Department of English

This course emphasizes the critical analysis of rhetorical strategies used in business settings, and stresses writing appropriate to a variety of professional audiences and situations.  The coursework will include business letters, short and long reports, resumes, oral presentations, and other professional communications, as well as examining the conventions, assumptions, and etiquette embodied by these communications.  We will be stressing critical thinking, rhetorical strategies, professional ethics, and the reader-ready format essential to the business environment.  Students will be simulating workplace projects by working individually as well as in collaborative settings, and will learn both time management and project management skills.

Required texts are Successful Writing at Work (Custom CSUN 9th edition available at the Matador Bookstore) by Philip C. Kolin and Better:  A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande.

This course emphasizes the critical analysis of rhetorical strategies used in business settings, and stresses writing appropriate to a variety of professional audiences and situations.  The coursework will include business letters, short and long reports, resumes, oral presentations, and other professional communications, as well as examining the conventions, assumptions, and etiquette embodied by these communications.  We will be stressing critical thinking, rhetorical strategies, professional ethics, and the reader-ready format essential to the business environment.  Students will be simulating workplace projects by working individually as well as in collaborative settings, and will learn both time management and project management skills.

Required texts are Successful Writing at Work (Custom CSUN 9th edition available at the Matador Bookstore) by Philip C. Kolin and Better:  A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande.

Mostly, creative writing is an isolated activity. In this class, new and developing writers will have the chance to bring their work to readers: their fellow classmates and instructor. The emphasis here will be on keeping an open mind and practicing a serious work ethic as students develop and revise short fiction, poetry, and drama. Workshops form the center of the class, and outside reading in the three genres is required. Grades will be based on effort and participation.

This introductory course is designed to help students enjoy literature.  A manageable reading list will enable us to give critical consideration to the short fiction, poetry, and plays we study.  In addition to active engagement with each piece (reading and writing thoughtfully), we will explore how basic literary modes and techniques function in the literature.  Coursework will include active discussion, written assignments and an oral project.    

This introductory course is designed to help students enjoy literature.  A manageable reading list will enable us to give critical consideration to the short fiction, poetry, and plays we study.  In addition to active engagement with each piece (reading and writing thoughtfully), we will explore how basic literary modes and techniques function in the literature.  Coursework will include active discussion, written assignments and an oral project.    

This course surveys English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the middle of the eighteenth century, encompassing a number of major writers and important genres and themes. The course aims to provide a basic context for understanding literature written during the first millenium of English literary history by focusing on the historical and cultural contexts in which the literature was written and the changing conventions it employs. You will be expected to learn a fair amount of history: names, dates, and cultural terminology. This is a crash course on all the chronological background you may have missed out on but which is crucial for understanding the origins and early development of western culture.

English 259 races through two centuries of British literature, from the Romantic poets through Victorian sages and modernist innovators to post-modern writers.  This period of British literature traces the construction of a modern British literary imagination and identity, and the dissolution of the belief in a coherent, unified (British) subject. The class introduces you to the "big guns" in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and explores what those writers did with and to the genres of poetry, novel, and drama. 

Lower-division survey courses like this one are not easy. Completing the course successfully requires you to synthesize a great deal of literary material and concepts, as well as historical information. You will also practice explicating (a.k.a. "close-reading") literary texts while learning about the cultural and historical contexts in which those texts were produced. All that doesn't mean we can't have some fun along the way.

The course is required for the English major (Literature, Credential, and Honors Options) and satisfies the Literature section of the Humanities GE (C1). The course is designed to foster the following English Department Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs): 1) Ability to write effective expository prose; 2) Ability to articulate clear interpretations of literary texts; 3) Knowledge of the history of British literature.

A survey of the last 200 years of British literature, from Blake to Stoppard, this class will explore the significant British writers of poetry, prose, and drama written during this exciting period.  Within the traditional categories of Romantics, Victorians, Edwardians, and Moderns, we will also consider how the historical and cultural changes affected British literature and how the writer-artist shaped the perspectives of his/her contemporary readers.

Some of the authors we will study include John Keats, Charlotte Turner Smith, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, W.H. Auden, John Fowles, and Nick Hornby.

To encourage active student participation and engagement with the material, the class format emphasizes discussion over lecture. In those discussions and writing activities, we will examine the writing techniques, styles, and ideas of British writers and the creative worlds in which they lived and worked.

In this survey class, we will study the complexity of British literature, from the Romantic Period through the Victorian Age and modernism to postmodernism. Our goal is twofold: First, immersing ourselves mainly in the genres of poetry, novel, and drama, we will analyze “major” British writers and their works; second, trying to define what constitutes British literature, we will investigate how authors from diverse background interact with the canon and write back to established literary traditions. In other words, this course will give you a sense of literary history and an understanding of how British literature and its readers have developed in the past century and a half.  The course will combine lecture and discussion.

After witnessing the slaughter of World War II, which harnessed the power of science in order to decimate Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mood of contemporary writers and thinkers was not particularly ... upbeat.  What is it about mankind that inevitably leads him to destroy, when the technologies of the 20th century offer so much to build upon?  Why are we simultaneously obsessed with creating - especially procreating?  What is the relationship between sex and violence?  Is post-modern existence so bad (FMyLife) that it is actually funny?  This course will explore these questions as grappled with in novels, short stories, drama, and poetry written from 1947 to the present.  Some of the titles include Ellison's Invisible Man, DeLillo's White Noise, and Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago.  Course requirements include two short papers, a final exam, and reading quizzes.  English 300 satisfies upper-division GE credit (as well as the desire to contemplate the meaning of life).

English 300 Online is an upper division general education course available to students who have satisfied the lower-division writing requirement. In this discussion-based course, we will study and analyze selected major works of fiction, poetry, and drama and major authors since approximately the end of World War II in England and America. During the semester, you will learn to identify the elements of fiction, poetry, and drama, to trace different attitudes as seen in literature during the contemporary period, to evaluate style and thematic ideas, to discuss theoretical approaches to literature, to successfully navigate the Internet, and to engage in synchronous (live chat) and synchronous (bulletin board) discussions, and to create and present a culminating group project. NOTE: This class will meet online EVERY Thursday from 7-9:45pm. This is a live discussion-based course, so please plan to be online for the entire 2 3/4 hour class meeting. Technical Requirements: Students will need to have access to the Internet, either Microsoft Explorer, Firefox, or Safari and a CSUN Email account. Instructions will be provided for all computer activities; you may visit CSUN's Office of Online Instruction web site for information on online courses, programs, computer resources and availability. Please be familiar with WebCT prior to our first meeting.

A basic course in Language and Linguistics. Starting with a fundamental introduction showing how 'Language' is 'Biological' in nature (a biological basis for language), the class then follows a natural course of inquiry designed to introduce students to general concepts of language. The course is organized in a 'bottom-up' fashion--from smallest to largest segments of language structure--by starting with 'Sounds' (Phonology), working through 'Words' (Morphology), and ending with 'Sentences' (Syntax). Subsequent topics ranging from language acquisition to language disorders are briefly touched upon. 

English 301, Language and Linguistics, is an introduction to the science of language.  The goal of the course is to provide an overview of this uniquely human ability as a social behavior and as a mental process, and how it pertains to various aspects of our everyday lives.  Readings and discussions will cover major areas of grammar such as pronunciation (phonetics and phonology), word formation (morphology), how words cluster toether into phrases and clauses (syntax), meaning (semantics).  It also stresses how people appear to learn their languages as children (child language acquisition) and as adults (second or subsequent language acquisition).  The material is organized to provide students with the terminology to discuss the purpose and nature of language and the language faculty intelligently; to raise awareness of students to the unconscious ways languages are learned and used; to promote the understanding that people sound the way they do when they talk because of a complex, interrelated set of social factors often going beyond conscious control; and to discuss practical application of this knowledge in various environments, e.g., in the classroom, the workplace, and other settings.  No prior knowledge of linguistics is required. 

English 301, Language and Linguistics, is an introduction to the science of language.  The goal of the course is to provide an overview of this uniquely human ability as a social behavior and as a mental process, and how it pertains to various aspects of our everyday lives.  Readings and discussions will cover major areas of grammar such as pronunciation (phonetics and phonology), word formation (morphology), how words cluster toether into phrases and clauses (syntax), meaning (semantics).  It also stresses how people appear to learn their languages as children (child language acquisition) and as adults (second or subsequent language acquisition).  The material is organized to provide students with the terminology to discuss the purpose and nature of language and the language faculty intelligently; to raise awareness of students to the unconscious ways languages are learned and used; to promote the understanding that people sound the way they do when they talk because of a complex, interrelated set of social factors often going beyond conscious control; and to discuss practical application of this knowledge in various environments, e.g., in the classroom, the workplace, and other settings.  No prior knowledge of linguistics is required.

A course in written composition, English 305 extends the skills learned in freshman composition. Students will explore strategies and tools to experience, engage and respond to an array of texts--visual as well as written--paying particular attention to audience, purpose, context, structure and medium.

This course satisfies the writing requirement for Liberal Studies candidates. The Course Web  page will provide links to  the syllabus, online readings, and Internet research resources.

English 305OL is an intermediate course in expository writing available to students who have completed their lower division writing requirement. This course provides preparation for the Upper Division Writing Proficiency Exam (UDWPE), satisfies the writing requirement in the Liberal Studies major, and provides an additional opportunity for students to review, reassess, and further develop their writing and research skills. Important aims of the course include: Discovering your own "voice," developing a variety of writing styles developing a sensitivity to the impact of language, improving your ability to use appropriate research methods and materials, improving skills in standard written English, and developing computer and Internet competency. You will be asked to produce a variety of writing, including short written responses to the readings, multiple drafts of several expository essays, an analytical essay on your writing process, and practice WPE exams. During the semester, you will learn to successfully navigate the Internet, and to engage in synchronous (live chat) and synchronous (bulletin board) discussions, and to create and present a culminating group project. NOTE: This class will meet online EVERY Tuesday from 7-9:45pm. This is a live discussion-based course, so please plan to be online for the entire 2 3/4 hour class meeting. Technical Requirements: Students will need to have access to the Internet, either Microsoft Explorer, Firefox, or Safari and a CSUN  Email account. Instructions will be provided for all computer activities; you may visit CSUN's Office of Online Instruction web site for information on online courses, programs, computer resources and availability. Please be familiar with WebCT prior to our first meeting.

This class is designed to prepare students for the type of writing which will be required in their professional lives, and stresses writing appropriate to a variety of professional audiences and situations.  The coursework will include a brief overview of the genres and rhetorical demands of professional writing as well as the conventions and etiquette specific to these genres.  We will cover a variety of short report genres; in addition, a significant portion of the class is devoted to the research and drafting of a long-term project, which will consist of a proposal and long report on a topic of the student's choice.  This is designed to give students the skills and strategies needed to master these challenging genres for graduate or professional work.  The course is linked with the school of public health, but the professional writing is applicable to every career field.  We will be stressing critical thinking, rhetorical strategies, professional ethics, and the reader-ready format essential to the professional environment.  Students will be simulating workplace projects by working individually as well as in collaborative settings, will learn time management and project management skills, and will begin to develop a sense of professional identity.

Required texts are Successful Writing at Work (Custom CSUN 9th edition available at the Matador Bookstore) by Philip C. Kolin and Better:  A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande.

This class is designed to prepare students for the type of writing which will be required in their professional lives, and stresses writing appropriate to a variety of professional audiences and situations.  The coursework will include a brief overview of the genres and rhetorical demands of professional writing as well as the conventions and etiquette specific to these genres.  We will cover a variety of short report genres; in addition, a significant portion of the class is devoted to the research and drafting of a long-term project, which will consist of a proposal and long report on a topic of the student's choice.  This is designed to give students the skills and strategies needed to master these challenging genres for graduate or professional work.  The course is linked with the school of public health, but the professional writing is applicable to every career field.  We will be stressing critical thinking, rhetorical strategies, professional ethics, and the reader-ready format essential to the professional environment.  Students will be simulating workplace projects by working individually as well as in collaborative settings, will learn time management and project management skills, and will begin to develop a sense of professional identity.

Required texts are Successful Writing at Work (Custom CSUN 9th edition available at the Matador Bookstore) by Philip C. Kolin and Better:  A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande.

The Madness: The real subject of the creative writing workshop is that “Culprit--Life.” Students should enter the course not like “a patient etherised upon a table” but like a surgeon with an impatient scalpel. In other words, students should possess the ferocious calm of a woman about to cut through skin.

The Method: English 308 offers intermediate instruction in writing fiction. In the first half of the course, students will investigate key modern and contemporary masters of the short story, paying special attention to the vital conventions in structure and classic elements of style seen in realism and in other literary movements. In the second half of the course, students will produce an original short story by applying classic narrative strategies and techniques to their own innovative fiction. Throughout the semester, students will read widely and will analyze published stories and the stories of other students in oral presentations and in written critiques. 308 assumes a previous introduction to figurative language and to basic narrative terms, as well as some prior workshop experience.

English 308 is an intensive, high velocity, directed writing-based class designed to introduce essential principles of language, narrative, and form from a writerly perspective and, in so doing, change, at least a little bit, the nature of what we think it is that we are doing when we’re writing.  What I mean by a “writerly perspective” is that most “real writers” understand that writing proceeds out of language (the medium itself) and not image (the idea in your head).  As E.M. Forster says, “How can I know what I mean until I see what I’ve said?”  And as the artist Vasa says, “art happens” in the “mistakes” that he makes when he is doing what he “doesn’t know how to do.”  Or, as one of my students last semester said on the completion of a “breakthrough story”—“It was like stepping off a cliff.”  In so doing, we will be beginning to explore how it is that language can indeed become a means of creation.  And as we do, we will also be exploring the various conventions of fiction that make all this possible at all.

This class will be held in conversation with other writers writing, and thinking about writing, and it will consist of exercise-based small workshops, lecture/discussions, and some form of larger workshop at the end.

This course will begin with music—the base of African American Literature and move to the challenges the authors faced, and the different jobs they assigned themselves in their writing.  A manageable reading list will allow us to give critical consideration to the different pieces we read—autobiographies, short fiction, poems and essays.  We will also examine the different places and spaces that African American authors have created.  Coursework will include active discussion, a fun debate (students love it), written assignments and an oral project.     

This course examines film’s representation of powerful dystopian novels such as George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes, and Jack London's The Iron Heel.  A close look at the relationship between these texts and others (e.g., Metropolis, Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Brazil) will lay bare aesthetic and philosophical visions of post-apocalyptic, totalitarian, and corporate-run societies.

This course is a study of contemporary popular culture, including commodity culture, advertising, television, and film. The course text is Signs of Life in the USA, 6th edition, and the course methodology is cultural semiotics. Students should be prepared to investigate the cultural mythologies behind our popular culture and to go beyond the surface of entertainment towards its significance. Students will write researched semiotic analyses towards satisfaction of the university IC requirement. English 313 also satisfies the university's Section E General Education requirement.

Socrates posited that "An unexamined life is not worth living."  In accordance with this view, it is important to take a close look at the movies, television, advertising, networking sites, video games, and cell phone apps that comprise such a sigificant part of our lives today.  Should the adage "I think, therefore I am" be changed to "I blog, therefore I am"?  Should "Know thyself" be updated to "Know MySpace"?  English 313 teaches one how to read popular culture, how to find meaning in what may seem, on the surface, to be trivial entertainment.  Taking a psychological and semiotic approach, we will examine the reciprocal relationship between the self and popular culture:  we create it while it simultaneously creates us. 

After warming up by analyzing packages and advertising, our primary focus will be television, with particular attention to cartoon sitcoms (The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy) and reality dating shows (Blind Date, Rock of Love, More to Love).  Students will then apply learned concepts in a research paper on the film of their choice.  Finally, students will work in groups focusing on any number of pop culture topics - from video games and comics to tattooing and fashion.  Signs of Life in the U.S.A. by Maasik and Solomon will be our primary text (over which you will have numerous quizzes).  English 313 fulfills upper division GE credits as well as Information Competence requirements.

Ah, the radical romance. . . .This course looks closely at popular culture by way of the radical romance in film, television, literature, and cyberspace. We begin by asking, What signifies love and relationships in the 21st-century? How do Summer Palace, Sex and the City, The Rules of Attraction, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof resist and reaffirm class, gender, and the romance genre itself? In what ways have MySpace and Facebook transformed human relations? We’ll define radical romance through literary theory, film theory, new media studies, and cultural studies in a friendly, workshop-style class environment.

This course introduces students to a wide range of themes and genres within American Indian literature: the oral tradition and tribal stories of creation, tricksters, and heroes; biographies of witnesses to the conflicts between Euro-Americans and American Indians; and poetry and fiction by Indians living in the 20th century. Among the modern authors covered will be Nicholas Black Elk, Louise Erdrich, Simon Ortiz, Carter Revard, Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie. American Indian literature is often times challenging because it presents a perspective "on nature, on human relations, on American history, on a sense of the sacred" radically different from mainstream America's. As we seek to understand what we read in class, we will explore our own perspectives and beliefs. The grade will consist of a mixture of quizzes, take-home exams, essays, and a brief presentation.

English 355 (Writing About Literature) is designed to teach English majors the way professionals examine and respond to literature; you will learn the tools and techniques necessary for success in upper division literature courses.

Thus, we will focus on close reading skills, learning to recognize specific literary devices and then analyze and interpret how they form and affect our understanding of the work. We will mine the genres of poetry, prose fiction and drama and will respond by practicing the skill of writing clearly and intuitively. We will also develop strong researching skills, learning how to evaluate the sources we have found and then fitting ourselves into the conversation on the topic we are researching.

English 364 Online is an upper division general education course in the genre of the short story. In this discussion-based course, we will study a variety of stories with varying themes, written at different periods of time, and authored by a diverse group of writers. The goal of our course is to appreciate the short story as a genre of literature and to enhance students' analytical reading and writing skills. During the semester, you will learn to identify the elements of fiction, to trace different attitudes as seen in literature during different periods of writing, to evaluate style and thematic ideas, to discuss theoretical approaches to literature, to successfully navigate the Internet, and to engage in synchronous (live chat) and synchronous (bulletin board) discussions, and to create and present a culminating group project. NOTE: This class will meet online EVERY Friday from 11:00am-1:45pm. This is a live discussion-based course, so please plan to be online for the entire 2 3/4 hour class meeting. Technical Requirements: Students will need to have access to the Internet, either Microsoft Explorer, Firefox, or Safari and a CSUN Email account. Instructions will be provided for all computer activities; you may visit CSUN's Office of Online Instruction web site for information on online courses, programs, computer resources and availability. Please be familiar with WebCT prior to our first meeting. 

In this class we will examine how individuals attempt to define themselves outside the confines of their specific societies.  Refusing to adhere to moral, legal, social, and cultural laws, these individuals dare to challenge Thomas Hobbes’ assertion that man outside of society will only decline into savagery. Transgressing& (or Breaking The Rules), they step beyond the familiarity of constraining boundaries to create new modes of interacting and living.  We will read texts such as Rita Mae Brown’s Southern Discomfort and Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (a Native American author).  As we explore the characters and authors who break the rules, our diverse selection will encourage us to consider both the construction and enforcement of dominant mores and laws, and the borderland possibilities of transgressing them. Coursework will include active discussion, written assignments and an oral project.  Students who are not honors students but like to read and ask questions are most welcome.

Questions—Email me at rosamaria.chacon@csun.edu.

 English 405, Language Differences and Language Change, is an upper-division course on language variation.  Its focus is the English language in America, with special attention to regional (e.g., Southern versus Northern American English) and social (e.g., Chicano English and African American Vernacular English or AAVE) dialects.  Language variation also depends on situations of usage, so some attention is also placed on formal, written varieties, or registers of English in contrast with the informal, spoken varieties that we all use outside of institutional settings like the university.  The course deals with concepts of standard versus nonstandard, formal versus informal, and so on.  No prior knowledge of linguistics is required, though it might be helpful.  The first part of the course deals with linguistic terminology and how linguists describe languages and processes of change.  Any student of the English language knows that English as come a long way since the time of Shakespeare and the translation of the Bible known as the Authorized (or King James) Version.  One goal of this course, therefore, is to enable students to see English as it is, a living language that is formed in the mouths (and by the pens) of its speakers.

This composition course is designed for upper division and graduate students who plan to teach English on the secondary level. Focusing on the diverse national and ethnic cultural perspectives found in contemporary literature, we will explore those works that are sure to be interesting and engaging to the adolescent reader and appropriate for use in today’s Grade 6-12 classrooms.  The class format emphasizes class discussion over lecture.

Two essential questions will guide our reading and discussion:

• How can we develop engaging reading and critical thinking strategies to enhance the secondary student’s ability to reflect intelligently and empathetically in reading poetry, fiction and nonfiction?
• How can we better understand the writing process in order to adequately prepare secondary school students to write clear, effective and thoughtful essays?

A review of grammar, rhetorical, and composition principles will enhance our own writing and assist us in developing strategies and techniques that will strengthen writing and reading instruction in the secondary English classroom.

This course gives students the opportunity to hone their writing skills and apply these skills to forms of writing common to professions such as technical writing, publishing, public/government relations, corporate communications, and advertising. Students will complete a news release, speech, print advertisement, brochure, fund-raising letter, PowerPoint presentation, and webpage, and learn strategies for completing these assignments on the tight deadlines common in the workplace. Students will also create effective job application materials, including a resume, cover letter, and portfolio. English 407 is also the prerequisite for English 494EIP (offered spring 2010), a professional writing internship in the communications division of a local corporation or small business. For more information, please visit the English Intern Program web site.

The Madness: What if existence is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to contemplate? What if the story of life has no clear beginning, middle, and end—no narrative arc? What if, instead, that story percolates out of a roiling cauldron of chaos? Perhaps, then, fiction and science are not separate enterprises but twin disciplines, conjoined by theories and probabilities instead of rules and resolutions. In that case, the writing workshop must be a laboratory of ceaseless experimentation where anything is possible and nothing is permitted. If you’re ready to embrace the paradox within that statement, then you’re ready for all the ambiguity inherent in English 408. First item in the Petri dish: must fiction make “sense” in order to create “meaning?"

The Method: 408 offers advanced instruction in writing fiction, with a focus on experimentation in structure and style. In the first half of the course, students will investigate key historical and contemporary renegades & mavericks, shamans & mad scientists, tricksters & philosophers, all the vanguards of the unfinished project of fiction. Students also will examine a range of artistic and intellectual possibilities, along with shifting theoretical perspectives regarding the role of narrative in the genre. In the second half of the course, students will produce their own short story by applying the techniques of specific literary movements or styles, such as formalism and fabulism. Throughout the semester, students will read widely and will analyze published stories and the stories of other students in oral presentations and in written critiques. 408 assumes a previous introduction to figurative language and to conventional narrative forms, as well as some prior workshop experience.

English 408 is an advanced class in narrative writing based loosely on the twinned, enduring principles of storytelling and constraint, and proceeding from the essential premise that writing itself proceeds out of language, not image.   “No surprise,” Frost tells us, “for the writer; no surprise for the reader.”  In class, we will write, read, reflect, and talk critically about both our writing and reading.  Along the way, what we think about when we think about what we’re doing when we’re writing is likely to shift.

Once I met a woman in New Mexico who teaches narrative using the basic conceit of obstacle:  whatever you’re doing, she’ll throw an obstacle in your path, and your job will be to circumvent, manage, or subvert it.  The avant-garde Oulipo group founded their writing philosophy on the more extreme conception of the “liberatory constraint,” designed to release what, in other respects, could not be conceived—what they called “potential literature.”

This class falls somewhere in between.

This class will be conducted as a conversation held in dialogue with other recent writing from around the world, and it will consist of exercise-based small workshops, lecture/discussions, and a whole group workshop in the end.  We’ll begin with a series of readings, lectures and discussions, directed writing based loosely on Oulipo logics of constraint, and small group workshops, using review and repetition as required.  In the latter part of the term, we will convene as a whole class workshop to discuss your finished short stories.

Chaucer is at once one of the greatest and the most dynamic of English poets. His best-known work, The Canterbury Tales, shows him as a master of narrative and of stylistic variety which has few rivals. His minor works focus on themes of particular interest in present-day criticism, such as the cultural formations embodied in the literary landscape, gender politics, and the workings of dreams and the imagination. In this course we will explore Chaucer’s most important themes and literary strategies by reading a selection of The Canterbury Tales and some of Chaucer’s shorter poems in his original Middle English. The scope of the course also embraces the study of Chaucer’s sources and literary analogues and will reflect on his influence on later writers.

In this course, we will be developing criteria and resources for selecting and critiquing children's texts, exploring methods for engaging children with literature, and developing an understanding of the socio-political implications and controversies embedded in texts written for (or adopted by) children. Course grade based on: journal entries examining books outside the course syllabus, a presentation, a mid-term essay examination, a term paper, a final project, and class participation. Texts: Charlotte Huck's Children's Literature in the Elementary School, selected critical readings, and several illustrated books and middle school novels.

From classics like Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web to such modern children’s books as Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising, this course will examine the exciting and dynamic changes in children’s literature over the past century.  As a class designed for university students who plan to teach in the elementary and middle school classrooms, some activities will focus on developing curriculum materials suitable for today’s young learners.  

This eight-week PACE course meets every Wednesday night beginning October 21, from 8:00 to 9:45 pm, and on four Saturday afternoons at 12:30 to 4:00 pm:  October 24, November 7, November 21, and December 5.

ENGL 430 is an unusual interdisciplinary course exploring the inter-relationship between words and pictures in literature, art, popular culture, and critical theory. This relationship is one of those issues that keep coming up, in myriad contexts, but rarely get tackled head-on. Tackling it head-on is what we're going to do, starting from the assumption that literature and visual art are inextricably linked, that in fact no medium is “pure” and all media participate in each other.

430 will study this relationship from two different directions. For one, we’ll look closely at specific literary and artistic works that blend or juxtapose word and image (or even call the distinction between them into question). I'll call such works (after scholar W.J.T. Mitchell) imagetexts. In particular, we'll look at visual poetry, illuminated poetry (Blake), picture books, comics, and contemporary artists' books. Secondly, we'll study the word/image question from a theoretical angle, taking a look at what intellectuals have said in the past about the alleged differences between words and pictures.

Course objectives: The aims of ENGL 430 are to help each member of our class achieve: greater awareness of word/image relationships, interartistic collaboration, and the growing field of word/image studies; knowledge of theoretical debates regarding word/image differences and relationships; and familiarity with resources for research in word/image studies.

Course requirements: Here's what we're going to do over the course of the semester:

1. We're going to keep up a weekly online reading journal and discussion forum, in the form of a blog to which everyone in class will contribute regularly.
2. We're going to read and discuss complex works. I'll be looking for constant participation in class discussion.
3. We're going to have some guest speakers and take a field trip or two, including a visit to the Getty Research Institute to discuss the book as a visual art form.
4. We're going to hold in-class group presentations (15 minutes each) on artists whose works address the relationship between words and images.
5. In the second half of term, each of you will prepare a critical, analytical paper of roughly five (5) pages in length, involving substantial research of your own.
6. At some point in the semester, you'll be creating a book from scratch. Not necessarily a written text to go into the book, but the book itself: its form, its binding, its material construction.

Required course texts: I'm still in the process of choosing these. You can certainly expect a range of genres, everything from novels to poetry to picture books to comics. Expect for example Paul Auster’s eerie detective novel City of Glass and its graphic-novel adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. Expect memoirs that incorporate drawings and photos as well as writing. Expect other things. On the theoretical side, we’ll read a bunch of electronic reserve texts (available online through the Oviatt Library) representing important scholars and debates in word/image studies. In sum, be prepared to read widely and unpredictably: everything from scraps of Homer and Virgil to Romantic poetry to comic books that were published last week to current websites. It’s going to be quite a ride! I love teaching this stuff, and hope to pass some of that love on to you.

To learn more, please contact Prof. Hatfield at x3416 or charles.hatfield@csun.edu.

Major Critical Theories is an historical survey of literary criticism and theory from the Classical era to the present, including Classicism, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, the New Criticism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction, Feminism, Marxism, Psychoanalytic criticism, the New Historicism, Multiculturalism, Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies. Not a methods course, Major Critical Theories surveys the history of a long, often contentious and contradictory, conversation about literature, a conversation that has no hope of an absolute beginning and no prospect of an end.

In analyzing the complex interactions among readers, writers, and texts, various theories of literature engage in debates about literature's status and value, and the nature of reading and interpretation. These critical theories wrestle with such questions as: What is the role and function of the poet/author/writer? What is the relationship between reading and interpretation? How do the desires of the reader affect the reading process? In this course, we will explore these and other questions about the function of the poet, the activity of interpretation, the role of aesthetics, and the status of the reader through a study of the major texts of literary criticism from Plato to the present. Course requirements MAY include a short essay, a take-home assignment, a midterm, and a comprehensive final exam.

This course will examine connections between literacy, rhetoric and culture, exploring what it means to be literate in an increasingly technological and multicultural world, tracing various paths to literacy, and considering the relationship  between literacy and power.  It will also study how rhetoric relates to these questions. Concepts for study will include academic literacy, social literacy, visual rhetoric, literacy for second language and non-standard English students, and the new literacy of technology. 

This course is the core course for the English minor in Writing and Rhetoric. It is open to graduate students.

English 457IL is an intensive selected topics class in recent literatures in translation with a special emphasis on the concerns of the working writer. We begin, as ever, by asking how it is possible to conceive of a prose-based story art that remains both central and vital in a time already saturated with narrative and image, and characterized by the free and immediate circulation of personal expression of all kinds. We proceed, again as ever, experimentally, seeking out and examining the work of new writers from around the world in an effort to re-imagine our sense of what is possible, even necessary, in writing. We are interested not just in the ways writing can be said to grow out of and respond to the particular cultural and historical moment of its production, but also in what an expanded literary conversation might mean to us and our own work and literature in our increasingly globalized world. We note with curiosity (alarm?) from the outset that in the US, nonetheless, only 3% of titles published annually are works in translation.

As a hybrid course, this course will attempt to balance practices of both reading and writingreading as writers, writing as readers, producing our own creative writing not as analysis of but in dialogue with the work of the writers we read. Available for workshop credit in the creative writing option and, by substitution, as a creative writing senior seminar. Also, literature credit by arrangement.

In this course we will study the various prose writers and poets associated with the British Romantic Era (1790-1830). We will study these writers in their literary and historical contexts, particularly the French Revolution, the slavery debates, and British imperialism. Course requirements MAY include several assignments and quizzes, a midterm, 1 long research paper, and a comprehensive final exam.

We begin our discussion of "contemporary" British literature in the year 1939, the year that W.B. Yeats died and Hitler invaded Poland, launching a second calamitous world war.  In Britain, 1939 marked the beginning of the end of widespread domestic unemployment, even as it signaled the destruction not only of its young men in battle, but also of its land and people at home during the Blitz.  As the century progressed, Britain would also witness the disintegration of its once-dominant Empire, the subsequent influx of immigrants from its former colonies, and wild fluctuations in its economic position.  All of these events radically restructured British society and called into question what exactly it means to be "British." 

The course will examine the literary responses to this series of transformations in recent British history. This examination will require you to carefully unpack and explicate the literary texts, craft arguments about the texts' ideas, and engage the larger literary discussion of the texts through research, eventually incorporating that research into your written arguments.

The course is designed to foster the following English Department Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs): 1) Ability to write effective expository prose; 2) Ability to articulate clear interpretations of literary texts; 3) Knowledge of the history of British literatures; 5) Knowledge of the cultural diversity of literatures.

The Madness: If poets are the “unacknowledged legislators” of the world, then critics make up the judicial branch. And if the artist’s job is “to pose the question,” then the critic’s job is to pursue the question--like Theseus following the thread. If you're ready to slay a minotaur with a thesis, then you're ready for the labyrinth of English 465.

The Method: 465 offers an intensive guide to literary criticism and to writing methodologies, as well as a survey of conflicting philosophical perspectives on the art of fiction. Throughout the course, students will read widely and will participate in ongoing debates by writers about the nature and aims of modern fiction. They also will write authoritatively about the relationship between dominant trends in literary theory and shifting styles in the novel, paying special attention to the dynamic relationship between form and content. In their critical analyses, students will push beyond the basic skills of summary and comparison/contrast to conduct close readings of texts guided by systemic or synthetic thinking. Students will demonstrate synthetic thinking by making complex connections between theoretical essays and literary fictions and by extending a dialogue between those texts into final projects of original criticism or imaginative writing. 465 assumes a fundamental grasp of narrative terms and techniques, as well as an advanced knowledge of composition skills, including elements of style, structure, and thesis formation.

In this class, we will explore select novels published in the nineteenth century, often referred to as The Victorian Age, after Queen Victoria (1837-1901). Scrutinizing works by such major 19^th-century novelists, as Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and William M. Thackeray, we will also immerse ourselves in Wilkie Collins’s and Mary Seacole’s novels. We will investigate the following questions: What constitutes a novel? Why did the novel dominate literature in the nineteenth century? Is the term "Victorian novel" an appropriate historical classification, an aesthetic description, or both? How do the novels under scrutiny represent the historical and intellectual contexts of the 19^th century, such as urbanization, industrialization, class conflict, transportation, religious crisis, social mobility, information explosion, bureaucratization, colonialism, the theories of Darwin and Malthus, the influence of science, pessimism, diversity, the Victorian selves? Apart from literary, cultural, and biographical contexts, we will test major theoretical approaches against the novels —psychoanalytic, deconstructive, post-colonial, Marxist, feminist, and gender criticism, and we will put special emphasis on the construction and representation of gender and race.

Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights.  1995. Ed. Pauline Nestor. London: Penguin, 2003; Charles Dickens. Great Expectations. 1996. Ed. Charlotte Mitchell. London: Penguin, 2003; Thomas Hardy. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 1998. Ed. Tim Dolin. London: Penguin, 2003; William M. Thackeray. Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero. Ed. John Carey. New York: Penguin, 2004; Wilkie Collins. The Moonstone. Ed. Sandra Kemp. London: Penguin, 1998; Mary Seacole. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. Ed. Sarah Salih. London: Pengiun, 2005.

The full syllabus for this course is available via a hyperlink from my website, http://www.bronzepage.com. In this class we will be studying seminal American authors from the 1770s to the 1850s, for the purpose of charting the development of fiction, exposition, and poetry alongside the formation of the United States’ national identity. To place the literature in context, we will have short weekly supplementary readings drawn from recent historians’ scholarship and pay special attention to the biographies of the country’s early presidents.

In this class, we will engage in a trans-national study of Latina/o authorship. Using authors from a wide range of backgrounds, including both Spanish-speaking writers (translated into English) and English-speaking Latinas/os, we will attempt to identify a common ground binding the “Latin” majority of the Western Hemisphere together. Jose Marti will be our starting point, and we will conclude with two Dominican writers of the 1990s: Julia Alvarez and Junot Diaz.

The full syllabus is available at http://www.bronzepage.com.

The madness: If passion and analysis, creativity and criticism, seem like contradictions, “very well, then, I contradict myself.” Creative writing contains multitudes of contradictions. Begin with two brief examples: Must a story “make sense” in order to “make meaning?” And is writing merely a way of putting “the best words in the best order” or is it “a way of seizing life by the throat?” Students should prepare to engage in the paradox of narrative writing by first embracing it then examining it up close.

The method: English 490 offers advanced instruction in narrative writing with a close focus on student writing. Over the course of the semester, students will produce 2-3 short stories by applying narrative strategies and techniques to their own innovative fiction. In addition, students will read and analyze the stories of other students in oral presentations and in written critiques. 490 assumes a previous introduction to figurative language and to conventional and experimental narrative forms, as well as prior workshop experience.

The full syllabus for this course is available via a hyperlink from my homepage, http://www.bronzepage.com/.

In this class we will study different kinds of “epic”, from ancient Rome to nineteenth-century America, with the goal of trying to understand how the complex and multilayered genre balances individual authorship and the collective voice of nations

English 495ESM is the capstone course for CSUN English Subject Matter students. English Subject Matter students are welcome, along with Credential Preparation students and any other interested English majors. Unlike the usual English senior seminar, this class does not require a research paper; instead, students will create a final portfolio of their best work produced during the semester. Work will be individual and collaborative. This unique course focuses on literacy in multiple genres (poetry, myth, world short fiction, and media). Students will develop short analytic papers and creative responses for most genres. For example, students will analyze a myth and then create a “myth web site”; we'll also study and write poetry. The course's multigenre, multimedia, and transnational compass makes it innovative and comprehensive. It both fulfills California standards for credential candidates and grounds this fulfillment in cutting edge scholarship in the fields of English studies. In its broad interpretation of genre and literacy, the course reviews, synthesizes, and builds on previous work in the English major in critical theory, literature, and expository writing. Technology is integrated into all components of the course. English 495ESM also provides the opportunity to develop analytic and creative skills around specific topics and genres relevant to the teaching of English at the secondary school level, and to reflect on work in the course in the context of future teaching practices. An understanding that English 495ESM students and their future secondary school students must situate their reading, writing, and thinking in a global context informs the course's commitment to examining texts from around the world.

A paradigm shift within literary studies has caused us to see that all cultural activity—from poetry to popular culture—is significant and can be "read" in order to understand the nature of the society in which we live. The resultant paradigm, Cultural Studies, accordingly includes the study of popular culture as a significant component of work within a literature department, and this Senior Seminar, Popular Culture Studies, is designed within that context. Thus, English 495 PC will be a course in learning how to "read" American popular culture, with the purpose of guiding students to an understanding of the kind of culture ours is. The method chosen for learning how to read culture will be that of cultural semiotics, because the semiotic method evolved precisely as a means of reading culture, especially as grounded in the work of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco. Students in the seminar will learn how to use semiotics and will apply their learning to a substantial term paper/project on a popular cultural topic of their choice.

English 623 is an intensive graduate seminar on recent literatures in translation with a special emphasis on the concerns of the working writer. We begin, as ever, by asking how it is possible to conceive of a prose-based story art that remains both central and vital in a time already saturated with narrative and image, and characterized by the free and immediate circulation of personal expression of all kinds. We proceed, again as ever, experimentally, seeking out and examining the work of new writers from around the world in an effort to re-imagine our sense of what is possible, even necessary, in writing. We are interested not just in the ways writing can be said to grow out of and respond to the particular cultural and historical moment of its production, but also in what an expanded literary conversation might mean to us and our own work and literature in our increasingly globalized world. We note with curiosity (alarm?) from the outset that in the US, nonetheless, only 3% of titles published annually are works in translation.

As a hybrid course, this course will attempt to balance practices of both reading and writing--reading as writers, writing as readers, producing our own creative writing not as analysis of but in dialogue with the work of the writers we read.  Available for creative writing or literature credit.

The fantastic—an umbrella term for fantasy, science fiction and everything in between—has often been constructed as a “lesser” literary form: as “popular” literature and/or as “merely escapist.” Children’s literature is also often dismissed in similarly cavalier ways. Yet both forms enact a fascinating and complex variety of cultural tasks in their broad appeal to diverse audiences. Drawing from feminist and post-colonial criticism and from criticism on the fantastic, we will examine how childhood functions at the confluence of these two forms, focusing on fantasy and science fiction texts written for or about children. Among the issues we will consider are: standard generic conventions (and how we go about analyzing them), gender and genre, unconventional narrative structures, narrative treatments of technology and magic, and the ideological implications of secondary world creation.

Texts we will examine include: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; The Phantom Tollbooth; Peter Pan; The Hobbit; Dark Lord of Derkholm; Sabriel; Dirty Job; Runaways; Ender’s Game; The Golden Compass; Where the Wild Things Are; and Come Away from the Water, Shirley. 

In this discussion-based class, we will be examing the genre of the American Gothic--from Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland to contemporary television shows. Louis Gross has argued that the Gothic quest "offers a darkened world where fear, oppression, and madness are the ways to knowledge" and where the conclusion of the quest often ends with the shattering of the protagonist's images of social, political and sexual roles. As such, we will be exploring the American Gothic not only as a genre, but also as a means of critiquing the gothic anxieties of the dominant culture. Because gothic dread is often focused upon the fear of the "other," we will emphasize contemporary criticism concerning race, class, sexuality, and gender. 

This course will be a multicultural approach to the high period of fascism – the 1930s and 1940s – though most of the works we will study were written after that period, looking back at it and trying to understand how human nature, even in democratic America, failed to stop the rise of fascist thought. The role that demonization of “others” played in the world’s fascist moment will be of especial importance, not only because of the severity of conflict in the 1930s and 1940s, but also because multiculturalist beliefs must be re-evaluated and interrogated when readers confront the cultural scapegoating of this particular era. The full syllabus is available through a hyperlink to my website, http://www.bronzepage.com.

Can you earn more money by taking a course on medieval literature? It's not as crazy as you think. Recent work on the literature of the Middle Ages has generated questions about the relationship between the material text and textual meaning--questions which are directly relevant to the acquisition of computer literacy skills needed which are needed in today's technology-centred world. The Technology of Textuality takes this as its central premise. In this course will explore how textual meaning is determined by the technology whether by oral, scribal, print, or digital. We will examine a selection of medieval texts, including Beowulf and portions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, exploring what we can learn about their meanings and social functions through a study of their production and transmission (both medieval and modern). We will spend a good deal of time looking at facsimiles of the original manuscripts (we may even make a field trip to the Getty), and you should be willing to engage with the original language and script with the help of translations.

This will be a very different approach to literary study which will change the way you look at literature. Part of our method for understanding how technology and meaning inter-relate will be "hands on." We will study how to produce digital texts, including web pages, and the learning of some basic HTML and other coding languages will be a required part of the course. No previous knowledge of digital text production is required, but regular internet access is essential. We will be discussing how the coding of information in a digital text can be used to reflect upon the way meaning is "coded" in other types of texts, and we will also discuss how digital resources can be used to study the literature of the Middle Ages. There will be an opportunity to contribute to an ongoing research project as well. With the methods, skills, and technical literacy you acquire in this course, you'll be able to apply your knowledge of literature in new ways and maybe, yes, maybe use them to earn some more money.

Critical Approaches to Literature is a survey of contemporary critical theory, from the New Criticism to Structuralism and Deconstruction, to Reader-Response, Feminist, Psychoanalytic, Marxist, and New Historicist criticism, through to Cultural Studies and Gender criticism. Consistent with the general postmodern consensus that intellectual history is not a matter of progress but, rather, a Nietzschean destinerrance of wandering and warring discourses, this course will not attempt to identify any "correct" approach to literature but will only survey the often contentious and controversial history of American criticism from the early twentieth through the early twenty-first century. The course text is The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

This graduate seminar on the history of rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and composition begins with Nietzsche’s devastating observation, “Is dialectics only a form of revenge in Socrates?”  The answer to that question has shaped the contemporary reception of classical and modern rhetoric as well as writing studies and teaching in general.  Today’s educators strive for a democratic classroom by recognizing how meaning making is always-already value-laden.
 
To that end, this course surveys the most influential texts in the field along with equally powerful non-canonical works. Readings explore how the rhetorical tradition informs present-day writing instruction and conceptions of language and human relations. Class discussions bridge literacy, rhetoric, politics, and the institutionalization of writing instruction so that by the semester’s end we’ll answer Nietzsche’s question with another: How are “rights,” “accountability,” and “responsible citizens” part of the problem?

Class meetings are discussion-oriented and open-ended. Coursework focuses on reading, writing, and discussion. No tests or exams.

This course examines scholarship concerned with genre, both the traditional concept of genre, which focuses on formal categories of literary texts, and the relatively new redefined notion of genre, which focuses on the rhetorical purpose and function of non-literary texts. Through extensive reading, class discussions and research projects, students will seek to understand similarities and differences between these two theoretical perspectives on genre, discover unexplored connections between them, and apply their own developing perspectives to particular  genres. This course provides credit to students in all three MA options: Literature, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric and Composition.