Fall 2025 Topics Courses, Department of English, CSUSB
English 3280 Disability Literature
Prof. Gina Hanson
MW 9:00-10:15 am (online synchronous)
This course explores the treatment of disability in literature across genres, time periods, and cultural contexts. Our exploration begins with disability as a lived experience and social construct and then moves into what literary depictions of disability tell us about the expectations we put on human bodies in any given space and time. We will consider how representations of disability function within stories, poems, and other literary works, and how these narratives shape and reflect public perceptions of the disabled body. We will read works by well-known authors like Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and Raymond Carver, as well as lesser-known contemporary authors attempting to re-envision disability within their literary works.
This course will also draw upon conversations from within Disability Studies, engaging with critical frameworks for understanding intersectionality, ableism, and accessibility. To this end, the assignments in this course will be grounded in alternative forms of assessment, designed to help us think about all of these disability-related issues in today’s college classrooms.
English 3600 Writing For/Against Conquest
Prof. Miriam Fernandez
TR 1:00-2:15 pm (online synchronous)
How did an infamous Spanish Captain use writing to change his illicit actions into a celebrated and sanctioned military campaign? How did an aging conquistador use his life story to make claims for his encomienda and continued legacy? How did the grandson of a famous indigenous ruler try to improve the living conditions for his family? In countless examples, Spaniards, Mestizos, and Indigenous people living in indigenous Mexico and colonial New Spain used writing to negotiate power in very precarious and politically fraught situations.
“Writing For/Against Conquest” offers students the opportunity to study how texts produced during and after the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 16th century were used to negotiate complex power dynamics. Then and now, writing has been used to sanction violence as well as to fight and persuade against it. During the semester we will analyze both Spanish and Indigenous texts and use rhetorical theory to help situate the tactics writers used to produce their texts. Students will work with archival documents in various genres including reports, letters, personal narratives like autobiography, indigenous codices, and even plays.
English 4400 Working-Class American Literature
Prof. Omar Moran
MW 4:00-5:15 pm
We often hear that the working class is the bedrock of American society. They are lauded for generating the industries and infrastructure that has made America one of the richest nations on the planet. Understandably, the idea of "hard work" has found itself in the American psyche by signaling the virtues of labor through a model of sacrifice for the greater good, while simultaneously situating a worker’s identity, autonomy and self-worth by the material reality she/he/they produce. The transactional nature of labor and the presumed virtues it produces, however, is one in which the working classes have been systematically exploited and alienated from the very conditions that generate true wealth, actual autonomy and meaningful happiness (as a betrayal of the American promise of achieving a “good life” through hard work). While the gap between those who produce goods and those who oversee it has been prevalent since the industrial revolution, the 1930s marked a significant turning point in the literary response to it. American writers and screenwriters during the Depression Era led a resounding charge to recognize the plight of the working-class poor and to expose the ideological and political practices that perpetuate their marginalization and exploitation.
This course will examine the work of these writers and screenwriters and will address the intersectional ways that race, gender, ethnicity, ability and sexual identity worked in tandem with the economic apparatuses that sought to objectify working-class communities. While considerable focus will be given to the "proletarian" novels and screenplays that saturated the literary landscape of the 1930s, the course will also consider how this movement paved the way for recent American works that have used the modernist platform to address contemporary inequities of labor and the means to challenge abuses of power. Our study of proletarian novels will include Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Josephine Herbst’s Money for Love. Our study of proletarian films will include Working Girls (Dorothy Arzner), It Could Happen to You (Nathanael West), God's Stepchildren (Oscar Micheaux), Freaks (Tod Browning), and Native Land (Leo Hurwitz). In addition to these selected works, students will choose their own literary and screenwriting pieces to shape a discussion of working-class conditions as represented through American literature and film today.
English 4630 The Theory of Horror (and the Horror of Theory)
Prof. Chad Luck
MW 2:30-3:45 pm
The last ten years have witnessed an unprecedented level of box office success in the horror genre. From blockbuster hits like The Nun, It, and The Conjuring, to the arthouse accolades of A24 films like X, Talk to Me, and Midsommar, horror movies have been enjoying a (long) moment in the sun. One reason for the popularity of such films is that they capture and express deep-seated cultural fears and desires. All kinds of 21st-century anxieties—both conscious and unconscious—bubble up in horror movies. This makes them scary and exciting to watch, of course, but it also makes them rich, complicated, and super fun to analyze.
This course will do just that by bringing a selection of different literary theories to bear on four or five different horror films. The overall goal of the course will be to introduce students to a variety of different theoretical frameworks: feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytical, and ecocritical. But we will do that by applying these different theoretical perspectives to juicy horror movies. Possible films for the course include: The Substance, Hereditary, Dawn of the Dead, The Host, Crawl, and Annihilation.
Because this is a course about literary theory, and because students will read (lots of) key texts in each of the theoretical schools we focus on, this class will fulfill your literary theory requirement for the major. That is, you can substitute this class for ENG 3750. The idea is to make literary theory a little less, well, scary.
English 5130 Writing in Times of Crisis
Prof. Izzy Wasserstein
TR 5:30-6:45 pm
From resistance to escapism, from imagining better worlds to envisioning dystopias, from introspection to engagement with their communities, writers respond to crisis in many ways.
In this course we will examine different ways that writers respond to crises in their lives, communities, nations, and world. We will explore strategies that keep us writing in dark times and write work that responds to times of crisis. This workshop will explore texts from a wide range of genres and will welcome students who write fiction, non-fiction, and/or poetry, and we will take great care to treat these issues and each other with care and respect. Students of all backgrounds and experience levels are welcome!
English 5150 Fascism and American Literature
Prof. David Carlson
MW 10:30-11:45 am
Fascism is a word that is used with great frequency in our public discourse today. But what does it actually mean to call something, or someone, “fascist”? In this course, we are going to try to address that question by reading a series of major American literary texts (novels and graphic novels), all of which explore the nature of fascist movements. Each author we will be studying approaches this topic from a different perspective. Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) considers fascism largely as the product of economic conflict. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) focuses primarily on the figure of the fascist leader and the nature of fascist propaganda. Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) allows us to consider the relationship between fascism and militarism. Art Spiegelman’s landmark graphic novel Maus I and II (1986, 1991) bears witness to the racism and racial nationalism that led to the Holocaust. Finally, in Satie on the Seine (2020), Gerald Vizenor connects fascism with the broader history of colonialism. By putting these five imaginative works in dialogue with each other we will have the opportunity to learn about the nature of fascist political systems, the rhetoric and symbolism of fascism, and the relationship between fascism and violence (particularly its most extreme, genocidal forms). We can also see embedded in our culture a sustained awareness of fascist threats to democratic institution-- dating from the early 20th century (well before the rise of Mussolini and Hitler) and carrying on into the present.
English 5150 The Last (Hu)Man: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
Prof. Ann Garascia
TR 4:00-5:15 pm
Congratulations! You’ve survived the end of the world. Do you?:
A. Join a multi-species collective to build a new, more equitable society.
B. Set things on fire.
C. Go to the pub and wait for all this to blow over.
D. End of world? (I’ve been busy with work lately.)
Apocalyptic scenarios dominate the literary imagination. From Victorian nightmares of “sun death” and miasmic fog to contemporary pandemic spread and zombie invasion, readers bear witness to environmental and societal collapse in excruciating detail. But, what of the remains? ENG 5150: The Last (Hu)Man takes endings as its beginning with a sub-genre of speculative fiction that maps out the slow, strange processes of world rebuilding: the post-apocalyptic novel. Our course will center on exploring how the aftermath of apocalypse does not simply memorialize death, but inspires new literary forms, socio-political frameworks, and ways of being. We will take a transhistorical approach to post-apocalyptic literature by beginning with nineteenth-century imaginings of twenty-first-century destruction before moving into contemporary depictions of imminent collapse. Questions that we will broach: how do our readings work together to develop a cohesive poetics of post-apocalyptic narrative? How might post-apocalyptic conditions inspire innovative or experimental literary and visual forms? How do pre-established identity categories and socio-political arrangements endure, or shift, in the wake of apocalypse? Can an apocalypse fundamentally change the world? Possible texts (novels and films) include Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), W.E.B. DuBois’s The Comet (1920), Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).
English 6030 Marxist Theory and Literature
Prof. David Carlson
Mondays 5:30-8:15 pm
This course is a critical inquiry into some of the ways that key concepts derived from the works of Karl Marx (ideology, commodification, reification, alienation, praxis, etc.) have informed various schools of materialist literary and cultural criticism during the 20th century. A significant portion of the course will focus on so-called “Western Marxism,” particularly work by members of the Frankfurt School, and by the structuralist and postmodernist thinkers who came after them. Students will also have an opportunity to reflect on the totalitarian strains of Stalinist literary criticism that developed during the 1920s and 1930s—modes of thought against which many Western European theorists would rebel. Finally, students in the class will be able to explore the generative interactions between theoretical discourse and literary production during the last century. Debates about the nature and social function of realist, surrealist, and postmodernist works provide striking examples of those relationships.
While this course is by no means a comprehensive survey of Marxist theory, students will develop a solid foundation for future study and inquiry, according to their interests. Our “theoretical” reading list may include writings by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Pierre Macherey, Lucien Goldmann, and Fredric Jameson. Literary texts to be considered may include works by Jean Racine, Honore Balzac, Eugène Sue, Bertolt Brecht, Gottfried Benn, and Louis Aragorn.
English 6340 Literacy in an Era of Mass Incarceration
Prof. Alexandra Cavallaro
Thursdays 5:30-8:15 pm
In 2019, students from Harvard University debated students from the Bard Prison Initiative. The students from Bard were all incarcerated for violent crimes in a maximum-security prison in New York.
They also won the debate.
News reports from a variety of outlets all expressed their shock; how could these “dangerous felons” have beat students from one of America’s finest universities? What this story illustrates is the pervasive and mistaken idea that schools and prisons are not connected—that Harvard University and the Eastern New York Correctional Facility have nothing to do with each other. Yet year after year, we see increases in funding for prisons even as education budgets are slashed. The policies and practices responsible for creating this “school-to-prison pipeline” move funding away from students when they are in school, but do not hesitate to incarcerate them later at nearly 3-5x the cost.
Using this lens, this course will invite students to examine the connections between literacy, pedagogy, and mass incarceration. We will interrogate what meanings literacy and writing education hold in this context, what the prison can tell us about our conceptions of writing pedagogy in more traditional educational settings, and how educational institutions are implicated in the prison industrial complex. Students will also have the opportunity to engage with scholars and activists working at the forefront of the field.