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.

 

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English major. 

 

Fulfills Writing II requirement.

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.

 

 

Fulfills Writing II requirement. Not open to students with credit for English 20.

This course explores the earliest works of African American literature. The first writers of African descent living in the Caribbean, England, and North America are often read simply as a prelude to the more fully developed Black literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By contrast, this course presumes that the texts of the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic are worthy of study on their own. We’ll examine what one writer called African Americans’ “uncommon sufferings” and the literary frameworks they used to make sense of them. In the process, we’ll consider the relationship between forced migration and transatlantic mobility, the role of literacy and authorship in the quest for freedom, the intersection of race and gender, and the place of Christian theology, scientific enlightenment, capitalist enterprise, and revolutionary violence in Black antislavery discourse. Readings will include slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, political pamphlets, letters, poetry, fiction, and a recent graphic novel adaptation of The Confessions of Nat Turner.

 

**This course qualifies as a pre-1848 course for the American Literature and Culture major.

This course explores the earliest works of African American literature. The first writers of African descent living in the Caribbean, England, and North America are often read simply as a prelude to the more fully developed Black literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By contrast, this course presumes that the texts of the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic are worthy of study on their own. We’ll examine what one writer called African Americans’ “uncommon sufferings” and the literary frameworks they used to make sense of them. In the process, we’ll consider the relationship between forced migration and transatlantic mobility, the role of literacy and authorship in the quest for freedom, the intersection of race and gender, and the place of Christian theology, scientific enlightenment, capitalist enterprise, and revolutionary violence in Black antislavery discourse. Readings will include slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, political pamphlets, letters, poetry, fiction, and a recent graphic novel adaptation of The Confessions of Nat Turner.

 

**This course qualifies as a pre-1848 course for the American Literature and Culture major.

This six-week course is focused on cultural depictions of interracial encounters across borders. Students will interrogate the sociohistorical construction of the US-Mexico border from the 1850s to the present. Rather than viewing literature as a means to transparently understand other cultures and accumulate knowledge, students will approach literature as a subversive interface for critical discourse on topics related to racialization, borders, power, and desire across a transnational context in flux. Such topics include, but are not limited to, xenophobia, gendered violence, forced migration, imperialism, the American Dream, etc. Additionally, rather than view borders as fixed and inflexible infrastructures, students will reflect on their fungible nature from a transhistorical perspective.

Los Angeles has been alternately imagined as an Edenic paradise of orange groves and opportunity and as a dystopian realm of corruption and decay. In this course, we’ll reckon with the complex and often contradictory images of Los Angeles in a range of texts across literature, film, and media over the last 150 years.

 

Together we’ll interrogate the role these texts play in shaping understandings of and attitudes towards the city and the diverse communities that call it home. As we explore various neighborhoods across time, we’ll examine how writers, artists, and filmmakers have responded to migration and gentrification, extreme social and economic inequality and racist violence, the emergence and dominance of the Hollywood “dream factory,” and ongoing environmental crises in America’s second-largest city. Grounding our readings in history, geography, and urban study, we’ll become more familiar with the changing cultural landscapes, artistic and political movements, architectural and environmental features, and industrial conditions that continue to shape L.A.

Have you ever observed a boomer and wondered “Why are you like this?” In this course, we’ll try to answer that question and others by looking through the lens of children’s literature in the boomer era. From The Red Badge of Courage to The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, the books boomers read as kids are full of fun, adventure, death, mystery, and all kinds of ideas about how Americans are and how they should be. By investigating what children and teens were reading in schools and outside them in the 1940s-70s, we’ll come away with a fuller picture of what ideas about gender, race, class, and politics went into the formation of this influential generation, and we’ll learn to think about the texts we’ve been nourished on ourselves in similar ways. What ideas and images did we glean from the books we read as children? In what ways did these texts draw on understandings that might be more similar to the baby boomer generation’s than we realize? And, how might we (as kids and as readers) still be influenced by the powerful ideas that came out of the boomer era–about the family, about war, about civil rights and women’s rights, etc.? We’ll think about how our course texts and cultural touch-stones form our image of America in the mid-20th century, and we’ll learn to complicate this image with close and sustained reading, contextual and archival research, and sophisticated analysis.