Spring 2018 Graduate Course Descriptions
English 512
Writing for Performance
Thursday, 4:00-6:45 pm
Professor Rick Mitchell
The main focus of this advanced workshop will be the writing of performance texts. Of course, much effective writing is to varying degrees "intuitive," but intuition itself is rarely enough, especially when writing for performance which, unlike most other genres practiced within English departments, involves not only "live" performers, but also spectators. With the performer/audience dynamic in mind (along with a lot of other things), we will read and discuss several published plays and performance texts, and students will frequently act out each other's work, either within small workshop groups or in front of the entire class. Also, everyone will have the (optional) opportunity to present a work-in-process during an evening of staged-readings produced by the Northridge Playwrights' Workshop towards the end of the semester, and students will complete a substantive final project. (Note: Writing for Performance will be run primarily as a workshop. It is available for either creative writing, literature, or rhet comp credit.)
English 525
Early American Minorities
Wednesday, 7-6:45 pm
Professor John Garcia
This course offers a graduate-level introduction to multi-ethnic and racially-diverse American literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with emphases on recently discovered primary sources, important “firsts” by indigenous, African-American, and Latina/o authors, and methodological trends in literary studies at the intersection of book history and digital humanities. Authors we will read include: Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Apess, Walt Whitman, Austin Reed, William Wells Brown, John Rollin Ridge, and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Secondary criticism will address topics such as transatlantic slavery, prisons and punishment, sexuality and the body, racialization, textuality and the archive.
English 525
Collage and the Künstlerroman
Wednesday, 4:00-6:45 pm
Professor Krystal Howard
This course focuses on recent formal innovations in children’s and adolescent literature that foreground the creative act. We will examine the ways that contemporary authors for young people use the Künstlerroman (narrative depicting the growth and development of an artist) and collage in visual and textual form to incite activism in young readers and to represent marginalized groups who have experienced trauma or had their voices silenced. Texts include: Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, Walter Dean Myers’s Monster, Isabel Quintero’s Gabi, a Girl in Pieces, Özge Samanci’s Dare to Disappoint, David Levithan’s Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story, Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, and Rainbow Rowell’s FanGirl.
English 600A
College Composition: Theory & Pedagogy, Teaching Associate Seminar
Monday, 12:30-3:15 pm
Professor JC Lee
English 600A is seminar that prepares Master’s Candidates to teach First Year Composition by addressing composition theory and practice. I have designed this class to introduce you to a variety of specialties and theoretical frameworks in Composition Studies that will help you form and refine your own pedagogies and practices. As most, if not all, of you are Teaching Associates, you will develop documents that can become the foundation of a First-Year Composition course, such as CSUN’s Approaches to University Writing.
English 601
Seminar in Scholarly Methods and Bibliography: Finding Your Academic Community
Monday, 7-9:45 pm
Professor Danielle Spratt
Literary research and scholarship often seems to be a deeply solitary activity, done late at night in the dark recesses of library archives (or as often something done alone, in your pajamas, while not showering for days); it can also seem mysterious: “how did this particular scholar make this archival discovery?”, we might wonder, with little explicit recourse to find an answer. This course will offer you the tools, resources, and methods to study English Language and Literature at the graduate level, and in so doing, it will make explicit the myriad ways in which literary research is fundamentally a social activity. Throughout the semester, we will discuss approaches to finding, evaluating, and employing primary and secondary sources for research, with a concentration on the following: critical bibliography and book history; archival research; textual and digital editing and annotating; scholarly writing for multiple audiences, from seminar papers to published articles; and other issues of professionalization, such as proposing and delivering conference papers. Most importantly, we will consider how research methods help us understand, intervene in, and further develop critical conversations about the literature and culture of the periods we study.
Projects over the course of the semester will include annotating and editing and archival text of your choice; crafting a prospectus and a brief annotated bibliography on a research subject that you devise; contributing to a blog of resources for literary research; writing a conference paper proposal; co-organizing a class conference; and delivering a final conference-length paper on a subject of your choice.
Note: this is a requirement for all LIT students, but it is open to CW or RC students (as an elective) who wish to spend a semester learning about intensive research and focusing on a writing/research project of their choice. Email danielle.spratt@csun.edu with any questions.
English 604
Seminar in Language and Linguistics
Monday, 4-6:45 pm
Professor Enchao Shi
See Catalog description
English 608
Seminar in Narrative Writing
Wednesday, 7:00-9:45 pm
Professor Christopher Higgs
Following Gertrude Stein’s observation that “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything,” this graduate seminar in narrative writing will focus on contemporary aesthetics. Borrowing a set of questions posed by Charles Bernstein, we will ask ourselves, “What is it to be contemporary? What is it to be where we are, to be present in language, to language: and for language to be present for us?” In order to move toward workable solutions, we will examine the form, technique, and style of compositions by classmates as well as diverse works of innovative narrative published in the 21st Century, with special emphasis on risk-taking, experimenting, and challenging ourselves to more purposefully inhabit the present in order to read and write from it rather than from received conventions. Authors likely to appear on the reading list include: Reza Negarestani, Sesshu Foster, Bhanu Kapil, and Alice Notley, among others. Requirements include: weekly writing exercises, a midterm writing project, individual presentations, and a final writing project.
English 609
Seminar in Poetry Writing
Tuesday, 4:00-6:45 pm
Professor Leilani Hall
English 609 is a workshop designed to help you become more proficient in the craft of poetry. It assumes prior formal practice in poetry. Based on a firm belief that good writers are good readers, your work in this course will embrace both pleasures. Specifically, this course will improve not only your writing but also your critical awareness of the process and its multitude of approaches. You will pay passionate attention to poetic techniques and formal elements as they inform content. The texts that we will read for this course underscore the use of lyric, narrative, and experimentation in poetry. It will behoove you to recognize and actively respond to each poem’s concerns. What is this poem’s project? How does this poem work? How does it progress? What does it want us to know?
This course requires your allegiance to others’ work as powerfully as your own. Your peer responses should be insightful and actively engage the poem’s project while bringing other voices to bear on your insight. Thus, this course asks you to write more than poems. In addition to a final portfolio of 10 poems, you will also write 1) critical primary responses, 2) literary letters to a peer, 3) an invisible form (based on your own work and exchanged with a peer), and 4) a final aesthetic statement.
English 622
The Poet as Critic
Thursday, 7:00-9:45 pm
Professor Michael Bryson
Over fifty years ago, Susan Sontag described “the project of interpretation” as “largely reactionary, stifling,” and placed it in the context of “a culture whose […] dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capacity,” before concluding that “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.” The situation does not seem to have improved in the intervening half-century. As Martin Paul Eve has very recently observed, “traditional literary criticism always coerces texts into new narrative forms,” as “its practitioners [read] to seek case studies suited for exegetic purpose.” This situation is hardly new, as Oscar Wilde commented on the often-hostile relationship between critics and poetry well over a century ago, while arguing that the poet should hold the upper hand. In an August 16, 1890 letter to the editor of The Scots Observer, Wilde noted that while “the critic has to educate the public,” the responsibility of the artist is different, for “the artist has to educate the critic.” In that observation, there is something crucial that contemporary academic criticism sometimes seems to have forgotten: artists respond to art differently than do critics (especially of the university-trained and theoretically-inclined variety).
This course takes its cue from Wilde. It is an historical take on the long-running controversy (even hostility) between philosophy and poetry, starting with Susan Sontag, then looking back at the 19th- and 20th-century development of a paranoid style in criticism (often referred to as a hermeneutics of suspicion), before working back to the classical origins of this controversy in Xenophanes of Colophon (and Gorgias and Plato), a consideration of the opposing positions of Eratosthanes and Horace on the "use" of poetry, then considering the Renaissance and Romantic controversies over poetry before returning to Oscar Wilde, and his now-heretical views on the relationship of the individual poet to art.
The author isn't dead. And there is an outside-text. But after the readings in this course, you will hopefully understand how we found ourselves subscribing to such notions in the first place.
English 630: The Red Christ and Modern American Protest Literature
Thursday, 4:00-6:45 pm
Professor Anthony Dawahare
Christianity is often only associated with a defense of the status quo of American society and conservative politics, yet its history in the U.S. is far more complex and complicated than the foregoing assumption. This course will study a radical tradition of Christianity within American society and, specifically, its impact on modern American writers. This strain of Christianity (or what some scholars term the “Social Gospel” and “Social Christianity”) provided many American writers with a framework within which to understand social problems in the U.S., such as slavery, racism, class oppression, sexism, and poverty. It also provided an ethos of social justice and a vision of an egalitarian society. This is not to say that all of the American writers we will study were “Christians;” some, for instance, were atheists who nonetheless found powerful literary language in the English Bible that they adapted to their own literary and political ends.
We will see, in fact, that for many American writers, Christianity was inseparable from a broad literary and philosophical tradition on the side of freedom, democracy, and equality. Writers we will study include Charles Sheldon, Edward Bellamy, Margaret Deland, Upton Sinclair, W.E.B . Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Dalton Trumbo, Grace Lumpkin, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright.
English 638 Critical Approaches to Literature
Tuesday, 4:00-6:45 pm
Steven Wexler
This graduate seminar explores major critical approaches to literature with particular attention to theoretical movements from the last one hundred years. After a brief introduction to criticism in Greek antiquity, we’ll leap ahead to the "rise of English" in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then settle comfortably in the 20th, with a close look at Russian formalism, structuralism, New Criticism, poststructuralism, Marxism, gender and queer studies, psychoanalysis, reader-response theory, race and ethnicity studies, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies. The course concludes in the 21st century, our century, with some focus on posthumanism and critical pedagogy.
To highlight theory’s ubiquity, relevance, and value as an interpretive lens--and to take the fear out of theory—we’ll examine specific theoretical movements in relation to the following popular texts:
1. Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph” (1945 short story): semiotics, structuralism, reader-response theory
2. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960 film): psychoanalysis, gender and queer studies
3. Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man (1977 play): historicisms, postcolonial theory
4. Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1970 film): Marxisms
5. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman(2014 film): postmodernism, poststructuralism
6. Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017 film): race and ethnicity studies
7. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003 novel): critical pedagogy, posthumanism
Projects include original digital sites devoted to theory and textual analysis, student-led discussions, and a weekly Canvas reflection-conversation.
English 651: Rhetoric and Composition Theory
Wednesday, 4:00-6:45 pm
Iswari Pandey
What is the status of writing and writing instruction in an age of the digital? Where does rhetoric, the art of persuasion, figure in this new scene of writing? Add to the mix the recent debates about the English language and rhetoric as we know them. English 651 addresses these issues by exploring the emergence and development of writing instruction in US higher education as well as the place and function of rhetoric in this development. As we survey the evolution of the field from its status as being mostly about (teaching) college composition to its growth as an interdisciplinary inquiry interested in multiple media and modes, the seminar will track the role that conception of language has played in our understanding of writing and its teaching over these years.
The course serves as one of the foundation courses for students in the rhetoric and composition option of the M.A. program in English, but other graduate students interested in questions of language, writing, and rhetoric or who are simply interested in finding out more about rhetoric and composition are also welcome to enroll.
Students will
- read and respond to both canonical and revisionist texts, in print and digital formats;
- maintain a blog as a space of ongoing dialogue with course readings and seminar discussions; and
- write a seminar paper.
English 698D
Graduate Culminating Experience (Creative Writing)
Tuesday, 7-9:45 pm
Professor Dorothy Barresi
First and foremost, this class will serve as a supportive, invigorating, immersive
writing community for students working on their graduate capstone project. Each student will propose a capstone project—a small thesis, if you will—that will ultimately consist of existing and/or new work, polished and revised, organized and titled: a complete manuscript by semester’s end, to be accompanied by a 10-page Critical Introduction which will situate your manuscript within an aesthetic, historical and theoretical framework of your choosing. You will be given a fair amount of conceptual freedom in terms of what your graduate project contains and looks like. Although the length of individual projects will be determined on a case-by-case basis, we will discuss as a group what theminimum page-length benchmarks are for each genre (poetry, playwriting, narrative),
Because your writing is paramount in 698D, the greater part of class time will be spent in workshop, using various peer group formats as needed for the mixed genre
composition of the class, with the goal of making each student’s culminating project a success. In this case, I define success as fulfilling and hopefully exceeding the student’s own goals for his or her project, but also to deepen the writing, to help refine/shape/develop the manuscript as needed, to cut what must be cut, to add what might need adding. The goal is to produce a polished, publishable manuscript that is shorter than a thesis, yes, but of thesis quality.
Requirements for the class will include a 3-4 page written Project Proposal that introduces me to your current aesthetic concerns, practice and obsessions, identifies what written pieces you want to include in your Project, what is written already, what needs to be written, how you will spend your time over the course of the semester in terms of composition and/or revision, which pieces are already “done” to your satisfaction, etc. With Your Proposal you will turn in to me a sample of the work that you intend to include in your finished manuscript. This can be one short story or an excerpt from a longer piece of fiction (up to 10 pages); or 5 poems; or one piece of nonfiction (up to 10 pages); a play or part of a play (up to 10 pages). You will turn this Proposal in to me on a date TBA. I’ll schedule these for the third, fourth and fifth weeks of class. On the day you turn your Proposal in to me, you will give a brief, informal Oral Presentationto the class about your project. Each student will also write a Critical Introduction to their project which will be turned in with his or her finished Graduate Project. At the end of the semester, the class will hold an on-campus Reading/Performance from the Projects, and all students will be required to participate.
English 698D Graduate Project for Students in Literature and Rhetoric/ Composition
Graduate Culminating Experience
Monday, 4:00-6:45 pm
Professor Irene Clark
This course provides a culminating experience in the English Department MA Program, enabling students to practice the tools of research used in the field of English Studies. Students will significantly revise a previously written text and gain experience with professional conferences, presentations, and productions.
English 698D
Graduate Culminating Experience (Literature)
Tuesday, 7:00-9:45 pm
Professor Jackie Stallcup
In this course, you will gain significant professional experience opportunities that closely dovetail with the kinds of work that professional academics generally perform. The University catalog notes that “Graduate Project/Artistic Performances are a significant undertaking of a pursuit appropriate to professional fields and fine arts.” This is precisely what this course will do: this culminating experience closely aligns with professional practices for faculty members in the field of English Studies: Faculty members deliver papers at conferences, we organize conferences, we apply for money to do various academic projects, and we typically write papers that are 18-25 pages in length and that reflect a clear and thorough understanding of the critical conversation (in ways that typical graduate seminar papers do not).
We will simultaneously pursue two tracks during the semester: first, you will discuss, research and practice the tools of our field by developing an 18-25 page revised research paper that demonstrates an advanced level of proficiency in relation to professional research and writing skills.
Second, you will investigate careers or further educational opportunities that you wish to pursue and develop materials that you will be able to use in a practical way after you graduate. These materials will be collected in a final culminating portfolio.
Throughout the semester, readings, discussions, and projects will be fairly evenly split between theoretical/philosophical/historical concerns and practical, nuts-and-bolts issues.