COOK FAMILY WRITING PROGRAM

This seminar is designed to serve two purposes. First, it offers an introduction to current theories, practices, and controversies in the teaching of writing in American colleges and universities, placing these matters in the context of various definitions of literacy in American culture. And second, it prepares teaching assistants to teach English 105, Expository Writing, here at Northwestern. Graduate students who expect to teach Expository Writing should take 570; other graduate students interested in the teaching of writing are welcome to enroll.

Scholars of language and writing argue that language and its modes, varieties, genres, and rhetorical strategies are always shifting, flexible, and contested. Thus, sociolinguistic diversity—differences across and within spoken and written languages and dialects—is inevitable. This seminar will explore the ways in which language difference is situated in current discourses, considering language in written, spoken, and signed forms. We will disrupt monolingual ideologies that infiltrate those discourses, focusing on the ways in which difference in language is an asset to individuals, cultures, and institutions. The course will consider how our sociolinguistic diversity sustains us, how we can sustain sociolinguistic diversity, and how we can create more equity and inclusion around language differences in a variety of social contexts. Students will formulate and consider their own questions about sociolinguistic diversity, equity, and inclusion in papers and presentations. Students of all sociolinguistic backgrounds are welcome to take this seminar, and our course design will provide direct benefits to students who identify as international, multilingual, and/or native speakers of non-mainstream Englishes. 

Where are you from? What does your hometown look like, sound like, feel like? This is a crash course in learning how to write about places, partly by way of surveying American regionalism, a genre often criticized for its narrow focus on local histories, cultural manners, and peoples of particular places and geographies rather than on larger national themes. Instead of isolating our readings of regional works, we will place texts focusing on three different regions of the United States in conversation with one another. We will study the South through Alice Dunbar-Nelson, New England through Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Great Plains through Zitkála-Šá. Using Digital Humanities tools such as StoryMap and ArcGIS we will build visual, digital maps tracing and connecting our readings of regionalist works. We will expand our map, potentially beyond the borders of the United States, by experimenting with our own regional writing, critically reflecting not only on the places where we are from or have come to love, but also on the Chicago/Northwestern region where we currently reside. (No prior training in digital tools nor skills in storymaking are required for this course).​

We live in a time when hostility towards immigrants has made many Americans forget that, as President Obama said, “We are and always will be a nation of immigrants" and has obscured the complex reality of their lives. In this course, we will study literary works by immigrants and their children in order to understand that complex reality. We will explore such questions as: How do immigrant experiences differ based on the era and country of origin, and in what ways are they similar? What happens to the relationships between parents and children through the process of acculturation into American society? How do social institutions and structures impact the lives of immigrants as they seek to pursue the American Dream? How do differences in national origin connect with other differences, particularly gender, race, ethnicity, and class? We will read novels, short stories, and poetry that were written over the last 100 years and that tell stories of immigrants from Vietnam, Mexico, Russia, Barbados, and elsewhere.

Hoaxes are ancient phenomena, but in our current “post truth” landscape we might wonder if they are more pervasive than ever before. Are they? If so, why? Are today’s hoaxes different in anything other than quantity? What are their historical precedents? And, perhaps most important, what truths can we learn from studying outright lies? This course will allow us to explore these questions—and more—through the examination of several historical and contemporary hoaxes. We will use these case studies to explore topics including ideology, originality, authenticity, identity, memory, and authorship. Additionally, your final paper will provide you with an opportunity to research a hoax of your own choosing in order to argue why it should be added to future iterations of this class.

Contemporary US culture has competing definitions of what it means to be an American. This seminar will ask students to consider the following set of questions: who or what is an American?; what forms do stories of the nation and of citizenship within it take?; and how and why do ideas of otherness remain complex in US history and culture? Students will contemplate these questions through two different types of readings: a series of scholarly and popular expository non-fiction essays, and a selection of short stories, plays, and poems. The essays will help students better understand what we mean when we say the words ‘nation,’ ‘citizenship,’ ‘otherness,’ and ‘culture’; the short stories, plays, and poems will help students understand the American experience through the lives of the many rich and diverse populations who help define it including immigrants, racial minorities, the LGBTQ+ community, and people with disabilities. Students will demonstrate their new knowledge about the connections between such populations and Americanness through drafting and revising a series of analytical papers.