Winter 2026

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 certain designated sections are reserved for Dept. of English majors and minors. All other sections are open to students of all majors.

As a way of introducing students to the American Literature and Culture major, this seminar examines the gothic aspects of early U.S. literature and culture. Readers have long been fascinated by the gothic excesses of nineteenth-century U.S. literature. However, critics have not always taken the gothic tendencies of early U.S. literature seriously—seeing in its overblown conventions the signs of an underdeveloped and almost juvenile culture. This seminar uses the nineteenth-century gothic to introduce students to the interdisciplinary connections between American literature and culture. We will approach the gothic—and its unreliable narrators, doppelgangers, and obsession with the uncanny—as an opportunity to understand the anxieties about identity and power that divided and haunted the tumultuous century between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Readings will include secondary criticism, as well as primary texts by Jefferson, Brown, Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Sigourney, Apess, and Crafts. Assignments will include a presentation, weekly in-class reading responses, a quote outline, and an essay-based final.

This course fulfills a preparatory requirement for the American Literature & Culture major. Non-majors who wish to take the course for Diversity or Foundations credit may enroll on second pass, space permitting.

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 as posted in the UCLA Schedule of Classes!

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. Open to American Literature and Culture majors as upper division units outside the major.

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

Not open for credit to students who have previously taken ENGL 110A with Dr. Stephan.

This writing-intensive course will focus on the literary essay. Students will study examples of the essay across the history of literature in English, and we will practice writing essays in a variety of styles and genres, from personal and reflective to moral, descriptive, social, and political.

English 110V qualifies as an elective for the English major and the Professional Writing minor. Open to American Literature and Culture majors as upper division units outside the major.

The course requisite is ENGL 4W. PWM students who have completed an alternate Writing II course may contact the English undergraduate advising office to request enrollment.

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.

This course troubles dominant conceptions of science fiction and genre by reading Indigenous horror, fantasy, and speculative storytelling. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, queer, and ecological 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 ecology. 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.

Historical survey of American literatures from Revolution through early republic, with emphasis on genres that reflect systematic attempts to create representative national literature and attention to American ethnic, gender, and postcolonial perspectives.

Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.

This course tracks the emergence of literary realism in the United States as it was developed by Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Kate Chopin, Charles W. Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser. Topics include racial conflict, the growth of cities, advances in technology, the rising political and sexual consciousness of women, and the growing prevalence of consumer capitalism. The course explores the connection between art and society, representation and reality, and literary value in a capitalist nation. We study the narrative innovations of each author, as well as the ethical dimensions and social questions raised in their work.

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.

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. P/NP or letter grading.

Survey of Chicana/Chicano literature from poetry of Triple Alliance and Aztec Empire through end of Mexican Revolution (1920), including oral and written forms (poetry, corridos, testimonios, folklore, novels, short stories, and drama) by writers such as Nezahualcoyotl (Hungry Coyote), Cabaza de Vaca, Lorenzo de Zavala, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Eusebio Chacón, Daniel Venegas, and Lorena Villegas de Magón.

Qualifies as a pre-1848 course for American Literature and Culture majors.

This course troubles dominant conceptions of science fiction and genre by reading Indigenous horror, fantasy, and speculative storytelling. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, queer, and ecological 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 ecology. 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.

Course description coming soon!

This course surveys the literature of California from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century. It examines the contexts in which these works were created, including the Mission Era, the Gold Rush, the rise of Hollywood, the Depression, gay liberation, urban race riots, and other forms of social protest. Requirements include daily participation and discussion in class, two quizzes, and a final research paper due on the last day of term. No final exam.

This course focuses on the stories and metaphors we use to think about and discuss current ecological problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, pollution, waste, and environmental injustice. How do environmental stories differ or even conflict between different regions, countries, cultures, and social groups? We will also explore differences environmental stories told in print, in film, on television, or on social media. How do these stories relate to wild, rural, and urban settings, and to local, national, and planetary scales? How does science figure in these stories? We will ask which stories are old, which new, and how effective they are for environmental communication.

The class will include two types of readings. The first group will include narrative theory and environmental communication research that explores dimensions of storytelling such as narrator, character, point of view, plot, genre, style, intended and real audiences, cognitive and emotional impacts of particular stories, and how to research them. The second group of readings will include environmental stories across a variety of media and genres from novels and journalism to disaster movies, videogames, and social media posts, and from pastoral to apocalyptic and utopian visions.

Students will learn how to access, analyze, and evaluate the effectiveness of contemporary environmental stories, and they will be encouraged to create new environmental narratives in different media.

This course is eligible for upper-division credit on the Literature & the Environment minor. Currently declared minors may contact Steph Bundy at stephanie@english.ucla.edu to enroll.

This course explores the often unglamorous side of Los Angeles—through novels, nonfiction, poetry, music, and film—during the turbulent years from the Watts Uprising to the Reagan/Punk era. Authors include Joan Didion, Charles Bukowski, Dennis Cooper, Wanda Coleman, Bret Easton Ellis, and architecture critic Reyner Banham, among others. Films include The Exiles (1961), The Long Goodbye (1973), and Repo Man (1984). Musical acts include the Watts Prophets, The Doors, the Germs, and X. Weekly writing assignments, a required class presentation, and a final paper.

Femininity is a set of traits, qualities, and behaviors associated with, but not proprietary to, women. Through readings in queer and feminist theory and trans studies, with works of literature, performance, art, and media, we will critically address how femininity is socially, historically, culturally, and medically constructed, and positioned as Other, subordinate and supplementary to men and the masculine. From femme lesbians, pop stars, to trad wives, how is femininity posed as a problem because of its connections—either claimed or disavowed—to heterosexism, submissiveness, passivity, dependency, domesticity, consumption, the body, and emotions? How is femininity a racialized, classed ideal, as well as a condition for inequality and violence against cis and trans women and people with marginalized genders? We will consider how femininity can be a site of injury and harm, but also intervention, empowerment, and play, reclaimed in some feminist, queer, and trans contexts as a source of survival, pleasure, sexual expression, and critiques of power.

This course qualifies as a critical theory course for students interested in applying to the departmental honors program.

This course explores the forty-year literary career of the acclaimed writer, Joan Didion. Working across multiple genres, Didion’s corpus includes iconic essay collections, novels, long-form journalism, and autobiographies that capture the changing values of the post-war period in United States history. We pay particular attention to the development of her inimitable style, which she used in probing accounts of early California history; critiques of 1960s counter-culture; dissections of America’s dubious politics in the 1980s; and in describing her psychological struggles with grief and the challenges of her art.

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).