Course Descriptions

Click below to see course offerings for the English Department.

  • Students are introduced to key concepts and critical frameworks within literary theory, rhetoric and critical cultural theory. Literary theory offers concepts and methods that help describe what is happening in literary texts and their contexts. Rhetoric offers students a range of thought, from classical understanding, such as the means of persuasion that writer or orator may use to move an audience, to more modern understandings in which rhetoric is a critique of power, a critique of ideologies that enforce distributions of power in the material world, and a critique of power that renders some communities powerful and others powerless. Critical cultural theory introduces students to the topic of power from the perspective of the vulnerable and the marginalized as articulated in critical race and ethnic studies, gender and queer theory, and postcolonial studies in order to understand how critical practices empower and challenge power.

    Instructor: Dr. Ryan

    Thursday: 12-3:30

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Histories

    NEW CURRICULUM: Theory, Power, and Rhetoric

    Click here for complete course description

  • This course examines Los Angeles Assemblage Art, literature, and film through the theoretical lens of assemblage. The specific meanings of assemblage as art practice, philosophical concept, and critical-urban theory will be compared as a means to make sense of the city’s cultural history. Like the sculptural constructions that first brought the city cultural attention, Los Angeles itself is similarly complex, diverse, and fractal. The diverse artists to be studied in the course Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge, Betye Saar, and the Womanhouse/CalArts Feminist Art Program, to name a few. We will examine Watts through the work of Noah Purifoy and the Watts Rebellion, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers of Los Angeles, and jazz musician Charles Mingus’s autobiography Beneath the Underdog. We will also study literature and theory of The Everyday with special attention to the writings and methods of George Perec.

    Instructor: Professor Harris

    Thursday: 4:00-7:30

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical

    NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar

    This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:

    Literature/Theory Elective

    Click here for complete course description

     

  • This course approaches adaptation in two different senses: media to media and culture to culture. In both cases, we will ask questions about the nature of transformation. What is gained and what is lost in the transition? As a case study, we will focus on cinematic adaptations of Jewish literature and the ways these films reflect and shape modern Jewish experience, including issues of identity, gender, religion, persecution, immigration, and culture. The texts and films are in original English or translated from Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and other languages.

    Instructor: Holli Levitsky

    Thursday: 11:20-12:50

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative

    NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar

    This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:

    Literature/Theory Elective

    Click here for complete course description

     

  • This seminar serves not only as an introduction to the English Major, but also as instruction for, the words of Wallace Stevens, "How to Live. What to Do." The primary goal of the course is to create a community of scholars and creative artists. There will be field trips to cultural events, guests speakers, indpendent projects, and other exciting opportunites. In addition, students learn to research and write for the major. The course instructs students in the tools, data sets, search strategies, reading methods, and disposition literary scholars use to develop and answer research questions. Students will develop transferable research, reading, analytical, and composing skills. Competency will be demonstrated and assessed at various stages in the discovery, invention, synthesis, and composing process, as well as in the final, evidence-based argument. All of this will prepare you for success in the English Major, as well as success in life. 

    Instructor: Kelly Younger

    Monday: 6:00 - 9:20PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: n/a

    NEW CURRICULUM: Disciplinary Research

    Click here for complete course description

  • Times of great change and upheaval inspire need and desire for cultivating imagination and personal     expression. We tell stories to save our lives and each other, making magic and re-envisioning mythologies toward an evolving embrace of humankind. We are all writers, and this course aims to help carry your unique voice and inspire your imagined narratives onto the page. In this course, students have an opportunity to read closely, learn about, and write into a variety of forms, including Poetry, Fiction, and Dramatic scenes or monologues as we read masterful examples across genres and discuss traditional and innovative approaches. Attention to various writers’ structural choices, as well as an emphasis on Play and Experimentation are key to nurturing Flow and Invention. We will read and contemplate modern and contemporary writers with an eye and ear to how they mine memory, imagination, personal experience, mythology, history, and current events to create work that blends and shapes new paths of literary perception, adding, in the spirit of Leo Tolstoy “our light to the sum of light.” Some authors considered include Diane Seuss, Carmen Maria Machado, Anton Chekhov, Natalie Diaz, George Saunders, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Terrance Hayes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sam Shepard, Joyce Carol Oates, and others. In turn, students will demonstrate techniques observed through the writing they generate and their attention to workshopping collaboratively with fellow students. Strong focus will be on developing a basic understanding of craft, a critical vocabulary for supportive in-class discussion of Poetry, Prose, and Theater, and a sense of connection, via art, to vital personal, political & cultural forces of the past and present. Students will respond to in-class exercises and prompts designed to develop flow, innovation, and depth. Craft talks, journaling, workshops, anthology examples, theoretical writings, viewings, and great author examples stimulate discussion and inspire new student work.

    Instructor: Dr. Bitting

    MWF: 9:25 AM - 10:35 AM (Section 1)

    MWF: 10:50 AM - 12:00 PM (Section 2)

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate core requirement: 

    Creative Experience 

    Click here for complete course description

  • These courses show students how to analyze and practice a specific genre, form, or mode. Students will learn how genres organize verbal discourse and contribute to the meaning of texts; they will understand the ways in which genres offer horizons of expectations that may be met, modified, or subverted by texts. Students will become knowledgeable practitioners within the world of their chosen genre by writing critically about them and by experimenting creatively with them. 

    Instructor: Kelly Younger

    Monday/Wednesday: 3:40 - 5:20PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Genres

    NEW CURRICULUM: Reading and Writing Genres

    Click here for complete course description

  • We live in an age when what is true and what is not true is blurred by spin and contested by polarizing opinions on what “really happened.” This is not anything new. This course traces the representation of truth in American culture by exploring American realism in novels and short stories written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Realism, both a literary technique and an artistic movement that aimed to represent ordinary events and experiences, arose as a challenge to romanticism and emerged in tandem with the rise of journalism, anthropology, ethnography and evolutionary science. Artists, writers, and photographers aimed to represent life truthfully and without sentimental coloring as the country encountered massive urban growth, a second Industrial Revolution, post-Reconstruction migration and a burgeoning middle class. 

    Instructor: Kelly Younger

    Thursday: 3:40 - 5:20PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Histories

    NEW CURRICULUM: History of Literature, Media, and Culture 

    Click here for complete course description

  • In this course, we will develop an awareness of the art of the short story, by reading short stories by a variety of writers and by writing our own fictional stories. This course assumes that the acts of reading and writing short stories inform each other, and each activity can be used to improve a student’s ability to do the other well. We will analyze the language of creative writers and literary critics and improve our ability to use the literary conventions of fiction. We will discuss conventions such as plot, character, setting, point of view, and style, and we will engage a variety of critical perspectives as we read and write short stories. You will be expected to participate in class discussion, peer response workshops, and other class activities. We will do weekly writing exercises; write an 8-10 page short story; and write a 5-7 page critical paper involving research.

    Instructor: Molly Youngkin

    MWF: 1:40 - 2:50PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Genres

    NEW CURRICULUM: Reading and Writing Genres

    Click here for complete course description

  • This course views “borders” as a paradoxical phenomenon in the social and cultural sense: on the one hand imagined (and to an extent practiced) as fixed demarcations between communities but also experienced as permeable sites of dynamic identity formation (something like “third spaces,” to borrow urban theorist Edward Soja’s term). There are spaces where two dominant communities collide (like galaxies sometimes do in space): Black and Latine in South Los Angeles; indigenous Mexican and Korean in Greater K-Town; Latine and Chinese in the San Gabriel Valley; Ethiopian and Jewish in the Fairfax District, etc. This course both theorizes why and how such spaces come to be, and practices them through creative narrative projects. We will study the literatures of Los Angeles that represent the "borderlands," digging deep historically and up to the present. The class includes immersive activities like field trips and community-based research projects.

    Instructor: Professor Martínez 

    Wednesday: 6:00 - 9:20PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative

    NEW CURRICULUM: Race, Intersectionality, and Power

    Click here for complete course descriptions

  • This course is about nothing. We will examine nothing from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, including literature, film, mathematics, philosophy, theology, and art. Nothing is a potently paradoxical and productive thing to study and contemplate, leading to challenging and boundary-exploring thinking. Students will be given options to write creative and or critical work for assignments. 

    Instructor: Professor Harris

    Thursday: 1:45 - 3:25PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical

    NEW CURRICULUM: Upper-Division Elective

    Interdisciplinary Connections core

    Click here for complete course description

  • This course surveys children’s literature through the combined lenses of literary and educational studies. To do so, we will consider both the aesthetic and social dimensions of children’s literature, reflecting on its literary, educational, and moral role in children’s development. Class readings and discussions will cover the history and development of children’s literature as a whole, with a special emphasis on contemporary children’s fiction and its attempts to address issues of multiculturalism and interculturalism. We will also consider the tension between the capacity of children’s literature to entertain and its institutional role and value. Of central interest to us will be the concept of imagination, its value, and the ways in which literature fosters its development. Finally, participants in this course will reflect on professional and personal values and ethics as they become informed selectors, consumers, and teachers of literature for children. 

    Instructor: Aimee Ross-Kilroy

    Monday/Wednesday: 3:40 - 5:20PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement: 

    OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical

    NEW CURRICULUM: Upper-Division Elective

    Click here for complete course description

  • This course engages a range of materials from across the disciplines designed to cultivate a planetary perspective, an ecological awareness of the human species’ present situation, as well as its history and prospective futures. Drawing on work from diverse cultural contexts, the course centers on the notion of “cultivating” both as a practice of gardening, cultivating the earth, and a practice of personal development, cultivating one’s mind and spirit to evolve a planetary ethical, ecological perspective. The class will integrate the study of gardens as expressions of philosophies of nature and living, and we will study contemporary artists and landscape designers who create planetary perspectives by integrating cosmology and ecology in their work.

    Instructor: Professor Harris

    Thursday: 4:30 - 7:00PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical

    NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar

    Click here for complete course description (undergraduate)

    This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:

    Theory Elective

    Click here for complete course description (graduate)

  • This course explores the theory and practice of teaching writing and literature. We will investigate the history of composition studies and pedagogical approaches to better understand current trends and movements. We will consider theories of language learning and critical pedagogy, and these explorations will inform our discussion of practical issues such as grading, classroom management, and diversity. We will discuss the (sometimes problematic) relationship between teaching literature and writing. We will also focus specifically on the Jesuit Rhetorical tradition and teaching rhetoric at LMU. This course is designed for those interested in teaching literature and composition, especially graduate teaching fellows who will eventually teach in the First Year Seminar and Rhetorical Arts programs. 

    Instructor: Aimee Ross-Kilroy

    Monday/Wednesday: 6:00 - 7:40PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical

    NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar

    Click here for complete course description (undergraduate)

    This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:

    Theory Elective

    Click here for complete course description (graduate)

  • The ocean has been essential to stories and storytelling for hundreds of years. Often mapped as a surface rather than a submersive space where human and non-human existences are entangled, the ocean has only recently been foregrounded by oceanic critics as crucial to our socially and ecologically connected histories and futures. This class will delve into the emergent and multi- disciplinary fields of oceanic studies and blue humanities as we examine how short stories, novels, and films by diverse authors represent the ocean, its creatures, and humanity's relationship to the watery world. 

    Instructor: Dr. Robin Miskolcze

    Tuesday: 6:00 - 9:20PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical

    NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar

    Click here for complete course description (undergraduate)

    This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:

    Theory Elective

    Click here for complete course description (graduate)

  • Diverse in invention, style, arrangement, delivery, and appeals to memory, cultural rhetorics as a field of research, practice, and activism, embraces mutually supportive relationships and solidarity among diverse collectives of race, sexuality, class, and gender, among many others. While it produces research that both informs and is informed by the rhetorical tradition, it also enlarges and revises this tradition by contributing to the rhetorical practices and socio-political development and enrichment of its cultural sites of origin. In non-linear fashion, this course will provide a contemporary historical context and framework by covering selected theories from broader movements that enabled the emergence of the cultural rhetorics field; survey current research and interdisciplinary approaches that are contributing to the field’s development; and require participants to generate original seminar projects that both inform the field and enrich the communities in which participants situate their studies, projects, or original works of literary art.

    Instructor: Professor Ching

    Tuesday: 7:20 - 9:50PM

    This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:

    Rhetoric/Composition Theory and Practice

    Click here for complete course description

  • Here’s an opportunity to try your hand at writing in several genres—prose, poetry and drama. Through reading, discussion, quizzes, and brief responses to exemplary works and literary events; writing exercises in poetry, prose, and drama (both during and outside of class), and in drafting, workshopping and revising creative pieces, you’ll draft and craft your work for inclusion in a final portfolio, developing greater skill in responding constructively and imaginatively to your own writing and that of fellow students, while gaining knowledge of key concepts and greater critical acumen.

    Instructor: Sarah Mclay

    MWF: 10:50 - 12:00PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate core requirement

    Creative Experience

    Click here for complete course description

     

  • Introduction to Fiction is a Creative Experience university Core course introducing strategies for creating fiction and writing about it as critics. As members of a literary community, participants develop the language to analyze fiction critically and academically. As practicing writers, participants create original works of fiction and analyze the form and technique involved in composing fiction. As we read, write, and analyze fiction, we also consider the role fictions play in shaping culture, and how they are shaped by it.

    Instructor: Dr. Robin Miskolcze

    SECTION ONE: T/R 1:45PM - 3:25PM

    SECTION TWO: T/R 3:40PM - 5:20PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate core requirement

    Creative Experience

    Click here for complete course description (Section One)

    Click here for complete course description (Section Two)

  • Creativity Through Constraints invites students to experience ways in which imposing constraints on writing literary texts produces innovative, original, and creative work. We will do close readings of a range of writers characterized by unique experiments with constraint-based production, including members of the Oulipo group (Workshop for Potential Literature) based in Paris. The philosophy of the Oulipo is that constraints liberate the writer’s imagination, and induce writers to explore the possibilities of literature in ways they would never expect or accomplish otherwise. Students will study the different kinds of constraints the Oulipo have used and then engage in creating texts under constraints they get to choose. The overarching goal of the course is to induce students to experience literary creativity in both reading and writing texts. You must be prepared to read painstakingly, think analytically, and write attentively in this course. This class is a workshop, defined as a place where an artisan practices applied techniques and produces and delivers particular goods. The encompassing ethos of this class emphasizes experimentation and rigorous play. Challenging oneself to do difficult things, including reading complex texts and writing original works, takes one into new, unexpected territories.

    Instructor: Professor Harris

    MWF 10:50AM - 12:00 PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate core requirement:

    Creative Experience

    Click here for complete course description

  • Modernist writer Virginia Woolf said that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” This course focuses on changes and continuities between the British Victorians (1837-1901) and Moderns (1901-1941) to show how literature and media can be analyzed in its historical context and how they influence cultural attitudes. In looking at the Victorians, we will examine literature and media within contexts such as work and poverty, faith and doubt, empire and race, and the politics of gender. In looking at the Moderns, we will examine literature and media within contexts such as Irish independence, World War I, the rise of psychology, the modern landscape, and World War II. While this course aims to show the depth of literature and media by Victorians and Moderns, the texts we will examine should be thought of as representative examples of a complex cultural tradition.

    Instructor: Molly Youngkins 

    MW 9:55AM - 11:35AM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Histories

    NEW CURRICULUM: History of Literature, Media, and Culture

    Click here for complete course description

     

  • This course will introduce students to literary and cultural history by focusing on Irish and British literature and culture from 1945 to the present. These were years of profound cultural and political change in both countries and we will consider the role of literature and culture in turbulent times that witnessed the shrinking of the British Empire; the transition of Britain to a multicultural welfare state; and Ireland’s transition from a country that was largely Catholic and rural to a country whose identity is increasingly secular and urban. Much of the course will explore the two nations’ complex and changing relationship, expressed most tragically in the armed conflict in Northern Ireland.

    Instructor: Dr. Ryan

    Tuesday/Thursday 9:55AM - 11:35AM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Histories

    NEW CURRICULUM: History of Literature, Media, and Culture

    Click here for complete course description

  • This course will explore a genre termed geo-fictions, a strand of ecological-themed fiction where geological forces, or even the Earth itself, are central actants of the plot. These works depict a deeply interconnected world where humans lose some of their privileged status and become enmeshed with other presences in the text (animals, plants, environments). Developing an understanding of the genre’s parameters will widen our understanding of the possibilities of fiction and its potential purposes within a rapidly changing planetary situation. Drawing on a range of critical work and fiction from diverse cultural contexts, the course will center on different ways in which specific texts imagine and facilitate a planetary ethical, ecological perspective.

    Instructor: Professor Harris

    MWF 3:05 PM - 4:15 PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Genres

    NEW CURRICULUM: Reading and Writing Genres

    Click here for complete course description

  • This course will introduce students to the genre of the pastoral and its related mode pastoralism, both of which represent life in the country, drawing an implicit or explicit contrast with urban life. It will be this course’s contention that Americans throughout history have relied on pastoralism as an indispensable conceptual apparatus—a fundamental tool for organizing and participating in reality. This course will treat pastoralism as a cultural grammar that Americans unconsciously and consciously employ to understand what it means to be American and to navigate fundamental questions of class, race, sexuality, and gender. We will analyze pastoralism as it appears in literature, film, music, and cultural politics more broadly.

    Instructor: Dr. Ryan

    Tuesday/Thursday 11:50AM - 1:30PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirements:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Genres

    NEW CURRICULUM: Reading and Writing Genres

    Click here for complete course description

  • Devils and werewolves, saints who walled themselves inside churches, and a Queen who never married: England in the pivotal years from 1450-1650 saw upheaval, radical transformation, and imaginative anomalies. This course covers 200 years of transition from the English middle ages to the early modern. This course will examine literature of this time period through the lenses of religion, politics, and the adaptation of previous forms and tropes to a new era.

    Instructor: Dr. Aimee Ross-Kilroy

    MW 9:55AM - 10:50AM 

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Critical/Theoretical

    NEW CURRICULUM: Pre-1800

    Click here for complete course description

  • This interdisciplinary course encourages students to reflect on the meaning of the desert as it has been conceived in the literatures of ancient Christian monasticism and contemporary contemplative practice; through the art, literature and politics of the American West and Borderlands; and as a site of ecological sublimity, complexity, and precarity. We will explore the varied meanings of the desert in diverse historical and cultural moments and ask what it means not just to imagine but also inhabit the desert today. These inquiries have real implications for what it means to inhabit the world with some sense of meaning and purpose—both in the profound sense of individual spiritual development as well as the pursuit of social and environmental justice. Into the Desert seeks to entwine these threads through close readings across genres as well as through embodied experience: a key class activity is a field trip into the desert itself.

    Instructor: Rubén Martínez/Douglas Christie

    Tuesday 6:00PM – 9:20PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative

    NEW CURRICULUM: Race, Intersectionality, and Power

    + Interdisciplinary Connections core & Engaged Learning Flag

    Click here for complete course description

  • Through this workshop, students will learn to appreciate the fundamentals of writing for stage and screen; to comprehend and use the language of theater, film, and television; to hone the skill of reading and interpreting scripts; to think dramatically about the ways we look at ourselves, each other, and the world around us; to construct compelling, entertaining, and commercially viable scripts; to analyze the subtle but profound differences between plays, screenplays, and teleplays with an eye toward adaptation; to prepare for a possible future in writing for stage and screen; and to foster a life-long love of storytelling through theater, film, and television.

    Instructor: Kelly Younger

    Monday: 6:00PM - 9:20PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirements:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry

    NEW CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry

    Click here for complete course description

  • This is an advanced poetry writing workshop that focuses on exploring the imaginative possibilities of the art form, with special emphases on metaphor, persona, surrealism and “leaping poetry.” Students will write original poetry, read and write about books of contemporary poetry, workshop the poetry of other students, revise their own poetry, and put together portfolios of original, revised poetry.

    Instructor: Sarah Maclay

    MWF 3:05PM – 4:15PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry

    NEW CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry

    Clcik here for complete course description

     

  • This course will delve deep into the sciences, scholarly sub-disciplines, and related critical/theoretical arts used to facilitate the understanding of the physical books, manuscripts, scrolls, and other objects that preserved the first examples of literature in English from between 500 and 1500 years ago. Students will gain access to new skills that can radicalize their critical interpretations of sometimes familiar texts like Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Malory’s Morte Darthur, or The Book of Margery Kempe. These skills can also be translated to modern endeavors such as publishing, library sciences, law, advanced graduate study, even law-enforcement.

    Instructor: Professor Shepherd

    MW: 7:55 - 9:35PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Comparative

    NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar

    This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:

    Literature Elective

    Click here for complete course description

  • In this course we will consider what fiction does besides (or in addition to) "tell a story." We will pay attention to language and the nature of meaning making as it is shared between reading and writing, and we will ask what fiction can be "about" other than "what happens." Ultimately, in reading fiction and in writing our own, we will explore how fiction asks questions and question the distinction between critical and creative discourse.

    Instructor: Professor Krause

    Tuesday/Thursday: 7:55 - 9:35PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English Major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Creative/Artistry

    NEW CURRICULUM: 5000-Level Seminar

    This course fulfills the following English M.A. requirement:

    Creative Writing Course

    Click here for complete course description

  • In this seminar, you will research and write a substantial original project. Creative, critical, and hybrid projects are welcome. The form/genre of your project may be a creative dramatic, fictional, or poetic work; a critical essay about literature, rhetoric or theory; or a hybrid work that combines creative and critical elements, uses visual and written media, etc. In consultation with Prof. Youngkin and your peers, you will construct an appropriate reading list for your project, learn how to write professional documents such as project descriptions and abstracts, write multiple drafts of your project, and present your project to others at the end of the semester.

    Instructor: Molly Youngkin

    MW: 1:45 - 3:25PM

    This course fulfills the following undergraduate English major requirement:

    OLD CURRICULUM: Specialization

    NEW CURRICULUM: Capstone Seminar (Creative and Critical)

    Click here for complete course description