Winter 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 designated sections are 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 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 a variety of 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 is a required preparation course for the American Literature and Culture major. Students in other majors may enroll for Foundations or Diversity credit.

This course investigates the origins and significance of the early American novel. Reading five representative works of prose fiction from the long eighteenth century, we’ll theorize the genre as a whole and explore the early American novel’s differences from its metropolitan British counterparts. We’ll examine the genre’s relationship to historical developments like capitalism, colonialism, Atlantic slavery, scientific enlightenment, religious awakening, and democratic revolution in order to illuminate modern hierarchies of gender, race, class, and faith. We’ll track shifting attitudes toward facticity and fictionality by considering the novel’s debts to nonfictional forms like letters, reports, sermons, natural histories, captivity narratives, and autobiographies. And we’ll analyze formal features like perspective, characterization, and emplotment as well as thematic oppositions like civilization vs. savagery, intimacy vs. publicity, and domesticity vs. violence. Assignments will include a close reading essay, secondary source response, and final research paper.

This course is a required preparation course for the American Literature and Culture major. Students in other majors may enroll for Foundations or Diversity credit.

This course provides instruction in critical writing about literature and culture specifically for English major transfer students at UCLA. Its goal is to help students improve their skills and abilities at literary and cultural analysis. It’s a workshop for discovering richer literary questions, developing more nuanced analyses of complex texts, sustaining arguments, and developing your own authoritative voice. The course assumes writing is a process, so students write, rewrite, and workshop all writing assignments. Requirements include a number of low-stakes shorter writing tasks (1-3 pages) and a final paper (6-8 pages). Grades will be based 35% on your final paper (including notes, prewriting, and drafts) and 65% on other written assignments and your class participation.

English 110T qualifies as an elective for the English major and the Professional Writing Minor and cannot be taken for credit if you have taken English 110A.

Enrollment is limited to transfer students: please contact the English undergraduate advising office via MyUCLA MessageCenter to enroll.

What does it mean to engage in “public writing” or to be a “public intellectual? This course broadens students’ concept of what it means to write about literature by exploring the history and practice of writing literary criticism for a general (rather than for a specifically academic) audience. We’ll pay particular attention to the range of venues that have emerged for writers to publish their work for non-specialist readers. The course will include extensive opportunities for critical writing in a variety of forms and for a variety of audiences, as well as building research skills for a variety of applications, including a culminating portfolio project.

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

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 Winter meeting as posted in the Schedule of Classes!

Introduction to interdisciplinary study of race and ethnicity, with primary focus on literature. Through examination of institutions that form understanding of race—citizenship, nationalism, class, gender, and labor—interrogation of how we come to think of ourselves and others as having race, and effects of such racialized thinking. Course is not about any particular racial or ethnic group, but highlights creation of ethnic categories and their effects on cultural production.

This course is open to students of all majors for Diversity and/or Foundations credit.

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 castaway, the captive, the convert, the heretic, the preacher, the witch, the master, the slave. Tackling a range of genres—settlement reportage, sermons, natural histories, political pamphlets, 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 the American Literature and Culture major; enrollment will be restricted to American Lit & Culture majors on first pass, and will open to English majors on second pass.

Introduction to interdisciplinary study of race and ethnicity, with primary focus on literature. Through examination of institutions that form understanding of race—citizenship, nationalism, class, gender, and labor—interrogation of how we come to think of ourselves and others as having race, and effects of such racialized thinking. Course is not about any particular racial or ethnic group, but highlights creation of ethnic categories and their effects on cultural production.

This course is open to students of all majors for Diversity and/or Foundations credit.

Introductory survey of 20th-century African American literature from New Negro Movement of post-World War I period to 1960s, including oral materials (ballads, blues, speeches) and fiction, poetry, and essays by authors such as Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ralph Ellison

Introductory survey of African American literary expression from late 1950s through 1970s. Topics include rise of Black Arts Movement of 1960s and emergence of black women’s writing in early 1970s, with focus on authors such as Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, and Ernest Gaines.

This course considers how Indigenous artists imagine alternative possibilities for intimacy and futurity by engaging in decolonial forms of wonder and speculation. Thinking with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” our readings trace nonrealist storytelling practices that resist normative conceptions of being, embodiment, temporality, and space. Reading contemporary Indigenous fiction, cinema, and graphic literatures, we will examine the ways that authors draw on and subvert diverse genre conventions (such as those found in horror, science fiction, and fantasy). We will ask: how do Indigenous wonderworks enact Indigenous cosmologies, ecological knowledges, and decolonial feminist relations with the more-than-human world? How do feminist and queer forms of wonder challenge heteropatriarchal violence while also creating decolonial forms of kinship and intergenerational connection? How are colonial apocalypses imagined as opportunities for creating queer Indigenous utopias?

This course asks how voices of the Early Black Atlantic constituted themselves in the literary and historical imagination of the era. Drawing from Anglophone texts written by authors of African and European descent between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries—including Diallo, Equiano, Gronniosaw, and Sutton, among others—we will consider the various forms that these voices inhabit, their modes of expression, and the tropes and figures associate with them. As the quarter progresses, we will ask ourselves what we mean by voice, by speech, by silence, by authorship, 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 the American Literature and Culture major; enrollment will be restricted to American Lit & Culture majors on first pass, and will open to English majors on second pass.

Broad survey of representative American writers across several centuries, designed to give concise account of broad narrative of American literary development, from origins through 19th century. Includes mainly works that have traditionally been identified as American classics and asks both what makes American literature distinctive and what its relations are to other literatures in English.

A little over two decades into the 21st century, new issues and forms of writing have arisen in poetry that are either brand new or were only inchoate in the century prior. This course aims not only to read poets who are exemplary of these developments but also the poetics — the aesthetic philosophies and assertions of what poets are or should be doing — that animate this creativity. Topics include: avant-garde poetry such as “conceptual” and digital literature; the critical discourse around the growing body of transgender and non-binary poetry; new angles on poetry by ethnic “minorities” including cross-cultural poetry; and the increasing interest in discovering ways to write “public” poetry and unearthing new “publics” themselves. Writers include Cathy Park Hong, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Ben Lerner, Elisabeth Houston and Craig Dworkin among many others. Students will also contribute to a class anthology of recent poetry in addition to their work on a series of short essays and creative assignments.

This course focuses on key works of modernist prose fiction by American writers in the decade following World War One. Selected readings reintroduce students to the astonishing variety of experimentation in narrative technique, controversial subject matter, and stylistic innovation demonstrated in the early work of classic authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner between the years 1919 and 1929. This is a class for students interested in reading great fiction, learning about modernism and avant-garde literary movements, thinking about early twentieth century conceptions of gender and queerness, and making connections to our own historico-cultural moment.

We examine the intersection of family and ethnicity as staged in comedy and drama in order to consider how literary and TV expressions of laughter, love, and emotional conflict have both reinforced the nuclear family ideal and challenged it by reimagining the American family variously (as single-parent and female-headed; as multi-generational and ethnic). We ask if there’s more to comedy than how many times it makes you laugh, or if accounting for changing times and mores can somehow compensate for jokes that age badly. Situation comedies include Father Knows Best, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Fresh Off the Boat, and Black-ish; TV dramedies include Girls and Louie. Dramatic fiction and autobiography (The Godfather, The Woman Warrior, Autobiography of Malcolm X) will be paired with comic novels (Portnoy’s Complaint, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, The Sellout). Telenovela-inspired Chicana literature (Caramelo and So Far from God) will be read alongside TV comedy and drama adapted from Latin American telenovelas (Ugly Betty, Jane the Virgin, Queen of the South).

Historically, this period is framed by two controversial figures: Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. We will look at literature, music, visual arts, and other media and consider their relationship to the socio-political conditions shaping an emerging post-war U.S. society. Race as a technology of modern social order will be central in our analysis since the United States has played a unique role among nations in its struggles over the function of race as central to and outside U.S. social order. While our focus will be on literature, we will approach the literary as one manifestation of cultural expression. A large part of the class will involve participation and so attendance in class is required.

Reading and discussion of lyric spiritual poetry by poets whose work has been influenced and informed by their religious faith traditions, including Native American, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim.

This course considers how Indigenous artists imagine alternative possibilities for intimacy and futurity by engaging in decolonial forms of wonder and speculation. Thinking with Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “Indigenous wonderworks,” our readings trace nonrealist storytelling practices that resist normative conceptions of being, embodiment, temporality, and space. Reading contemporary Indigenous fiction, cinema, and graphic literatures, we will examine the ways that authors draw on and subvert diverse genre conventions (such as those found in horror, science fiction, and fantasy). We will ask: how do Indigenous wonderworks enact Indigenous cosmologies, ecological knowledges, and decolonial feminist relations with the more-than-human world? How do feminist and queer forms of wonder challenge heteropatriarchal violence while also creating decolonial forms of kinship and intergenerational connection? How are colonial apocalypses imagined as opportunities for creating queer Indigenous utopias?

Broad survey of representative American writers across several centuries, designed to give concise account of broad narrative of American literary development, from origins through 19th century. Includes mainly works that have traditionally been identified as American classics and asks both what makes American literature distinctive and what its relations are to other literatures in English.

A little over two decades into the 21st century, new issues and forms of writing have arisen in poetry that are either brand new or were only inchoate in the century prior. This course aims not only to read poets who are exemplary of these developments but also the poetics — the aesthetic philosophies and assertions of what poets are or should be doing — that animate this creativity. Topics include: avant-garde poetry such as “conceptual” and digital literature; the critical discourse around the growing body of transgender and non-binary poetry; new angles on poetry by ethnic “minorities” including cross-cultural poetry; and the increasing interest in discovering ways to write “public” poetry and unearthing new “publics” themselves. Writers include Cathy Park Hong, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Ben Lerner, Elisabeth Houston and Craig Dworkin among many others. Students will also contribute to a class anthology of recent poetry in addition to their work on a series of short essays and creative assignments.

This course focuses on key works of modernist prose fiction by American writers in the decade following World War One. Selected readings reintroduce students to the astonishing variety of experimentation in narrative technique, controversial subject matter, and stylistic innovation demonstrated in the early work of classic authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner between the years 1919 and 1929. This is a class for students interested in reading great fiction, learning about modernism and avant-garde literary movements, thinking about early twentieth century conceptions of gender and queerness, and making connections to our own historico-cultural moment.

We examine the intersection of family and ethnicity as staged in comedy and drama in order to consider how literary and TV expressions of laughter, love, and emotional conflict have both reinforced the nuclear family ideal and challenged it by reimagining the American family variously (as single-parent and female-headed; as multi-generational and ethnic). We ask if there’s more to comedy than how many times it makes you laugh, or if accounting for changing times and mores can somehow compensate for jokes that age badly. Situation comedies include Father Knows Best, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Fresh Off the Boat, and Black-ish; TV dramedies include Girls and Louie. Dramatic fiction and autobiography (The Godfather, The Woman Warrior, Autobiography of Malcolm X) will be paired with comic novels (Portnoy’s Complaint, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, The Sellout). Telenovela-inspired Chicana literature (Caramelo and So Far from God) will be read alongside TV comedy and drama adapted from Latin American telenovelas (Ugly Betty, Jane the Virgin, Queen of the South).

Historically, this period is framed by two controversial figures: Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. We will look at literature, music, visual arts, and other media and consider their relationship to the socio-political conditions shaping an emerging post-war U.S. society. Race as a technology of modern social order will be central in our analysis since the United States has played a unique role among nations in its struggles over the function of race as central to and outside U.S. social order. While our focus will be on literature, we will approach the literary as one manifestation of cultural expression. A large part of the class will involve participation and so attendance in class is required.

For various cultural reasons, sexuality is particularly sensitive political subject. Indeed, sexual representation remains one of few cultural forms guaranteed to elicit strong response. Study provides research and analytical tools to investigate causes and effects of personal and political responses. More specifically, use of contemporary gender, race, class, and sexuality theories (among others) to help examine sexual representations in terms of shaping force they have in our lives. Examination of cultural force involves defining key terms, such as power, to interrogate how details of key representations manifest their cultural and personal work (effects on people’s values and conditions of existence, for example) on social justice. Students learn to interpret and explicate representations of sexuality in terms of their manipulation of power. Students learn to define key terms and interpret cultural representation in academic dialog with their peers and with scholars in their field.

Reserved for American Literature & Culture majors only on first pass. Open to English majors on second pass.

This course proceeds on a counter-intuitive premise: that the greatest hindrances to our understanding of what is “real” are those elements of literature and film that confirm our sense of the “everyday.” Instead, we will read and view speculative works as a form of “weird realism,” perhaps as examples of philosophy themselves that animate an ontology (the nature of being) that the world of appearances obscures. Fiction writers include H.P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas Ligotti among others; films include The Thing (1982), eXistenZ (1999) and Arrival (2016). Short works of philosophy by George Berkeley, David Hume, Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers and Quentin Meillassoux will also be assigned. Please be warned: some of the material is not for the faint of heart, so please do some research on the works and creators above prior to enrolling.

Reserved for American Literature & Culture majors only on first pass. Open to English majors on second pass.

This course examines key developments in contemporary African American literature, tracing lively debates about authenticity, identity, and tradition over the last four decades. We explore the links between aesthetic and political worlds, the interplay of race, gender, class, sexuality, and region, and the innovative responses of writers to the ongoing contradictions of emerging racial formations, neither reducible to what came before, nor radically in breach from it. In what ways is contemporary African American literature a coherent entity? To what extent does resistance form a central problematic in the field today? How do contemporary writers open up restrictive ideas about racial identity and community and highlight the multiplicity of African American identities, interrogating notions of authenticity and the demands of representation? How do they make sense of the contradictions of historical developments over the last four decades, where advances in racial justice have been haunted by the persistence of pernicious forms of discrimination and dispossession? The writers and artists we study not only reckon with these developments, they shape our understanding of their impact on ordinary lives by chronicling the psychic and social architecture of lived experiences of racism. They also take up the question of how and why contemporary forms of discrimination relate to previous racial regimes, probing whether the new century inaugurated a new racial order or documented the persistence of old forms of injustice and precarity. In doing so, they reshape our understanding of white supremacy, offering resources for imagining a more just world. Major topics we cover include: the literature of protest and dissent; memory, history, and the legacy of slavery; literary experimentation and speculation; satire, humor, and the search for new forms; the new African diaspora, migration, and displacement.

Reserved for American Literature & Culture majors only on first pass. Open to English majors on second pass.

CoursesCourses for the American Literature & Culture Major

Preparation for the Major

Critical Reading and Writing

Introduction to American Cultures

The Early American Novel

Upper Division Writing, Research, and Practicum Opportunities

Writing in the English Major: Transfer Students

Public Readers, Public Writers: Writing About Books for a 21st-Century Audience

Westwind Journal

Upper Division Courses in English

ORIGINS – Beginnings, Events, and Trajectories

Ways of Reading Race

Colonial Beginnings of American Literature [PRE-1848 CREDIT]

IDENTITIES – Places, Communities, and Environments

Ways of Reading Race

African American Literature from Harlem Renaissance to 1960s

African American Literature of the 1960s and 1970s

Indigenous Wonderworks, Feminisms, and Futurities

Voices of the Early Black Atlantic [PRE-1848 CLASS]

Major American Writers

21st Century Poetry and Poetics

American Fiction of the 1920s

MEDIA – Aesthetics, Genres, and Technologies

American Spiritual Poetry

Indigenous Wonderworks, Feminisms, and Futurities

Major American Writers

21st Century Poetry and Poetics

American Fiction of the 1920s

Senior/Capstone Seminars

Pornography and the Politics of Sexual Representation

Horror, the Supernatural, and Philosophy

Contemporary African American Literature

Upper Division American Culture Courses