Lower Division Courses in English (Freshman, Sophomore)
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, mass enslavement, 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 films) 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 eerily prophetic title encapsulates the course’s interrogation of inequality, excessive resource consumption, and holy violence.
This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the American Literature & Culture major.
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American Novel
English 85 / Prof. Mott
| We invite you to study the American novel as a cultural instrument, as an intervention in cultural conversations that reflect and shape the values, beliefs, and practices characteristic of U.S culture. We will provide you with guidance on and opportunities to practice asking questions about how novels (and other forms of representation) work in our culture. For example, how do the novels define and argue for racial justice? How do they define and argue for gender justice? How do the novels define and argue for social class justice? According to our novels, what values, beliefs, and practices threaten social justice? What practices and beliefs do our novels identify as anti-democratic (assuming a connection between social justice and democracy…)? How do these practices and beliefs challenge principles of equality and/or equity? How do they challenge individual rights? In addition to these thematic questions, we will consider how these novels question and/or extend the cultural logic of literary conventions and genres, and how they deploy satire, irony and parody–as well as other forms of play on social and literary conventions. We also aim to help students master analytical and synthetic skills by way of argumentative analysis, close reading, research, and comparison.
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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.
Writing in the English Major: Transfer Students
English 110T / Prof. Stephan
| 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. Open to American Literature and Culture majors as upper division units outside the major.
Enrollment is limited to transfer students: please contact the English undergraduate advising office via MyUCLA MessageCenter to enroll. |
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 Winter quarter meeting! |
Upper Division Courses in English
Courses that meet the American Literature and Culture major requirement for pre-1848 material are marked with an asterisk.
ORIGINS – Beginnings, Events, and Trajectories
The Intimacy of Queer Life in Early Queer Literature
Queer Literatures and Cultures, 1850 to 1970
English M101B / Prof. Little
| From the elegiac and tragic to the comic, this course begins with Walt Whitman and ends (most likely) with lesbian pulp fiction. The course surveys not only some of the most groundbreaking queer texts—novels, poems, plays (sometimes in the form of film)—written between 1860 and the late 1960s but also the intriguing personalities/authors behind so many of them. Our course attends to how this literature and these personages resisted systemic efforts to disappear, silence, and erase queer bodies, voices, and subjectivities. Without resorting to autobiography (at least in any straightforward sense), the queer literature produced during this period makes emphatically evident the intimate relationship between life and narrative: importantly, literature in this era was far less a way of reporting on one’s life than a way of laying claim to one. Queer literature was indeed a way to demonstrate and perform the fact that queer folk, like non-queer folk, had intimate lives. This course serves as a literary and cultural introduction to the period under consideration as well as to some of the ideas that have come to shape our own contemporary queer epistemologies and sensibilities. |
The Age of Phillis: Neoclassicism, Black Feminism and the Life and Legacy of Phillis Wheatley Peters [*PRE-1848 CREDIT]
Individual Authors
English 139 / Prof. Turner
| This course centers on Phillis Wheatley Peters: her life, her poetry, her community, and her legacy. Phillis Wheatley Peters was an enslaved Black woman and poet who was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and brought to New England when she was only seven years old. In our class, we’ll explore Wheatley Peters’s writing by centering the insights of Black feminist scholars and makers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (from whose recent book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, our course title is drawn). We’ll dive deeply into Wheatley Peters’ writing and neoclassical influences to understand how her work grapples with structures of oppression in often coded ways. And we’ll follow Hartman, whose notion of “critical fabulation” provided Jeffers with the conceptual tools for developing alternate ways of honoring and amplifying Wheatley Peters’s world and work.
Not open for credit to any student concurrently enrolled in English 184.2 on Phillis Wheatley.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors. |
American Literature, 1776 to 1832 [*PRE-1848 CREDIT]
English 166B / Prof. Silva
| This course is a survey of American literature from the period broadly known as the Age of Revolutions. We will read a range of texts (including novels, poetry, autobiographies, essays, manifestos, and speeches) that respond to the major political, social, and aesthetic movements of the era. We will consider, for example, how colonies reimagined themselves as nations, how theorists reimagined the functions of liberalism and citizenship, and how writers in the Americas reimagined the work of history and literature. At each stage, we will be attentive to the diverse voices that shaped the modern world as well as to the many acts of resistance to dispossession and enslavement that define the ethical boundaries of our work.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors. |
American Literature, 1865 to 1900
English 170A / Prof. Colacurcio
| Historical survey of American literature from end of Civil War to beginning of 20th century, including writers such as Howells, James, Twain, Norris, Dickinson, Crane, Chesnutt, Gilman, and others working in modes of realist and naturalist novel, regional and vernacular prose, and poetry. |
IDENTITIES – Places, Communities, and Environments
The Intimacy of Queer Life in Early Queer Literature
Queer Literatures and Cultures, 1850 to 1970
English M101B / Prof. Little
| From the elegiac and tragic to the comic, this course begins with Walt Whitman and ends (most likely) with lesbian pulp fiction. The course surveys not only some of the most groundbreaking queer texts—novels, poems, plays (sometimes in the form of film)—written between 1860 and the late 1960s but also the intriguing personalities/authors behind so many of them. Our course attends to how this literature and these personages resisted systemic efforts to disappear, silence, and erase queer bodies, voices, and subjectivities. Without resorting to autobiography (at least in any straightforward sense), the queer literature produced during this period makes emphatically evident the intimate relationship between life and narrative: importantly, literature in this era was far less a way of reporting on one’s life than a way of laying claim to one. Queer literature was indeed a way to demonstrate and perform the fact that queer folk, like non-queer folk, had intimate lives. This course serves as a literary and cultural introduction to the period under consideration as well as to some of the ideas that have come to shape our own contemporary queer epistemologies and sensibilities. |
African American Literature from Harlem Renaissance to 1960s
English M104B / Prof. Streeter
| 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 |
Chicana/Chicano Literature since el Movimiento, 1970s to Present
English M105C / Prof. Perez-Torres
| This class traces the development of Chicana/o/x literature from its explosion in response to the radical politics of the 1960’s to its engagement with multiple and intersectional forms of identity through the 1990’s to the present. We consider how books by Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, Ana Castillo and others engage the various (social, sexual, racial, ethnic, cultural, political, economic) meanings marked by the terms Chicana, Chicano, and Chicanx. The meaning behind these terms of identity evolve and shift. What tensions and social dynamics do these terms generate as ethnic, racial, cultural, social, and even economic labels? Our goal is to generate clear, effective analyses about the texts we read. |
Poetry of the Americas
Literature of Americas
English 135 / Prof. Foote
| This course will explore how poetry has been integral to constructing what we now think of as “the Americas.” Beginning with the colonial period, we will construct a working poetic lineage of the Americas by exploring key historical moments up through modern and contemporary literature. While we will attend to the role of poetry in history—including the recording of the Popol Vuh during crisis, and the hemispheric movements of poetry in the 19th century—our emphasis will be on 20th- and 21st-century poetry. What can poetry tell us about how the Americas have been, and still are, imagined? Further, does poetry offer a different construction of the Americas? These are some of the questions we will ask as we address topics such as New World “discovery” and conquest, settler colonialism, borderlands, enslavement and revolution, and the endurance of colonial pasts in the present. We will consider the geographic divisions of the Americas—North, South, Central, and Caribbean—and the ways in which poetry probes geographies and histories of the hemisphere. |
The Age of Phillis: Neoclassicism, Black Feminism and the Life and Legacy of Phillis Wheatley Peters [*PRE-1848 CREDIT]
Individual Authors
English 139 / Prof. Turner
| This course centers on Phillis Wheatley Peters: her life, her poetry, her community, and her legacy. Phillis Wheatley Peters was an enslaved Black woman and poet who was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and brought to New England when she was only seven years old. In our class, we’ll explore Wheatley Peters’s writing by centering the insights of Black feminist scholars and makers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (from whose recent book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, our course title is drawn). We’ll dive deeply into Wheatley Peters’ writing and neoclassical influences to understand how her work grapples with structures of oppression in often coded ways. And we’ll follow Hartman, whose notion of “critical fabulation” provided Jeffers with the conceptual tools for developing alternate ways of honoring and amplifying Wheatley Peters’s world and work.
Not open for credit to any student concurrently enrolled in English 184.2 on Phillis Wheatley.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors. |
Major American Authors
English 168 / Prof. Dimuro
| This course offers a survey of major American authors whose works have shaped a national literature over the last two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and demographic diversity, all these novelists grapple with issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each transformed literary conventions to express their visions of the place of America in the world. We will read the following works from different stages in this literary history, including Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; Chopin’s The Awakening; Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother; Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; and Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. |
Realism, Expressionism, and the Absurd
American Drama
English 172C / Prof. Stefans
| This course covers major plays of the early to mid-20th century, including works by Rice, Odets, O’Neill, Hellman, Miller, Saroyan, Williams and Albee, with a special focus on how they related to developments in Europe including Realism, the Theater of the Absurd, Expressionism, Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theater,” metaphysical theater and the early 20th-century vogue for the Noh Theater from Japan. More contemporary playwrights include David Mamet, Paula Vogel, Suzi-Lori Parks and several underground, experimental figures such as Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), María Irene Fornés, and Mac Wellman. Assignments include short papers, creative assignments and a final paper or project. |
Writing the American Hemisphere, 1492 to 1804 [*PRE-1848 CREDIT]
Hemispheric American Literature
English 176 / Prof. Fuchs
| This course engages texts from across the Americas to enrich and complicate ideas of the U.S. and of “American” literature. We will first examine lasting tropes of encounter, established in texts from Columbus onwards, and a range of indigenous responses to European representations. We then turn to the adjacent and overlapping experiences of New Spain (Mexico and California), “Florida” (encompassing much of the southern United States), and the Caribbean that unsettle the narrative of an Anglo US. We will explore a range of different actors and writers—European, African, indigenous American—to analyze the contingency of national histories and national canons.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors. |
Ethnic Comedy, Family Drama
Interdisciplinary Studies in American Literature and Television
English 177.1 / Prof. Decker
| 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). |
MEDIA – Aesthetics, Genres, and Technologies
The Age of Phillis: Neoclassicism, Black Feminism and the Life and Legacy of Phillis Wheatley Peters [*PRE-1848 CREDIT]
Individual Authors
English 139 / Prof. Turner
| This course centers on Phillis Wheatley Peters: her life, her poetry, her community, and her legacy. Phillis Wheatley Peters was an enslaved Black woman and poet who was kidnapped from her home in West Africa and brought to New England when she was only seven years old. In our class, we’ll explore Wheatley Peters’s writing by centering the insights of Black feminist scholars and makers such as Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (from whose recent book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, our course title is drawn). We’ll dive deeply into Wheatley Peters’ writing and neoclassical influences to understand how her work grapples with structures of oppression in often coded ways. And we’ll follow Hartman, whose notion of “critical fabulation” provided Jeffers with the conceptual tools for developing alternate ways of honoring and amplifying Wheatley Peters’s world and work.
Not open for credit to any student concurrently enrolled in English 184.2 on Phillis Wheatley.
Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors. |
Major American Authors
English 168 / Prof. Dimuro
| This course offers a survey of major American authors whose works have shaped a national literature over the last two centuries. Whether in response to war, the institution of slavery, economic inequality, continental expansion, urbanization, and demographic diversity, all these novelists grapple with issues of artistic representation, questions of liberty, personal and national identity, and the ideals and failed promises of American citizenship. Each transformed literary conventions to express their visions of the place of America in the world. We will read the following works from different stages in this literary history, including Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; Chopin’s The Awakening; Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother; Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; and Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. |
Realism, Expressionism, and the Absurd
American Drama
English 172C / Prof. Stefans
| This course covers major plays of the early to mid-20th century, including works by Rice, Odets, O’Neill, Hellman, Miller, Saroyan, Williams and Albee, with a special focus on how they related to developments in Europe including Realism, the Theater of the Absurd, Expressionism, Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theater,” metaphysical theater and the early 20th-century vogue for the Noh Theater from Japan. More contemporary playwrights include David Mamet, Paula Vogel, Suzi-Lori Parks and several underground, experimental figures such as Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), María Irene Fornés, and Mac Wellman. Assignments include short papers, creative assignments and a final paper or project. |
Ethnic Comedy, Family Drama
Interdisciplinary Studies in American Literature and Television
English 177.1 / Prof. Decker
| 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). |
Senior/Capstone Seminars
Knowing New World Rebellion
Capstone Seminar: English
English 183A / Prof. Mazzafero
| This seminar explores the competing modes of political knowledge-making that emerged during the colonization of North America and the Caribbean. We’ll track the era’s major transformations—including settlement, slavery, and nation-building—and the violent rebellions they elicited. Focusing on three key modes of knowing (reasoning, observing, and imagining), we’ll consider how European ideas were adapted to New World circumstances. What literary strategies did elite writers use to represent the outbreaks of mutiny, heresy, Native warfare, and slave revolt they faced? And how did these depictions relate to enduring assumptions about politics and contemporaneous accounts of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions? We’ll read texts by William Strachey, John Winthrop, Aphra Behn, Tom Paine, and Leonora Sansay alongside works by Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Edmund Burke. And we’ll conclude with two retrospective attempts to know New World rebellion: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) and a graphic novel about the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt.
Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting. |
Pornography and the Politics of Sexual Representation
Capstone Seminar: English
English 184.1 / Prof. Mott
| For various cultural reasons, sexuality is a particularly sensitive political subject. Indeed, sexual representation remains one of the few cultural forms that is guaranteed to elicit a strong response. Our class will provide students with the research and analytical tools to investigate the causes and effects of those personal and political responses. More specifically, we will use contemporary gender, race, class, and sexuality theories (among others) to help us examine sexual representations in terms of the shaping force they have in our lives. Our examination of a 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. In other words, students will learn to interpret and explicate representations of sexuality in terms of their manipulation of power. Students will learn to define key terms and interpret cultural representation in an academic dialogue with their peers and with scholars in their field.
By the end of the course students will have initiated and executed a research plan that explores an issue based on the student’s personal interest
By the end of the course students will understand and use productively the rhetoric of scholarship, the ways of enriching, honing, and bolstering an interpretation by way of secondary sources
By the end of the course students will know how to provide helpful feedback about their peers’ works-in-progress; as authors, they will know how to assess and make use of the feedback they receive
By the end of the course students will demonstrate–in a 12-15 pp essay–effective organizational strategies leading to a coherent and compelling large-scale argumentative analysis.
Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting. |
Phillis Wheatley and her World
Capstone Seminar: English
English 184.2 / Prof. Silva
| 250 years after the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, this seminar aims to situate Phillis Wheatley within her eighteenth-century social and intellectual milieu, to consider the literary legacy of her poetry, and to understand the state of Wheatley scholarship. We will pursue these aims through careful readings of Wheatley’s poetry and correspondence, studying along the way the formal, aesthetic, and religious currents that shaped her work while also being attentive to ways in which she adopted and strained against those currents.
Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.
Not open for credit to any student concurrently enrolled in English 139 on Phillis Wheatley. |
Topics in Chicanx Literature: Chicanx Lit and Pop Culture
Topics in Chicana/Chicano and/or Latina/Latino Literature
English M191B.1 / Prof. Perez-Torres
| This class examines the influence and presence of popular U.S. and Mexican cultures on modern Chicana/o/x literature. Chicano cultures result from a mixture of different societies and cultures coming together – often as the result of military and economic aggression – to forge creative new identities of adaptation and resistance. We will read books by Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other writers in conjunction with selections from films, videos, musical performances, and visual arts to explore how Chicana/o/x culture transforms the cultural material in playful and critical cultural mestizaje. Our goal is to generate clear, effective analyses about the texts we explore.
Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting. |
Performing Contemporary Latinx Poetry
Topics in Chicana/Chicano and/or Latina/Latino Literature
English M191B.2 / Prof. Foote
| From border corridos to the Nuyorican Poets Café’s poetry slams, Latinx poetry has a long tradition of performance. In this class, we will consider how these traditions of performance manifest in Latinx poetry of the 21st century. Together, we will explore how contemporary Latinx poetry offers its own theories of embodiment, as well as how the body has been and remains central to the ways in which Latinx literature continues to reckon with history and disrupt national spaces. To do so, we will examine poems that reside at the intersection of the page and the stage. Among the poets we will consider are Elizabeth Acevedo, Aracelis Girmay, J. Michael Martinez, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Angel Dominguez. Each week, we will read a poetry collection and discuss its performance poetics to ask not what contemporary Latinx poetry is, or what it means, but rather to develop our own theory of what the poetry can do as a performance in and of itself.
Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting. |