Topics courses are taught seminar style, with substantial reading, research, and writing included.

Topics Courses – Fall 2024

ENGL 169T – Queer Teens on Screen (Rodríguez-Astacio)

This course examines representations and ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality, in various genres of films and television featuring adolescents from around the world, and how contemporary sociocultural circumstances and understandings of adolescence, gender, race, and queerness affect the production, adaptation (from original sources like manga, webcomics, novels, and video games), circulation, and reception. Students will learn to close read films and media as texts by paying close attention to creative and expressive elements through queer theory and transnational lenses.

ENGL 175T – Teaching Creative Writing in K-12 and Beyond (Blackburn)

Students that have completed a creative writing workshop of some kind are eligible to take this service-learning course on teaching and writing skills in the community, with an emphasis in creative writing pedagogy. Students will develop curriculum, syllabi, lesson plans, and creative writing exercises to engage students in K-12 environments and potentially college classes as well. Through a partnership with youth organization, The kNOw Youth Media, students will have a culminating experience of an actual in person workshop taught in either the Fresno County schools or community centers.

ENGL 188T – William Faulkner (Gordon)

Known, in Toni Morrison’s words, for having a “refusal-to-look-away approach” to fiction, Faulkner examined the terrifying unconscious of the American imagination. This course will focus on Faulkner’s major works (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!) and his short fiction, autobiographical writings, literary criticism, and social commentary. Topics include slavery, incest, settler colonialism, historical memory and trauma, the environment, consumer capitalism, modernism/modernity, justice, and “problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”

ENGL 250T – Teaching with Technology (Crisco)

Teaching with technology is not just a necessity in response to an emergency pandemic. Scholarship on teaching literacy with technology focuses on leveraging technology to reimagine the classroom space and content. Additionally, many community colleges require instructors to use technology in order to make college more accessible to a diverse range of students. This course will focus on best practices for teaching literacy with technology, including incorporating elements of Universal Design for Learning, addressing equity, and researching and experimenting with technology tools.

ENGL 250T – Laughter, Joy and Wonder in Contemporary CNF (Church)

The genre of creative nonfiction often concerns itself with the darker elements of the human experience—loss, death, violence, or trauma—but there are many other books that celebrate things like joy, wonder, and curiosity. These books open up the possibilities of the genre and offer different sorts of permissions for writers and readers. They deserve to be celebrated; and we could all use more laughter, joy, and wonder.

ENGL 173/278T – Cultural Rhetorics (Sias)

Examines American Ethnic Rhetoric(s) through debates about the social histories of rhetoric. Traces classical, neoclassical, and/or contemporary rhetoricians. First-hand investigation of primary cultural artifacts, including review of archival studies, rhetorical/feminist historiography, and/or qualitative research approaches.

Seminars in English – Fall 2024

ENGL 193 – Victorian Identities: Fictional Autobiographies (Jenkins)

Faced with unprecedented change, Victorians found themselves struggling to understand their place in a world where an individual’s identity was no longer pre-determined by class, gender, or sex. It is in this context that a flurry of fictional autobiographies were published, offering a range of narrative voices and experiences through which individuals might experiment imaginatively in new stories of self. We will be reading Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, Collins’ The Woman in White, Dickens’ David Copperfield and Great Expectations, and Stoker’s Dracula.

ENGL 193 – Comics and Graphic Novels (Mandaville)

In the age of “fast media,” comics offers an increasingly popular “slow” form through which to think about ideas and tell stories. Supplementary theory and historical texts will introduce the ancient traditions of comics/graphic narrative: concepts, vocabulary, and evolution of the text/image form. We will read closely a selection of diverse texts, fiction and non-fiction by diverse writers in the US and around the world. Consideration of the role of this form/genre in the context of increasingly dominant digital media will inform creative and critical discussion and writing. Assignments will also include close-reading response papers, a multi-draft literary research essay, in class creative experimentation and a memoir/non-fiction piece in comics form.

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• Bulldogs for Recovery — Helps students learn healthier ways to cope with substance use, safe partying, etc.
• Career Development Center — Gives students a one-stop shop for job opportunities and professional development.
• Dream Success Center — Helps students who may have mixed or undocumented immigration statuses.
• Learning Center — Provides students with tutoring, supplemental instruction, academic success coaching, etc.
• Let's Talk Counseling — Gives students easy access to confidential and anonymous mental health counseling.
• Money Management Center — Helps students learn techniques for budgeting, credit, and debt management.
• Student Cupboard — An on-campus food pantry that provides students with free food and hygiene products.
• Student Health and Counseling Center — A full, high-quality on-campus health facility for students.
• Victim Advocacy Services — Provides confidential support to students impacted by interpersonal violence. 
• Writing Center — Helps students with their writing assignments, from start to finish.