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Your search for courses · tagged with ENGL Tradition 2 · returned 24 results
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AFST 325 Slavery in the Africana Imagination 6 credits
Through the lens of former slaves and their descendants in America, this course explores ways in which the slave and neo-slave narratives attend to the larger existential question of what it means to be free. The corollary notions of race, gender, identity, solidarity, among others, will also be considered. In addition, this class will investigate the ways in which the re-inscription of slavery, in contemporary literature, has impacted the development of the Africana literary tradition in terms of content, genre, and form. This course adopts an interdisciplinary approach to slavery that utilizes philosophy, literature, and media studies.
Not offered in 2024-25
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AMST 269 Woodstock Nation 6 credits
“If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.” We will test the truth of that popular adage by exploring the American youth counterculture of the 1960s, particularly the turbulent period of the late sixties. Using examples from literature, music, and film, we will examine the hope and idealism, the violence, confusion, wacky creativity, and social mores of this seminal decade in American culture. Topics explored will include the Beat Generation, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, LSD, and the rise of environmentalism, feminism, and Black Power.
Extra time
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ENGL 113 Horror Fiction 6 credits
Horror is a speculative genre of literature with ancient roots in storytelling. Contemporary horror finds source material in centuries-old religious narratives, medieval folklore, historical events, contemporary urban legends, and real-life crimes and violence. Horror has always been full of metaphors for society’s deepest fears and anxieties; studying and writing horror can yield limitless insight and inspiration for imagining different futures. How do writers use atmosphere, characterization, symbols, allusions, suspense, etc. to hold our attention and produce “horror” toward some larger thematic end? In this course, students will read, analyze, discuss, and write about various literary fictional texts that could fall under the rubric of “horror” and practice creative writing in this capacious and rebellious genre. Authors may include Lesley Arimah, Neil Gaiman, Shirley Jackson, Han Kang, and Victor LaValle.
Not offered in 2024-25
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ENGL 211 Haunting the Margins of American Literature 6 credits
Nineteenth-century Americans were hardly strangers to ghosts and the world beyond. In fact, many actively sought communion with the dead by attending table-rapping séances and sitting for spirit photographs. This class will analyze a variety of literary hauntings from the long nineteenth century to explore the cultural anxieties and desires they might represent. Paying particular attention to questions of race, gender, and sexuality, we will consider how figures ghosted from history become present in ways that demand attention and, at times, redress. Authors will include Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins.
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ENGL 213 Being Queer in Nineteenth-Century America 6 credits
What forms of community, gender identification, and desire were imagined as possible in the literature and life writing of nineteenth-century Americans? How did race and class shift the terms of what could be imagined, and how did these possibilities change with the sexual taxonomies developed by scientists? This course will explore these questions by reading American literary texts from 1799 to 1899 alongside shorter works of history and theory. We will consider not only the discourse around wealthy, white “romantic friendships,” but also the ways that poor and non-white bodies were deemed queer in conduct manuals and scientific texts.
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ENGL 215 Modern American Literature 6 credits
A survey of some of the central movements and texts in American literature, from World War I to the present. Topics covered will include modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat generation and postmodernism.
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ENGL 223 American Transcendentalism 6 credits
Attempts to discern the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist come down, Emerson says, to a “practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?” This interdisciplinary course will investigate the works of the American Transcendentalist movement in its restless discontent with the conventional, its eclectic search for better ways of thinking and living. We will engage major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Whitman alongside documents of the scientific, religious, and political changes that shaped their era and provoked their responses.
Not offered in 2024-25
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ENGL 227 Imagining the Borderlands 6 credits
This course engages the borderlands as space (the geographic area that straddles nations) and idea (liminal spaces, identities, communities). We examine texts from writers like Anzaldúa, Butler, Cervantes, Dick, Eugenides, Haraway, and Muñoz first to understand how borders act to constrain our imagi(nation) and then to explore how and to what degree the borderlands offer hybrid identities, queer affects, and speculative world-building. We will engage the excess of the borderlands through a broad chronological and generic range of U.S. literary and visual texts. Come prepared to question what is “American”, what is race, what is human.
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ENGL 228 Banned. Censored. Reviled. 6 credits
What makes a work of art dangerous? While present-day attacks on books, libraries, and schools feel unprecedented, writers and artists have always had to fight efforts to suppress their work, often at great personal and societal cost. We will study literature, films, graphic novels, images, music, and other materials that have been challenged and attacked as offensive, taboo, or transgressive, and also explore strategies of resistance to censorship.
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ENGL 230 Studies in African American Literature: From the 1950s to the Present 6 credits
We will explore developments in African American literature since the 1950s with a focus on literary expression in the Civil Rights Era; on the Black Arts Movement; on the new wave of feminist/womanist writing; and on the experimental and futuristic fictions of the twenty-first century. Authors to be read include Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, August Wilson, Charles Johnson, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, Suzan-Lori Parks, Kevin Young, and Tracy Smith.
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ENGL 233 Writing and Social Justice 6 credits
Social justice is fairness as it manifests in society, but who gets to determine what fairness looks, sounds, feels like? The self-described Black Canadian poet Dionne Brand says that she doesn’t write toward justice because that doesn’t exist, but that she writes against tyranny. If we use that framework, how does that change our own writing and our own notions of justice in our or any time? What is the role of literary writing, especially fiction, the essay, and poetry in the collective and individual quest to understand and build conditions that could yield increased potential for social justice? In this course, students will read, analyze, discuss, and write about various texts that might be considered to be against myriad tyrannies, if not necessarily toward social justice. Authors may include Octavia Butler, Phillip Metres, Toni Morrison, Myung Mi Kim, and M. NourbeSe Philipe.
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ENGL 235 Asian American Literature 6 credits
This course is an introduction to major works and authors of fiction, drama, and poetry from about 1900 to the present. We will trace the development of Asian American literary traditions while exploring the rich diversity of recent voices in the field. Authors to be read include Carlos Bulosan, Sui Sin Far, Philip Kan Gotanda, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Milton Murayama, Chang-rae Lee, Li-young Lee, and John Okada.
Not offered in 2024-25
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ENGL 236 American Nature Writing 6 credits
A study of the environmental imagination in American literature. We will explore the relationship between literature and the natural sciences and examine questions of style, narrative, and representation in the light of larger social, ethical, and political concerns about the environment. Authors read will include Thoreau, Muir, Jeffers, Abbey, and Leopold. Students will write a creative Natural History essay as part of the course requirements.
Not offered in 2024-25
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ENGL 241 Latinx Voices in the Age of Trump 6 credits
The last few years have placed Latinx communities under siege and in the spotlight. The demands of the census and new policies around immigration mean that who counts as Latinx and why it matters has public visibility and meaning. Simultaneously, the last few years have seen an incredible growth of new literary voices and genres in the world of Latinx letters. From fictional and creative nonfiction accounts of detention camps, border crossings, and asylum court proceedings to lyrical wanderings in bilingualism to demands for greater attention to Afrolatinidad and the particular experiences of Black Latinxs–Latinx voices are rising. We will engage with current literary discussions in print, on twitter, and in literary journals as we chart the shifting, developing terrain of Latinx literatures.
Not offered in 2024-25
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ENGL 248 Visions of California 6 credits
An interdisciplinary exploration of the ways in which California has been imagined in literature, art, film and popular culture from pre-contact to the present. We will explore the state both as a place (or rather, a mosaic of places) and as a continuing metaphor–whether of promise or disintegration–for the rest of the country. Authors read will include Muir, Steinbeck, Chandler, West, and Didion. Weekly film showings will include Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown and Blade Runner.
Extra Time required.
Not offered in 2024-25
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ENGL 255 The Poetics of Disability 6 credits
Scholar Michael Davidson has suggested that “perhaps the closest link between poetry and disability lies in a conundrum within the genre itself: poetry makes language visible by making language strange.” In this class we will read a wide range of poets who tackle ideas of normalcy and “ability” by centering disability consciousness and culture. We will engage with poetry’s capacity as a genre to destabilize our assumptions and generate new imaginaries. Alongside contemporary U.S. poetry, we will study contemporary theory in the field of disability studies in order to better understand the critical conversations around the meaning, nature, and consequences of disability.
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ENGL 258 Playwrights of Color: Taking the Stage 6 credits
This course examines work by U.S. playwrights of color from the 1950s to the present, focusing on questions of race, performance, and self-representation. We will consider opportunities and limitations of the commercial theater, Off-Off Broadway, ethnic theaters, and non-traditional performance spaces. Playwrights may include Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Luis Valdez, Cherrie Moraga, August Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Philip Gotanda, Maria Irene Fornes, Anna Deavere Smith, and Chay Yew. We will watch selected film adaptations and attend a live performance when possible.
Not offered in 2024-25
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ENGL 288 California Program: The Literature of California 6 credits
An intensive study of writing and film that explores California both as a place (or rather, a mosaic of places) and as a continuing metaphor–whether of promise or disintegration–for the rest of the country. Authors read will include John Muir, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion and Octavia Butler. Films will include: Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, Zoot Suit, Boys in the Hood and Lala Land.
OCS Visions of California Program
Not offered in 2024-25
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ENGL 329 The City in American Literature 6 credits
How do American authors “write the city”? The city as both material reality and metaphor has fueled the imagination of diverse novelists, poets, and playwrights, through tales of fallen women and con men, immigrant dreams, and visions of apocalypse. After studying the realistic tradition of urban fiction at the turn of the twentieth century, we will turn to modern and contemporary re-imaginings of the city, with a focus on Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Selected films, photographs, and historical sources will supplement our investigations of how writers face the challenge of representing urban worlds.
Not offered in 2024-25
- LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
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Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.
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ENGL 332 Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald 6 credits
An intensive study of the novels and short fiction of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The course will focus on the ethos of experimentation and the "homemade" quality of these innovative stylists who shaped the course of American modernism. Works read will be primarily from the twenties and thirties and will include The Sound and the Fury, In Our Time, Light in August, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Go Down, Moses.
Not offered in 2024-25
- LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
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Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.
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ENGL 338 Dickinson, Moore, Bishop 6 credits
An intensive study of lyric invention and innovation in the work of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. Starting with formalist readings and historicizing the poetic subjects they pursued in common (self and society, loss and knowledge, nature, gender, the senses, the body), we will explore their practice, reception, and influence in relation to changing Modernist poetics, 1860 to 1970, and to specifics of place: Amherst, Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil.
- Spring 2025
- LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
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Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.
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ENGL 352 Toni Morrison: Novelist 6 credits
Morrison exposes the limitations of the language of fiction, but refuses to be constrained by them. Her quirky, inimitable, and invariably memorable characters are fully committed to the protocols of the narratives that define them. She is fearless in her choice of subject matter and boundless in her thematic range. And the novelistic site becomes a stage for Morrison’s virtuoso performances. It is to her well-crafted novels that we turn our attention in this course.
Not offered in 2024-25
- IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
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Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.
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ENGL 395 Senior Seminar 6 credits
Advanced seminar in English topics
Not offered in 2024-25
- LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2 IS, International Studies
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Student must have completed any of the following course(s): ENGL 295 – Critical Methods and one 300 level ENGL course with grade of C- or better.
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THEA 255 August Wilson: History and the Blues 6 credits
This course will explore the ten plays that comprise August Wilson’s “Century Cycle.” Wilson wrote one play for each decade of the twentieth century, exploring the movement of African-Americans, in critic John Lahr’s words, “from property to personhood.” Wilson’s work, inspired by the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s-70’s is rooted musically in the Blues, the African American musical form at the root of modern American popular music. We will read these plays, informed by the Blues, against the major historical events in African-American life during each of the decades they represent.
Not offered in 2024-25