubric of “sexuality”? American Sex will combine rich primary materials with active reflection on interdisciplinary research methods.

This course satisfies the pre-1848 requirement for American Literature and Culture majors. Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature and Culture majors on first pass; English majors may enroll during second pass.

The genre of the novel has had a long association with conventional narratives of normative personal development and with stories of compulsory heterosexual marriage. This has meant that writers who wanted to queer the novel have had to find innovative ways to disrupt the form and interfere with those normative trajectories. American novels, in particular, have sometimes been claimed as generally queerer than the novels of other national traditions. This course will study some nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century queer American novels, all of which feature such formal and thematic disruptions. The course will have a dual focus: on a particular literary genre (the novel, in various forms) and a particular content (queer experience, very broadly understood). We will read Charles Brockden Brown’s Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (1799-1800), Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite (c. 1846-47), Margaret J. M. Sweat’s Ethel’s Love-Life (1859), Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme (1861), Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Marsh Island (1885), Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1891/1924), Charles Warren Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company (1904) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), all of them offering unsettling variations on novelistic form and content.

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.

This course traces the rifts and relations between queer theory and feminist theory with particular attention given to how race structures theoretical debates around gender and sexuality. Students will consider the critical interventions of black and women of color feminisms, postcolonial feminism, queer of color critique, trans of color critique, and queer crip of color critique to engage ongoing discussions around Western colonial formations of modern human subjectivity, what constitutes care, consent, and capacity, how we make sense of intimacy, desire, and deviance, and the limits of aesthetic and political representation.

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to pursue departmental honors.

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.