Spring 2025 Course Descriptions - CSUN English Graduate Program
Below are course descriptions and links to flyers submitted by instructors for Spring 2025 graduate courses and certain 400-level English classes likely to be of interest to grad students. More descriptions/flyers will be added as they are received by the Graduate Adviser. Duncan
ENGL 507 Introduction to Graduate Studies -- Underwood (Flyer)¶
English 507 introduces students to graduate-level research and writing skills across the three options in the English MA program: Literature, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric and Composition. An additional section of this course has been added with the same instructor and description.
ENGL 512 Writing for Performance -- Mitchell (Flyer)¶
Intensive study of writing for performance. Students will write and workshop performance texts and read related published texts, including plays, one-person shows, stand-up comedy routines, and performance art pieces. This course is available both for graduate credit (for graduate students) and undergraduate credit. Additionally, this course may be taken by undergraduates in the Creative Writing Option as a Senior Seminar. Undergraduate students must have senior standing. English 512 may be repeated once for credit by both graduate and undergraduate students.
ENGL 525AGL Avant Garde Literature -- Higgs (Flyer)¶
Pulsing with an ethos of dissent, disruption, and institutional critique, from the early 20th century Dadaists to the contemporary Black Radical Tradition, avant-garde artistic practice has consistently challenged conventions, undermined authority, resisted rules, and worked toward dismantling normative patterns of social behavior. With an emphasis on reading, thinking, discussing, and writing both critically and creatively, this graduate course will examine avant-garde literature from the past to the present in order to gain valuable approaches to impacting social issues today.
ENGL 525DH Digital Humanities: The Technology of Textuality -- Kleinman¶
This course is a late addition to the schedule. The following description is from a past semester, and the actual offering will be similar to this, although it may not be exactly the same. An updated description will be added soon -- at which point this message will disappear.
This course examines medieval literary traditions from the perspective of the growing field of Digital Humanities. It begins with the premise that literary form and function can be understood in terms of the technologies used to produce it. For the Middle Ages, this consists of the spoken and written word, in contrast to modern print, and, increasingly, digital technologies. We will in fact use the latter to understand medieval literature, and, in comparison, study some of the ways that digital technologies make literary and cultural meanings today. This will be a demanding course, as we will be looking at medieval texts in their original forms, and we will also be learning computational techniques for studying literature. No prior experience or technical knowledge is presumed, but you should be prepared to put some effort into learning material that is unfamiliar and may be outside of your comfort zone.
ENGL 617 Studies in Shakespeare -- Bryson¶
Prerequisite: ENGL 417 or equivalent. Advanced study of several of Shakespeare's works including formal, textual, or historical aspects. Topics will change from semester to semester.
ENGL 622 Seminar on Aspects of Poetry -- Hall¶
Intensive critical study of the province of poetry, providing opportunity for the scrutiny of individual poets as well as for concentration on the wider historical perspective.
ENGL 630TTT Twice-Told Tales -- Byler (Flyer)¶
Why do some stories and literary characters persistently capture readers’ imaginations, reappearing in various adaptations, spin-offs, and modern guises? What does or doesn’t make a literary work translatable from one age and place to another? Why do certain narratives endure in spite of differences between the cultures that tell them and even in spite of cultural violence done by these narratives? This class will examine several popular texts published in England during the nineteenth century and explore their afterlives in twenty-first-century American and British adaptations. We will consider the politics of retelling tales, considering whether affection, appropriation, resistance, interpretation, or critique drives each reimagining. Texts may include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Patricia Park’s Re Jane (2015), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X (2018), Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887), Steven Moffat’s and Mark Gatiss’s television series Sherlock (2010-2017), and Karl Bollers’s, Rick Leonardi’s, and Larry Stroman’s graphic novel Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black (2013). We will also engage critical work by scholars such as W.E.B. du Bois, José Esteban Muñoz, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Saidiya Hartman.
ENGL 651 Rhetoric and Composition Theory -- Pandey (Flyer)¶
Intense discussion and analysis of theories of rhetoric and composition.
ENGL 654 Advanced Rhetoric and Composition -- Khadka (Flyer)¶
Preparatory: ENGL 651. Intense advanced study of a specialized area, topic, question, or problem in the field of rhetoric and composition. Topics vary from semester to semester. May be repeated once for credit, provided topic is different.
ENGL 698D Graduate Project -- Lee (Flyer)¶
This course is one of the available choices for the culminating experience in the English department M.A. program. In significantly revising existing written work, students will practice the tools of research used in the field of English Studies. While students in the Literature and the Rhetoric and Composition Options will focus on revising and developing a previously written essay, students in the Creative Writing Option will write a critical introduction to a revised portfolio of their creative work. Additionally, students will gain experience with professional conferences, presentations and productions.
ENGL 698D Graduate Project -- Stallcup¶
This course is one of the available choices for the culminating experience in the English department M.A. program. In significantly revising existing written work, students will practice the tools of research used in the field of English Studies. While students in the Literature and the Rhetoric and Composition Options will focus on revising and developing a previously written essay, students in the Creative Writing Option will write a critical introduction to a revised portfolio of their creative work. Additionally, students will gain experience with professional conferences, presentations and productions.