Lower Division Courses in English (Freshman, Sophomore)
Critical Reading and Writing
English 4W / TA
| 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. |
Introduction to American Cultures: “There Will Be Blood”
English 11 / Prof. Mazzaferro
| This course provides a gateway to the American Literature and Culture major. We’ll explore major themes and concepts from American cultural history in light of the political, ecological, and racial reckonings taking place in our own moment. Toggling between historical material and more recent representations, we’ll consider the forms of Indigenous dispossession, plantation slavery, environmental destruction, imperial warfare, and coercive community formation that shaped the history of the nation and the hemisphere. Applying interdisciplinary methods to a variety of genres and media (including letters, sermons, poetry, political pamphlets, images, speeches, graphic novels, fiction, and film), we’ll trace throughlines from the first arrival of Europeans on New World shores in the fifteenth century to the height of U.S. dominance in the twentieth. Our readings will include early texts by Spanish conquistadors, Puritan settlers, antislavery activists, and Atlantic revolutionaries and later works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, William Apess, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison that remember and reimagine those stories. Finally, we’ll investigate the unique place of California and Los Angeles in utopian and dystopian figurations of American life through fiction by John Steinbeck, essays by Joan Didion, and a film by Paul Thomas Anderson whose foreboding title encapsulates the course’s interrogation of inequality, excessive resource consumption, and holy violence. |
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.
Westwind Journal
Undergraduate Practicum in English
English M192 / 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 Spring meeting as posted in the Schedule of Classes! |
The Letter of the Law
Junior Research Seminar
English 180R / Prof. Hyde
| The skills developed in literary study—textual interpretation and rhetorical persuasion—are among the most valued in legal practice. In the U.S., these skills play an especially important role in legal practice for a simple reason: the U.S. Constitution is written. As such, it is textually bound, subject to interpretation, and fairly difficult to revise. This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of law and literature by examining the role that rhetoric played in the cultural development of the United States in the long 19th century. Students will read founding documents and the revolutionary literary traditions that developed alongside them (the slave narrative, transcendentalism, etc.). Since this is a “junior seminar,” the course will give students a chance to develop their reading and writing skills in a small, interactive format. Primary readings will include works by Jefferson, Douglass, Stanton, Thoreau, Stowe, and Melville. Assignments will likely include in-class writing, an outline, presentation, quizzes, and an essay-based final.
This course confers English major Elective credit, and is NOT a senior seminar course. |
Upper Division Courses in English
Courses that meet the American Literature and Culture major requirement for pre-1848 material are marked with brackets.
ORIGINS – Beginnings, Events, and Trajectories
Indigenous Wonderworks, Feminisms, and Futures
Studies in Native American and Indigenous Literatures
English 106 / Prof. Mo’e’hahne
| This course troubles dominant conceptions of science fiction and genre by reading Indigenous horror, fantasy, and speculative storytelling. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, queer, and more-than-human frameworks, we will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use wonder to subvert genre conventions and challenge colonial violence (past and present). We will also contemplate how Indigenous fiction, visual culture, and sonic media depict diverse understandings of space-time, embodiment, being, kinship, and relations with more-than-human worlds. Content considerations: our materials engage ecological violence, gender and sexual violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.
Not open for credit to students who have previously completed ENGL 115E with Prof. Mo’e’hahne. |
Keywords in Theory: Abolition
English 122.2 / Prof. Turner
| In the United States today, abolition has become a broad strategy for achieving social justice; it tends to take as its objects the prison industrial complex and the systemic racial structures that have resulted in this country’s status as the largest jailer in the world. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, abolitionists were those who sought to end the slave trade and the practice of slavery itself. This course investigates the continuities and discontinuities between these two abolitionist moments. Throughout, we’ll consider how contemporary abolitionist frameworks might aid us in approaching the literature and culture of the past, and vice versa.
This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to apply to the departmental honors program. |
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 convert, the heretic, the settler, the captive, the enslaver, the enslaved, the preacher, the witch. Taking up a range of genres—reports, letters, sermons, autobiographies, natural histories, political pamphlets, legal codes, 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. |
American Literature, 1832 to 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. |
American Literature Fiction to 1900
English 167B / Prof. Hyde
| Study of American fiction (both novels and short stories) from its beginning to end of 19th century. |
IDENTITIES – Places, Communities, and Environments
The Queer 90s
Queer Literatures and Cultures after 1970
English M101C / Prof. Kim 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 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 AIDS crisis, 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 different, radical, and new. We will ask how the queer 90s sheds light on our contemporary moment, and how the recent queer past informs our sense of queerness in the present. |
Hip-Hop Poetics
Topics in African American Literature and Culture
English M104E / Prof. Bradley
| Some say hip hop was born just over fifty years ago when a creative kid with a big sound system threw a back-to-school party in the Bronx. But hip hop as we know it today is at once much older and much younger than that. This class will center on one facet of hip hop—the lyric performance of rap artists—against the backdrop of its expansive culture. We’ll consider dozens of rappers, from Tupac and Biggie to Kendrick and Drake, from MC Lyte and J. Cole, from Doechii to GloRilla. The goal of the course is (1) to build a literary-critical vocabulary for discussing rap’s poetics and (2) to gain a greater appreciation for the art and science of rapping to a beat. |
Introduction to Latino/Latina Literature
English M105D / Prof. Foote
| This class is a survey of U.S. Latinx literature and an introduction to its major cultural trends. We will study literature pertaining to various regional and national origin groups (the Caribbean, Mexico, South America, and Central America), and discuss how these works speak to the (contested) definition of “Latinx” and the heterogeneity of Latinx communities in the U.S. Latinx literature has a deep history that emerges from literary traditions spanning more than four centuries, but our course will focus on more contemporary works that have contributed to the tradition’s ongoing historical and aesthetic lineages. While we will begin with texts that have been central to establishing a canon of Latinx literature, we will continue with others that enrich, complicate, and call such canons into question. Together, we will read from a range of genres—novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and plays—to ask what these literary forms can tell us about the socio-historical issues facing Latinx communities both today and in the past. |
Indigenous Wonderworks, Feminisms, and Futures
Studies in Native American and Indigenous Literatures
English 106 / Prof. Mo’e’hahne
| This course troubles dominant conceptions of science fiction and genre by reading Indigenous horror, fantasy, and speculative storytelling. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, queer, and more-than-human frameworks, we will interrogate the colonial dimensions of popular speculative genres. Working with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” we will consider how authors use wonder to subvert genre conventions and challenge colonial violence (past and present). We will also contemplate how Indigenous fiction, visual culture, and sonic media depict diverse understandings of space-time, embodiment, being, kinship, and relations with more-than-human worlds. Content considerations: our materials engage ecological violence, gender and sexual violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.
Not open for credit to students who have previously completed ENGL 115E with Prof. Mo’e’hahne. |
Contemporary Asian American Prose
Topics in Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
English 109 / Prof. Wang
| This course examines the dynamic array of voices, forms, and styles in Asian American prose from the 2000s to the present day. We will consider how work (including short fiction, memoir, essays, and comic novellas) by Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Nami Mun, Adrian Tomine, Anthony Veasna So and others grapple with issues of cultural identity, displacement, and stereotypes, utilizing distinct narrative techniques and perspectives. By critically engaging with this increasingly complex body of writing, we will explore and challenge prevailing notions surrounding race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and the immigrant experience. |
Food Cultures & Food Politics
English M118F / Prof. Hall
| Eating can be a fraught undertaking. As the food studies scholar Maggie Kilgour points 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 material and 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, films, recipes, life writing, and critical essays – that grapple with the complicated issues surrounding food, appetite, hunger, and taste.
This course fulfills an upper-division requirement for the Literature & the Environment minor. Students in the minor may contact Steph Bundy (stephanie@english.ucla.edu) to enroll. |
Indigiqueer and Trans* Aesthetics
Feminist and Queer Theory
English M126 / Prof. Mo’e’hahne
| This course traces Indigenous queer, trans*, and gender-expansive aesthetics from the late 20th to the early 21st centuries. We will contemplate the ways that artists and theorists craft gender-expansive lifeways, erotics, embodiments, and kinship with human and more-than-human worlds. We will also consider how artists and authors enact global anti-colonial solidarities and imagine healing pathways for Indigenous communities, genders, and sexualities across Turtle Island and beyond. Our texts will include queer, trans*, nonbinary, and Two Spirit poetry, experimental cinema, photography, visual art, young adult fiction, performance art, and critical theory from Canada, Greenland, the United States, Mexico, and Palestine. Content considerations: our materials engage gender and sexual violence, racial violence, anti-migrant violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.
This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to apply to the departmental honors program. |
Lives of Property in the Colonial Atlantic World [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
Transatlantic Literatures and Cultures
English 133 / Prof. Turner
| This course asks how colonial models of property and personhood shaped both the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the world we continue to inhabit today. 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.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors. |
Voices of the Early Black Atlantic [PRE-1848 CREDIT]
Literature of Americas
English 135 / Prof. Silva
| This course focuses on voices of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Black Atlantic. Drawing primarily from Anglophone texts written by authors of African and European descent, we will try to define what we mean by voice in a literature class, and what we understand the relation between voice and narrative to be. Our work will be driven by a number of intellectual and ethical questions: how do we recognize diverse voices in the historical archives? How do we recover them for twenty-first-century audiences? What is at stake in this recovery? These questions will push us to think carefully about the nature of our reading practices, particularly as we look to the past. Together, we will strive to imagine the modes of literacy and illiteracy that we bring to our encounters with materials from the past and we will continue to ask ourselves what we mean by voice, by speech, by silence, and by authority—particularly as these relate to a broad constellation of forms, genres, and modes of mediation.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors. |
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? |
American Poetry since 1945
English 173B / Prof. Bradley
| 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’ll chart the course of American poetry since 1945 so that we may establish a shared foundation and a sense of the evolving critical, aesthetic, and political concerns of the times. We’ll 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 term, we’ll read the complete works of several living poets. The goal here is to foster a deeper immersion in the work of those poets 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. |
Contemporary American Short Fiction
English 174C / Prof. Torres
| An examination of the diversity and evolution of American short fiction over the last forty years. We’ll read stories about work, death, sex, tech, race, place, love, gender, class, climate, catastrophe, religion, justice, and more. Narratives will vary in length from flash fiction to novellas, with a primary focus on the short story form. By examining short stories historically, critically, and aesthetically, students will learn how to interpret and critique short fiction as a reflection of our contemporary society and collective humanity. Assignments will be both creative and analytical. Students will deepen their critical skills through essay writing, as well as craft their own short stories. |
MEDIA – Aesthetics, Genres, and Technologies
Hip-Hop Poetics
Topics in African American Literature and Culture
English M104E / Prof. Bradley
| Some say hip hop was born just over fifty years ago when a creative kid with a big sound system threw a back-to-school party in the Bronx. But hip hop as we know it today is at once much older and much younger than that. This class will center on one facet of hip hop—the lyric performance of rap artists—against the backdrop of its expansive culture. We’ll consider dozens of rappers, from Tupac and Biggie to Kendrick and Drake, from MC Lyte and J. Cole, from Doechii to GloRilla. The goal of the course is (1) to build a literary-critical vocabulary for discussing rap’s poetics and (2) to gain a greater appreciation for the art and science of rapping to a beat. |
Indigiqueer and Trans* Aesthetics
Feminist and Queer Theory
English M126 / Prof. Mo’e’hahne
| This course traces Indigenous queer, trans*, and gender-expansive aesthetics from the late 20th to the early 21st centuries. We will contemplate the ways that artists and theorists craft gender-expansive lifeways, erotics, embodiments, and kinship with human and more-than-human worlds. We will also consider how artists and authors enact global anti-colonial solidarities and imagine healing pathways for Indigenous communities, genders, and sexualities across Turtle Island and beyond. Our texts will include queer, trans*, nonbinary, and Two Spirit poetry, experimental cinema, photography, visual art, young adult fiction, performance art, and critical theory from Canada, Greenland, the United States, Mexico, and Palestine. Content considerations: our materials engage gender and sexual violence, racial violence, anti-migrant violence, violence against children, anti-queer and anti-trans* violence, and genocide.
This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students planning to apply to the departmental honors program. |
American Literature Fiction to 1900
English 167B / Prof. Hyde
| Study of American fiction (both novels and short stories) from its beginning to end of 19th century. |
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? |
American Poetry since 1945
English 173B / Prof. Bradley
| 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’ll chart the course of American poetry since 1945 so that we may establish a shared foundation and a sense of the evolving critical, aesthetic, and political concerns of the times. We’ll 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 term, we’ll read the complete works of several living poets. The goal here is to foster a deeper immersion in the work of those poets 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. |
Contemporary American Short Fiction
English 174C / Prof. Torres
| An examination of the diversity and evolution of American short fiction over the last forty years. We’ll read stories about work, death, sex, tech, race, place, love, gender, class, climate, catastrophe, religion, justice, and more. Narratives will vary in length from flash fiction to novellas, with a primary focus on the short story form. By examining short stories historically, critically, and aesthetically, students will learn how to interpret and critique short fiction as a reflection of our contemporary society and collective humanity. Assignments will be both creative and analytical. Students will deepen their critical skills through essay writing, as well as craft their own short stories. |
Senior/Capstone Seminars
Caribbean U.S. Latinx Poetry and Poetics
Topics 20th and 21st Century American Literature
English 183C / 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.
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass. |
Literature, Medicine, and the Unmaking of the Modern World
Capstone Seminar
English 184.7 / Prof. Silva
| This course invites us to think about the ways that medicine and community have shaped the histories and literatures of the United States. Beginning with the early colonial violence that defined European–Indigenous relations for centuries to come, we will ask ourselves two sets of questions: first, how do historical conceptions of illness and health set the terms through which writers imagine their communal ideal? Second, what are the strategies of inclusion and exclusion that continue to determine the boundaries of our public health debates? Reading from a number of genres including novels, poems, essays, memoirs, and pamphlets, we will consider the limits of our knowledge and vocabulary as we inquire into the meaning of immunity, susceptibility, knowledge, conspiracy, treatment, care, and medicine.
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass. |
Topics in African American Literature
English M191A/ Prof. Mullen
| Title and topic TBD.
Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass. |