Spring 2025 Topics Courses, Department of English, CSUSB
Eng 3300 Tutoring Writing: Theory and Practice
Prof. Karen Rowan
TR 10:30-11:45 am
Eng 3300: Tutoring Writing focuses on learning how to tutor other writers one-on-one or in small group contexts. In this class, we draw on scholarship and hands-on practice to learn about ourselves as writers, learn how to help others become more confident and versatile writers, and learn how to become more effective and empathetic educators. Along the way, we delve into topics like collaborative learning, linguistic diversity and linguistic justice, disability and ableism in tutoring practice, developing anti-racist tutoring practices, and tutoring in a variety of educational and professional contexts. This course welcomes students from all majors and is designed with current and aspiring tutors and teachers in mind, as well as students interested in pursuing professional writing and editing.
Eng 3610 Studies in Literacy: Literacy and/as Citizenship
Prof. Karen Rowan
MW 10:30-11:45 am (online, synchronous)
Literacy and citizenship are inextricably woven together in US history and society. We’re taught that literacy is not just beneficial but indispensable to us in our daily lives, as citizens, and as a nation. However, scholars recognize that literacy serves as a barrier to citizenship and civic engagement as often as it offers pathways to citizenship and participatory democracy—and many of us know this from experience.
In this class, we will explore how literacy and citizenship are intertwined in our histories and in our current moment. We will start by focusing on “literacy” and “citizenship” as complex practices and subjects of study that are always shifting across contexts. From there, we will expand our inquiry by learning from studies of literacy and/as citizenship across a range of contexts, such as literacy tests designed to disenfranchise black voters; community efforts to protect public education in the wake of Brown v Board of Education; the literacy experiences and activism of immigrants; Asian American college activists writing against racial injury; Anti-SB 1070 graffiti as activism and more. Students in this class will contribute to our learning by developing independent research projects that build on and extend our shared inquiries. Throughout the class, we will study how literacy is used as both a means of oppression and a means of liberation for citizens.
English 3700 Turning Points in Literary History: Ancient Greek Texts
TR 10:30-11:45 am
Prof. Jenny Andersen
This course will explore how the Greeks of the 5th-4th century BCE Athenian democracy looked back on and appropriated the Bronze age epics of Homer. We will examine how dramatists reworked heroic sagas of warrior kingdoms to speak to democratic citizens in civic drama festivals. Primary readings will include Homer’s Iliad (in Emily Wilson’s new translation), Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, Sophocles’ Antigone and Philoctetes, Euripides’ Hecuba and Iphigeneia, and Aristophanes’ Frogs.
English 4630: Plotting the Unconscious: Literature and Psychoanalysis
MW 9:00-10:15 am Synchronous Online
Prof. Steve Lehigh
Who are we? What do we want? How did we become what we are? Psychoanalysis suggests that the answers to these as to most interesting questions about human existence will be stories. Psychoanalysis might be described as the search for the story of ourselves that makes life better; to find this story, we’ll end up rejecting any straightforward accounts of who we are. In place of the usual stories, psychoanalysis proposes complex and deeply poetic accounts of human experience and consciousness. The centrality of the story for psychoanalysis, and of psychoanalysis for the ways we now imagine stories, will shape this course. We will explore the invention of psychoanalysis out of literary materials and the remaking of literature by psychoanalytic criticism.
Whether he is admired as a pioneering genius or disparaged as a sex-obsessed patriarch, Freud’s work is more often mentioned than read. Yet few figures have been as important as Freud for literature since the early 20th century. In this course, we will trace the development of Freud’s thought, reading his major works from his reflections on hysteria through his monumental work on the interpretation of dreams, sexuality, and metapsychology (or theories of the psyche).
Freud imagined that he was founding a science. Adam Phillips has recently suggested that we might read him as a late Romantic poet. We will consider both possibilities and the strange terrain where they converge in an aesthetic technology of the self. In the process, I hope our readings and reflections will defamiliarize and re-enchant the mysterious inner country of consciousness.
English 5130 Speculative Fiction: Craft and Career
TR 2:30-3:45 pm
Prof. Izzy Wasserstein
Successfully publishing science fiction and fantasy (SFF) short stories requires two separate but related skillsets:
1. Crafting speculative stories
2. Navigating the marketplace in order to submit and sell those stories.
In this class, we will develop both of these skillsets. We will closely examine a diverse array of SFF short stories, with particular emphasis on stories published recently; write, workshop, and revise SFF short stories (or chapters from longer works); and develop the understanding and tools necessary to successfully navigate the marketplace for these stories.
We will pay particular attention to how you can write stories that are meaningful to you while also understanding and utilizing the expectations of editors and readers. We’ll work together to create supportive, collaborative classroom where you can develop your skills, “level up” your writing, and set yourself on the path to publishing (and profiting from) your fiction.
Whether you’re already very familiar with SFF stories or have never written one before, you are welcome in this class!
English 5150 Senior Seminar: Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel
TR 2:30-3:45 pm
Prof. Jenny Andersen
This topic will explore literary texts from nineteenth-century Russia as a vehicle for understanding the intellectual and social crosscurrents of the period. Westernizers sought social, educational and political reforms along the lines of Western Europe; Slavophiles argued for the uniqueness of traditional, Eastern European institutions with a distinct historical trajectory; and Populists sought to mobilize newly emancipated subjects to drive radical reforms. Out of the clash between these schools of thought came often anguish-filled stories of generational conflict and strained marriages and tales that dramatized characters’ existential doubts about their places in the social order.
In order to understand the momentous social and political changes taking place in nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia, students will engage in an immersive role-playing game facilitated by the instructor; roles in the game will include nineteenth-century Russian authors, censors, and publishers of literary journals. Primary readings will include Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
English 5150 Write Essays, Do Murders: Dark Academia in Literature and Visual Arts
MW 5:30-6:45 pm Online Synchronous
Prof. Ann Garascia
Midnight, October 5th 1869: Poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti nervously waits as a group of laborers unearth the coffin of his beloved wife and muse, the ginger-haired Lizzie Siddal. The reason? Seven years ago, Rossetti had dramatically cast his poetry manuscript into Siddal’s casket as a final goodbye. Except now Rossetti wanted those poems back, especially “Jenny,” a dramatic monologue about a wayward university student. On wrenching open the coffin, the gravediggers witnessed Siddal (supposedly) perfectly preserved, her auburn tresses cradling the poems worm-eaten right through the heart of “Jenny.”
A vampirically beautiful corpse. A moldy manuscript. A well-dressed artist committing crimes for his perfect poetic meter. Rossetti’s midnight romp exemplifies the peculiar blend of humanities and horror that will come to form “Dark Academia’s” signature style in the mid-2010’s. Now recognizable as a born-digital subculture and aesthetic, Dark Academia’s world view is best described as “traditional-academic-with-a-gothic-edge” (New York Times 2020). This section of ENG 5150 takes as its focus Dark Academia in its different literary, visual, and material forms. Our class will ground its inquiries in British Romantic and Victorian literary cultures before moving into contemporary considerations. Our texts will feature university settings and student protagonists who find themselves navigating both the trials of academic life and obstacles more supernatural or deadly. Readings may include: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s poetry and paintings (including Rossetti’s infamous “Jenny”), Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, R.F. Kuang’s Babel, alongside the works of digital creators. Questions that we will broach: how do our readings reinforce, or undo, Dark Academia’s romanticized depictions of exclusive and unattainable models of university education? How do university systems replicate imperialist, classist, and heteronormative frameworks? How does Dark Academia open spaces for queer and anti-imperialist expressions? And how might we, as scholars at a California public university, grapple with the gap between Dark Academia’s nostalgic collegiate experiences and our own contemporary university cultures?
English 6510 Banned Books
Tuesday 5:30-8:15 pm
Prof. Robert Kyriakos Smith
"Banned Books" is a course that will focus on a selection of readings comprised of some of the books most often banned from high school libraries and curricula. We will read the books that some parents and school boards think that students shouldn’t read. These include Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian.