| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ENGLISH 9 | SHAKESPEARE | HELFER, R. | Love and friendship, separation and reunion, rivalry and jealousy, buffoonery and bullying, and race and gender: these are among the themes addressed in this designed-online Shakespeare course. Explore Shakespeare’s poetic gifts, theatrical imagination, and global references and concerns alongside his inquiry into human relationships and the human condition. You will be guided by an experienced team of faculty from UCI’s English department. Professionally-recorded online lectures are illustrated with clips from the plays and voice overs by UCI actors. Texts include Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Othello. Students will complete three multi-modal projects as well as lecture and reading quizzes and peer evaluation of creative assignments. |
| ENGLISH 10 | CONTEMPRY AFAM LIT | GRADY, K. | This course will engage contemporary African American literature to consider long-histories specific to the Black experience. We will explore how recent work by Black authors renders the past, contextualizes the present, and charts the future. Coursework will include short writing assignments, a group project, and a final paper. |
| ENGLISH 10 | BOREDOM AND LIT | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | GENERATION X/Y/Z | MCCLANAHAN, A. | E15: Gen X/Y/Z What does it mean to be a part of a “generation”? How do ideas about generational belonging and generational change shape the way we understand the history, politics, and culture of a moment? How do multiple generations relate to one another: what is the connection between narratives of generational anger or disappointment and narratives of generational solidarity and sympathy? Who is typically included in the idea of a generational “we” and who tends to be excluded? This course will take up all these ideas by looking at the representation and self-representation of three recent “generations.” We’ll look at Gen X and millennials by viewing films like Reality Bites and Friday, and we’ll read four novels: Raven Leilani’s, Luster; Justin Torres’ We The Animals; Ryan Lee Wong’s Which Side Are You On; Imogen Binnie’s Nevada. In the end of the course, we’ll look at your generation, Gen Z, and we’ll focus on what texts you think are important. All quarter you’ll build a portfolio of writing and research toward a final project on your own place in world history. |
| ENGLISH 15 | SELF AND OTHER | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | |
| ENGLISH 15 | LOVE&HATE AFAM LIT | MORGAN, C. | |
| ENGLISH 16 | CRAFT OF POETRY | HANSON, D. | This class is a survey of contemporary American poetry. We will read and listen to a variety of poets, covering a wide range of topic, identity, and form. We’ll use these readings as a basis to discuss what poetry is and how it achieves a connection with the reader and communication of a story or subject. We will write a few poems in response to writing exercises, and write one short analytical paper on contemporary American poetry. |
| ENGLISH 17 | CRAFT OF FICTION | SCHULTZ, R. | Most English classes ask what works of fiction "mean"; this class asks how works of fiction are made. The best stories do something borderline miraculous: they help us experience lives different from our own; they make us care what happens to people who don't exist; through the valence of fiction, they tell truths unspeakable in real life; mostly, they take us on a ride. In the first half of the quarter, we'll read short stories in a range of forms and traditions alongside texts about craft in order to learn, first, to experience this magic, and, second, to parse how writers pull it off. In the second half of the quarter, we'll embark on stories of our own. Projects will include both creative and expository writing, as well as a presentation. |
| ENGLISH 100 | INTRO TO LIT THEORY | MCCLANAHAN, A. | If this thing we call “Theory” is to have not just an afterlife but a life—to continue to be urgent, illuminating, necessary—it will have to be in constant critical conversation with the present. For this class, then, we’ll a bunch of excerpts from the “classics” of theory (Adorno, Horkheimer, Freud, Marx, Fanon, Butler, Foucault, Hartman, Munoz, Brown). But alongside these, we’ll also read recent works of theory written in an accessible style, from pop culture criticism to personal essays. In particular, we’ll be interested in the relationship between theory and praxis, which we’ll think about by reading a number of manifesto-like texts, from the classic feminist text “Wages for Housework” to Angela Davis’s writing on prison abolition. We’ll also be curious about the relationship between theory and experience. Among the most hyped “new” kinds of theory is auto-theory, which replaces the abstractions and opacity of theory with a more vivid and engaged accounts of lived experience—we’ll think together about the origins of auto-theory in workers’ struggles, feminism, and intersectional race theory. Succeeding in this class will require patience with demanding texts and an abiding curiosity about what those texts can tell you about the world. Our skills-building work together, then, will focus on reading comprehension and on note-taking. We’ll do exercises in class where we work together to locate the key sentences, ideas, and claims in a given piece of writing; we’ll also work together on good habits for long-hand note-taking. |
| ENGLISH 101W | ERLY AMER SHRTSTORY | MCCALL, S. | |
| ENGLISH 101W | MACHNE LRNING STORY | HELFER, R. | In “Machine Learning Stories,” we’ll study four novels that explore the rise of generative AI—chatbots and more—works that were once speculative fiction but which may now seem less strange than reality: Richard Power’s Galatea 2.2, Louisa Hall’s Speak, Liz Moore’s The Unseen World, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. These works raise important and pressing questions about the relationship of humanity to technology, and more broadly about what it means to be human. We’ll focus particularly on how memory and storytelling figure in these works, which represent the narrative itself as the creation of artificial intelligence and as a form of artificial memory, connecting classical antiquity to the contemporary novel. |
| ENGLISH 101W | RACE & REVISION | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | Feminist scholars have long positioned historical revision as a crucial literary strategy. Dominant histories sometimes obscure the contributions of women and people of color, and, as Carmen Maria Machado articulates, the silences that develop in those accounts “illustrate a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; but either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.” In this course, we will look at some of the ways that Latinx creatives and authors have used their work to address the gaps and silences of historical and literary records. We will ask what kinds of literary and visual forms they mobilize and consider what narrative methods they deploy. Along the way, we will think critically about revision as a tool: Is narrative revision a means for creating social, political, or structural change? What kind of knowledge is created in acts of creative remembrance? How does the revision or retracing of personal or cultural memory alter or impact the construction of racial and ethnic categories? This focus on revision is also a means for considering the importance of those strategies for our own writing practice. Throughout term we will practice rewriting and reconceptualizing arguments for different mediums, genres, and audiences. The grade for this course will be based on participation, writing, and revision. |
| ENGLISH 102A | MEDIEVAL NETWORKS | MATTHEWS, R. | |
| ENGLISH 102B | NOVELTY: LITERATURE OF THE 18TH CENTURY | SPEER. M. | |
| ENGLISH 102C | THE 1890S | BARTLETT, J. | |
| ENGLISH 102D | 20TH CENTURY RACE AND SEX | TRIGOS, M. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | POSTCOLONIALITY | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | n this course, we will be taking a selective but deep look into some of the powerful and often revolutionary literature as well as theory produced in the formerly colonized areas of Asia and Africa. Here is a tentative list of works and authors to be studied: Things Fall Apart (Achebe, Nigeria), A Grain of Wheat (our own wonderful Ngugi wa Thiong’ O, Kenya), Shadow Lines (Amitav Ghosh, India), Burger’s Daughter (Nadine Gordimer, South Africa), Nervous Conditions (Tsi-tsi Dangarembga, Zimbabwe). We will be analyzing and interpreting the fiction within the larger macro-political context of Colonialism and its aftermath. The themes that will animate and inform the course are: Tradition and modernity; Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism; the politics of Gender and Sexuality between the West and the non-West; Nationalism and Feminism; Nationalism in the post-colonial context; Enlightenment Reason and the politics of decolonization; Postcolonial double-consciousness; Secularism and the Nation state; Nationalism, Populism, and the politics of representation; Race, Sovereignty, and the Nation State; Self and Other and the Colonial Divide; Subjectivity and Collectivity in the postcolonial condition; People and the Intellectual in the post-colony; and the Cultural politics of the “post-“ after Colonialism. Even as we pursue these themes by way of a careful close reading of the literary texts, we will also be taking an equal look at a number of influential theoretical essays by political thinkers and philosophers such as, Frantz Fanon, Ernst Renan, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’O, Edward Said, to name a few, to frame and contextualize our discussion. Format: Lecture and discussion. Requirements and Expectations: Regular attendance and participation. Possibly 1 short paper (5 pages) and 1Long Paper (7 to 10 pages). |
| ENGLISH 105 | WRITING LATINX EXPR | TOBAR, H. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | ASAM MEMOIR | LEE, J. | |
| ENGLISH 105 | VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES | LIN, J. | Course is cross-listed with GLB/CLT 191, Lecture A. This course explores how storytelling, play, and immersive design can translate global issues into embodied and digital experiences. Students engage in cross-cultural collaboration, strategic storytelling, and creative research to design public-facing projects that center joy, connection, and ethical transformation across media and borders. |
| ENGLISH 106 | FREEDOM DREAMS | MORGAN, C. | This advanced seminar considers how African American writers have explored the idea of freedom. By studying narratives of captivity, resistance, and everyday life, from the nineteenth century to our present day, students will learn to analyze and interpret relationships between the historical, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of literature. The difference between personal liberties and liberation movements, and the links between race, identity, and subjective experience will be central concerns of our study. As a capstone seminar, this course will also provide students with an opportunity to conduct their own research in pursuit of a substantive research paper by the end of term. Course assignments will consist of brief preparatory assignments, due throughout the term, related to students’ larger research projects—e.g. annotated bibliography, project proposal, close reading exercises; a research paper of approximately 2500-3000 words. |
| ENGLISH 106 | ENDS OF THE WORLD | FAN, C. | Does it feel like the world’s ending? For many people the world has never not been ending. The endless ending of the world, as it turns out, is just one of many possible ends for the world. But what are we really talking about when we talk about the end of the world? What does it mean for something to “end?” What is the “world?” What linguistic and imaginative tools do we have to imagine this thing that is unimaginable? As dreary as this line of thinking is, might the ends of the world also possibly contain within them the beginnings of a new world—a better world? This course is about contemporary cultural representations—in film, television, novels, and short fiction—of ends and beginnings. We’ll encounter Utopia, dystopia, climate catastrophe, political upheaval, resilient mushrooms, and extraterrestrial kinship formations, as well as the poetic challenge of bringing something to an artful end. Importantly, we’ll collectively refuse to allow these ends to triumph in their endings. Instead, we’ll focus our energies on finding the beginnings in them, or at least reconfiguring ends so that they’re more beginning-like. |
| ENGLISH 106 | LIT AND THE MIND | MONTERO ROMAN, V. | In her well-known work on the fictional representation of consciousness, Dorrit Cohn argues that the “singular power possessed by the novelist” is that the author is a “creator of beings whose inner lives [they] can reveal at will” (4). This course will introduce you to scholars like Cohn, who have studied how and why novelists represent the inner lives of characters. We will read scholarship that analyzes the narrative strategies authors use to represent cognition (like free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, unreliable narration, and description) and ask questions about the nature of literary imagination, the relationship between fiction and reality, and the uses of fiction. Because the study of the mind has never been objective or neutral, though, we will also think critically about how gender and race have impacted the representation and theorization of fictional minds. Primary sources are likely to include women authors like Jane Austen, Nella Larsen, Virginia Woolf, Maria Cristina Mena, and Jean Rhys. The grades for this course will be based on participation, close reading, and literary analysis/research. |
| ENGLISH 205 | VICTORIAN VISION | HENDERSON, A. | Enrollment open to only MA Students. Tu 6:00-8:50 PM In this course we will trace the nineteenth-century preoccupation with seeing and vision, focusing on poems and novels that are meditations on the relation of literature to painting and/or photography. Readings will include De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, along with poems by Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti. |
| ENGLISH 205 | 18C NOVEL(TIES) | MCCALL, S. | This course is open to English M.A. students only. Class meets Wednesdays, 6:00-8:50 PM In this course, we will read eighteenth-century fiction and discuss the era's most influential social fictions — race, gendered desire, and narrative subjectivity. We will examine the "rise" of the novel, attending to the genre's experimental origins and scandalous nature, which often get forgotten in its later respectability. |
| ENGLISH 210 | RACIAL CONSTRUCTS | GRADY, K. | This course will consider broadly how race is constructed in the early modern period, focusing on late 15th and early 16th century English drama and culture. We will read dramatic work by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, early modern travel narrative, archival material, and recent scholarship in premodern critical race studies. This course will also function as a survey of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. 23840 9:00 am - 11:50 pm |
| ENGLISH 210 | ARCHVE THERY&METHDS | TRIGOS, M. | This course is an introduction to archive theory and methods. It provides students the opportunity to engage the materiality of archival materials and finding aids while also expanding on metaphorical and theoretical approaches to the archive. Students will be required to visit special collections and community archives in the area as well as present and write about their findings. We will often look at specific archival documents and collection finding aids in order to examine the particularities of different archival repositories, classification practices, and access limitations. Theoretical approaches may include those of Michel Foucault, Jaques Derrida, Saidiya Hartman, Anjali Arondekar, Rodrigo Lazo, José Aranda, Zeb Tortorici, María Elena Martínez, Anne Stoler, José Esteban Muñoz, and Arlette Farge. 23842 Th, 11:00 am - 1:50 pm |
| ENGLISH 210 | POETICS OF SLAVERY | JACKSON, V. | Fall, 2025 PhD seminar English 210 The Poetics of Slavery Virginia Jackson This course will explore the ways in which the expansion of Atlantic enslavement informed what we have come to call Romantic poetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the examples will be Anglo-American, and will include Clarkson, Hegel, Wheatley, Horton, Blake, Shelley, Bryant, Mill, Douglass, Harper, Whitfield, and Du Bois. There is also a chance that this will just become a seminar on Wheatley (Peters). Theoretical readings will include Hartman, James, Moten, Sharpe, Berlant, Wynter, Terada, Hanson, Abrams, Brady, Nersessian, and others. |
| ENGLISH 210 | METHODS | HENDERSON, A. | (FOR FIRST YEAR PH.D. STUDENTS ONLY) This course, exclusively for and required of all first-year Ph.D. students, will touch upon a number of interpretive traditions within literary criticism with the aim of helping students become more self-conscious regarding their own critical methods. It will also discuss practical and professional matters, such as course selection and application to conferences. 23846 9:00 am - 11:50 am |
| ENGLISH 255 | WRKSHOP IN ACAD PUB | FAN, C. | |
| ENGLISH 398 | RHET/TCHNG OF COMP | QUEEN, B. |