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.

 

Fulfills a preparatory requirement for the English or American Literature & Culture major and a lower-division requirement for the Creative Writing minor.

 

Fulfills Writing II requirement.

 

Additional sections of English 4W may open if the waitlist fills.

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 a lower-division requirement for the Creative Writing minor.

 

Fulfills Writing II requirement. Unlike the regular academic year, summer offerings of ENGL 20W do not require an application.

 

Additional sections of English 20W may open if the waitlist fills.

What constitutes “appropriate” literature for children and adolescents? Who gets to decide? This course focuses on the historically contingent nature of these questions by inviting students to read books that have been removed from or kept off of American school shelves over the course of the last century or so. We will consider what it means to analyze these controversial texts as literary works: What do we–and other students–stand to learn from them? What artistic merit do they have or lack, and how do we even define “artistic merit”? Possible readings include Melissa (Alex Gino), The Hate U Give (Angie Thomas), Lysistrata (Aristophanes), Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), Forever (Judy Blume), and Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman). We will supplement our primary readings with excerpts from relevant legal proceedings and scholarly criticism. Assignments will include weekly discussion posts and a research essay.

Course cancelled for summer 2026.

“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

 

Los Angeles is a city of myths, erasures, and contested spaces—shaped as much by freeways, redlines, and watersheds as by novels, films, and screenplays. This interdisciplinary, digital-humanities course asks how L.A. has been imagined over the last 150 years, and how those representations shape our understanding of urban space, race, class, memory, and belonging. Moving through literature, film, television, music, and visual culture, we return again and again to three questions: Who gets to tell the story of L.A.? Whose stories are marginalized or erased? And how does the city keep reinventing itself through narrative?

Beyond the page and screen, the course centers digital and place-based learning: rather than only reading about Los Angeles, you work directly with the city as data and as archive. In weekly hands-on practica, you’ll use digitized collections and online exhibits from institutions such as the LA Public Library, the Huntington Library, Mapping Inequality, and the L.A. as Subject alliance, building toward a creative final project or ArcGIS StoryMap that traces the texts we read across the city’s actual geography. This is “thick mapping”: the layering of stories, sources, and places into spatial narratives that take seriously whose history a map includes and whose it leaves out. From the vanished Victorian mansions of Bunker Hill to the streets of South L.A., we examine how artists and everyday Angelenos have responded to migration and displacement, the rise of Hollywood’s “dream factory,” subcultures and countercultures, racialized violence and inequality, and ongoing environmental crises.

L.A. may be the most photographed, filmed, and written-about city in the world, yet it remains deeply misunderstood—a utopia of sunshine and opportunity, a dystopia of smog and exclusion, often in the same frame. This course treats L.A. as a dynamic text to be read, mapped, and reimagined.

 

Consideration of ways in which discourses of otherness circulate and operate in speculative fiction. From Frankenstein’s monster to encounters with alien species in outer space, the genre has a long history of exploring cultural conceptions of alterity, as well as contact zones where divergent ideologies and values collide. Study will explore texts—primarily, though not exclusively, American—that critically evaluate our notions of the Other in its various guises: the foreign, the uncanny, the monstrous, the threatening, the incomprehensible, the alluring. Course objective is to critically evaluate how speculative fiction reflects, informs, reorients, and shifts cultural understandings of difference. Authors may include Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula K. Le Guin, and China Miéville.

Course cancelled for 2026.

In a world increasingly dominated by images, the power of one’s “face card” seems increasingly important. This course explores contemporary manipulations of the face in photography, film, and digital media to understand the significance of the face in current debates over desire, identity, and surveillance. We will examine works in a variety of contemporary media, including Ruth Ozeki’s The Face: A Time Code (2015), Kim Kardashian’s Selfish (2015), YouTube makeup tutorials of the early 2000s, and other works. There will be a creative option for the final project.

“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

 

Los Angeles is a city of myths, erasures, and contested spaces—shaped as much by freeways, redlines, and watersheds as by novels, films, and screenplays. This interdisciplinary, digital-humanities course asks how L.A. has been imagined over the last 150 years, and how those representations shape our understanding of urban space, race, class, memory, and belonging. Moving through literature, film, television, music, and visual culture, we return again and again to three questions: Who gets to tell the story of L.A.? Whose stories are marginalized or erased? And how does the city keep reinventing itself through narrative?

Beyond the page and screen, the course centers digital and place-based learning: rather than only reading about Los Angeles, you work directly with the city as data and as archive. In weekly hands-on practica, you’ll use digitized collections and online exhibits from institutions such as the LA Public Library, the Huntington Library, Mapping Inequality, and the L.A. as Subject alliance, building toward a creative final project or ArcGIS StoryMap that traces the texts we read across the city’s actual geography. This is “thick mapping”: the layering of stories, sources, and places into spatial narratives that take seriously whose history a map includes and whose it leaves out. From the vanished Victorian mansions of Bunker Hill to the streets of South L.A., we examine how artists and everyday Angelenos have responded to migration and displacement, the rise of Hollywood’s “dream factory,” subcultures and countercultures, racialized violence and inequality, and ongoing environmental crises.

L.A. may be the most photographed, filmed, and written-about city in the world, yet it remains deeply misunderstood—a utopia of sunshine and opportunity, a dystopia of smog and exclusion, often in the same frame. This course treats L.A. as a dynamic text to be read, mapped, and reimagined.