2020-2021 Course Descriptions
English 105-0: Expository Writing (F’20)
Expository Writing is designed for any student who wants a strong introductory course in college-level writing. Students write three or four extended pieces of expository writing, developing each through a process of planning, drafting, revising, and editing. Students also complete several briefer exercises in which they experiment with specific writing techniques or use informal writing as a tool for exploring ideas. Class meetings are conducted as seminar discussions and workshops. In addition, the instructor meets regularly with students in individual conferences.
English 105-0-20: Expository Writing (W’21)
In suburban houses and downtown apartments, housing projects and condos, our immediate living situations shape our lives, work, and relationships as well as our writing. Throughout the quarter, we will read both academic writing and literary texts that engage a strong sense of place rooted in the home or apartment. By looking at these texts and writing about our own living spaces, we will ask: How does housing shape our writing? How do housing conditions enact or constitute inequalities between classes, genders, and racial and ethnic groups? What can housing reveal to us about writing, and what can writing reveal to us about housing?
English 105-0-21: Expository Writing (W’21)
In this course, we will take games seriously as objects of study that can teach us about social values, cultural narratives, material realities, and historical moments that produce, receive, or reject these games. Things like video games, board games, and the figurative language of games (quit playing games; he’s just a player; in earnest or in game; the fame game; war games; shell game; the blame game; I didn't come to make friends--I came to win; etc.), are materially and rhetorically recognizable. Transcending culture, continent, and time, games are an integral part of our lives and our collective and individual histories. Yet the perceived import of games varies from something as culturally and economically significant as the Olympic Games to games that are often maligned as silly wastes of time. Beginning in the Middle Ages, we will read about popular games that were either encouraged or illicit. We’ll continue on to modern games such as Monopoly and Animal Crossing. We’ll ask what it means to conceive of social phenomenon as games, including war, gossip, and intimate relationships. We will, of course, discuss video games, including their tendency to re-enact, appropriate, or re-imagine the past. Yet we shall also attend to the possible futures games can help us create. We’ll sharpen the precision of our vocabulary by defining our terms through interrogating the difference (if there is one) between games, competition, and sporting events. With each game we study, we will attend to the players, the significance of the rules, and ask: what’s at stake? We will analyze the content and stylistic features utilized by other authors, while also generating writing that draws on your research and analysis of the games that you’re most interested in discussing.
ENGLISH 105-0-20: Expository Writing (S'21)
That the U.S became the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic during an election year highlights a stark opposition: on the one hand, Americans are sharing in the universal experience of a virus that has touched every corner of the planet, while at the same time national and nationalist politics have strongly shaped U.S. perceptions and responses to that virus. On top of this, the world is two decades into a century that many predicted would usher in the decline of nation-states and emergence of more transnational forms of identification and exchange, while we are instead witnessing a resurgent tide of nationalist movements across the globe. This class examines cosmopolitanism, as both an ideal of global consciousness and a description of global phenomena, and how it is thought of and written about in an age of nationalisms. Approaching the topic as pivotal to understanding modern debates about identity, culture, and world politics, we will interrogate the definitional slipperiness of cosmopolitanism, the affects and ethics associated with the term, and its frequently antithetical, but occasionally symbiotic relationship to the ideal of patriotism. We will do this by reading widely across critics and scholars of cosmopolitanism like Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martha Nussbaum, historical essays by George Eliot and Karl Marx, and speeches across the political spectrum by Theresa May, Josh Hawley, and Bernie Sanders, as well as by watching and analyzing films such as "Arrival" (2016) and television episodes of "Sense8" (2015-2018).
ENGLISH 105-0-21: Expository Writing (S'21)
The two central goals of this course are 1) to collectively establish provisional definitions of "good writing" 2) to develop and practice strategies for improving our own writing based on these definitions. To do so, we will read critically works from a wide variety of authors and genres, always asking ourselves questions like: how is this piece of writing organized? how is this writing style like or dislike other things I have read? what is the relationship between the form and content of writing? what makes this argument effective or ineffective? We will also highlight that good writing is, in fact, made. That is to say, good writing is a process that requires reflection and revision in order to develop skills of argumentation, organization, clarity, and style. This course will take the creation of utopia as its central topic, consulting utopias and utopian criticism from a historically broad cast of writers including Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, Plato, Charles Fourier, Samuel R. Delaney, and Karl Marx. These will span a wide variety of genres such as fiction, manifesto, essay, sermon, and treatise. As a class, we will think through both the imaginative creation of utopia—what is utopia? who is utopia for? what is the purpose (if any) of imagining the ideal society? how have utopian imaginings (or lack thereof) shaped our present society?—as well as modes of representing utopia in writing.
ENGLISH 105-0-22: Expository Writing (S'21)
Much of our lives revolve around work. For many of us, work will account for at least—if not more than—50% of our waking lives, estimating 8 hours of work per day (though this number is rising). Because work takes up so much of our time, it is, as sociologist Judy Aulette puts, "a (perhaps the) key place where we strive to be human, express ourselves, our talents, and our values." Following this insight, this course examines the lived experiences and political textures of work: where we work, what we do, how work impacts and is shaped by other parts of our lives (i.e., family, gender, race, class), and what problems we face at work. Collaborating on an archive of stories that moves across genres, from investigative journalism to short fiction, from television commercials to film, we will examine how work has been represented, experienced, and critiqued. Focusing primarily on the 21st century workplace, we will ask: Why are some workers or areas of work more socially or economically valued than others? Why are some individuals unable to obtain work or forced into precarious forms of employment? What does work actually mean to us as individuals and our identity in the social world?
English 105-6-20: Sustaining Sociolinguistic Diversity for Equity, Access, and Inclusion (F’20)
Scholars of language and writing argue that language and its varieties, genres, modes, and rhetorical strategies are always shifting, flexible, and contested. Thus, sociolinguistic diversity—differences across and within languages and dialects—is inevitable. This seminar will explore how language difference is situated in current US and global discourses, considering language in written, spoken, and signed forms. We will disrupt monolingual ideologies that infiltrate those discourses, focusing on language diversity as an asset to individuals, cultures, and institutions. The course will consider college as one of those institutions and will explore language diversity as part of your first-year experience at Northwestern. Using scholarly readings from sociolinguistics and writing pedagogy along with popular non-fiction, the course will consider how we can sustain sociolinguistic diversity, how we can foster equity, access, and inclusion around language difference, and how our sociolinguistic diversity sustains us. You will formulate and explore your own questions about sociolinguistic diversity, equity, access, and inclusion in papers, presentations, and class discussions.
Our seminar will operate as a community that celebrates our diverse language use and as a system of academic, practical, and emotional support as you begin your college experience. Students of all sociolinguistic backgrounds are welcome in 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.
English 105-6-20: Literatures of Addiction (W’21)
Ever since Pentheus’ fatal decision to spy on the revels of Dionysus, audiences have had a guilty fascination with the spectacle of addiction—a fascination which crosses not only centuries but disciplines, captivating scientists, policymakers, philosophers, artists, and laypeople alike. This class will trace the evolution of literary representations of addiction across several centuries, from classical depictions of god-induced madness, through the Gothic narratives such as Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, temperance classics such as Ten Nights in a Barroom (whose impact has often been compared to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), to the twentieth- and twenty-first century comedies and confessionals that make the bestseller lists today. Through these readings and related critical texts, we will examine the ways that such literature provides a staging ground for public controversy and emerging theories about the artistic, cultural, ethical, and scientific significance and ramifications of addiction.
English 105-6-21: Studying Race in the US: Legacies of Academia, Media, and Popular Culture (W’21)
You have come to Northwestern to study, or be a scholar (the word ‘scholar' means "a person studying at an advanced level;" that is now you!) But what is ‘scholarship,' and what does it mean study race in the United States? At the root of scholarship is inquiry, or the questioning and investigation into a topic. We will investigate how different facets of US society have defined and codified race. This seminar builds students' informational literacy by looking at how to decipher news sources, do college-level research, analyze artifacts of popular culture (song lyrics, short stories, editorials, personal essays, TV and film), and develop expertise. In studying how we define race, we will also consider the intersections of citizenship and immigration, gender and sexuality, and more. This seminar helps students transition into college-level inquiry and into being a conscientious and ethical member of a diverse learning community.
English 105-6-22: How to Become an Expert in Roughly 10 Weeks (F’20)
Every day on television and on the internet, on the streets and in classrooms, we hear people expressing opinions about a variety of topics. The people who are most persuasive, however, are those who are most informed. This course is designed to give students the tools to develop an informed opinion, to present that opinion to others orally and in writing, and to persuade others to consider (and even accept) their point of view. In this seminar, you will have the opportunity to select a controversial topic of your choice and research it in depth, using library resources, the Internet, interviews and surveys. You will also learn a number of techniques for presenting your ideas persuasively, both orally and in writing. By the end of the course, you will be in position to discuss your ideas in a thoughtful, authoritative way. In this sense, you will have earned the right to call yourself an expert on your topic.
English 105-6-23: Coming of Age, Coming to College (F’20)
Coming-of-age novels and memoirs portray the journey from childhood to adulthood. In this course, we will focus on works of fiction and autobiography that pay special attention to the role that college plays in that journey. These works portray the formative childhood influences and conflicts that shape the protagonists. In the chapters on college, they dramatize the different ways that higher education helps the characters navigate the difficult and confusing task of taking control of their lives and coming to a deeper understanding of who they are and what they want from life. In each work, we also get to see the impact of their college experiences after the characters have graduated and entered the so-called “real world.” The works explore such questions as: Does college change who you are or, rather, help you to understand who you are? How does it impact your relationships with your family? What factors contribute to success in college and beyond, and what is even meant by “success”? Through reflection on and discussion, you’ll begin to answer those and other questions for yourself too.
We will read a variety of books that include: Bread Givers, a novel about a Jewish girl struggling with poverty at the turn of the 20th century; A Particular Kind of Black Man, a novel about the child of Nigerian immigrants who faces discrimination not only from white people but from African Americans; Educated, a memoir about a girl who grows up in an isolated, rural community with almost no formal education; and other literary works. In each work, college is a turning point for the main character, helping them to mature and move forward in their lives with clearer self-understanding and sense of purpose. The readings will offer you the opportunity not only to enjoy and discuss some wonderful books but also to reflect on the path that has led you to Northwestern and the ways you hope you will continue to grow and mature while you’re here.
English 105-6-24: The Terror and the Triumph of Youth (F’20)
As you are well aware, being young has many benefits and many drawbacks. For instance, the optimism and creativity that often characterize youth can lead to positive social and societal change. At the same time, though, young people often struggle to be taken seriously, even when their actions and ideas are good ones. Through examining several historic and contemporary case studies, this course will explore both the triumphs and terrors of youth (i.e., teens-twenties). What risks are uniquely available to young people? Which ones are rewarded and which end in regret? How might these outcomes be mediated by other factors (e.g., race, gender, sexuality)? Most importantly, what can we learn from the triumphant and terrible behaviors of others? As we explore answers to these questions through discussion, reading, and writing assignments, we’ll also take advantage of your own uniquely youthful status as first-quarter, first-year students. Specifically, we’ll think and learn about how both your transition to college and the years ahead present you with opportunities to both capitalize on your youth and cultivate for you and others (especially those who might disparage Gen Z) a more realistic idea of what it really means to be young these days.
English 105-6-25: Reading, Writing, and the Problem of Empathy (F’20)
As university students, you enter a context in which most of your classes will ask you to place a very high value on commonly accepted standards of scholarship for your field: Use of the scientific method in primary research, careful attribution of sources in your secondary research, and reliance on accepted categories of evidence in argumentative papers. Nevertheless, as a reader and global citizen, you may have observed that in public discourse and even, perhaps, in the texts you like to read, emotional appeals often (perhaps too often) seem to win the day.
In this class, we will examine theories and texts from a number of different genres and fields—including Northwestern’s 2020 One Book, Just Mercy--to co-develop theories of how skilled writers and responsible scholars can foster both empathy and critical acumen in their audiences. You will also practice such writing skills in short exercises as a platform for developing first, an internal understanding of the tensions that can exist between these writerly strategies and second, your own ethical codes of conduct for the construction of rhetorically compelling writing and scholarship.
English 105-6-26: I Guess this is Growing Up: Transitioning to College Life (F’20)
Welcome to Northwestern! Over the next ten weeks, first-year students all over campus will experience a flood of transitions as they adjust to college life. In your courses this fall, many of you will experience academic transitions from high-school to college-level expectations of critical thinking, reading, and writing. First-year students experience exciting (and scary!) social transitions. Many experience some degree of spatial transition, too, arriving to live on campus away, however far, from where you graduated high school. There are financial transitions, family transitions, and cultural transitions to contend with. On top of all of this, the class of 2025 will be arriving to Northwestern during a worldwide transition from our normal ways of life to battling a global pandemic. And in the midst of it all, you’ll be beginning your classes during the fall of an important election year for the United States.
This course aims to ease some of the transitions that you will experience in your first quarter at Northwestern by defining, exploring, discussing, and reflecting on your own experiences. By reading and discussing novels, essays, short stories, and works of journalism that take up the theme of significant life transitions, we will work together to cultivate productive study habits and to hone your critical thinking, reading, writing, and research skills for Northwestern classes. Our class will serve as a social support system, as we work generously with one another through seminar discussion and a routine exchange of writing. We’ll navigate larger global and national transitions together, compassionately, in real time. And we’ll work to prepare you as you transition out of your first quarter and into the rest of your college career.
English 105-6-27: Studying Race in the US (F’20)
You have come to Northwestern to study, or be a scholar (the word ‘scholar' means "a person studying at an advanced level;" that is now you!) But what is ‘scholarship,' and what does it mean to study race in the United States? At the root of scholarship is inquiry, or the questioning and investigation into a topic. We will investigate how different facets of US society have defined and codified race. This seminar builds students' informational literacy by looking at how to decipher news sources, do college-level research, analyze artifacts of popular culture (song lyrics, short stories, editorials, personal essays, TV and film), and develop expertise. In studying how we define race, we will also consider the intersections of citizenship and immigration, gender and sexuality, and more. This seminar helps students transition into college-level inquiry and into being a conscientious and ethical member of a diverse learning community.
ENGLISH 105-6-01: First-Year Seminar: LGBTQ in Popular Culture (S'21)
In this class, we'll explore the influence that popular culture exerts on our societal understanding of what it means to be queer. We'll study queer identities across time and locale, coupling our study with relics of popular culture (stories, TV shows, and films) in an effort to situate the reality of queerness with the underlying current of popular culture. We'll also take some time to explore the impact of queer representation in popular culture created in the 21st Century. Assignments will include a research paper focused on what it means to be queer in a different time and place; a multimedia Prezi presentation focused on the impact of queer representation in the 21st Century; and a creative primary-research-based piece which gives us the opportunity to add our voices and the voices of others to the relics of queer popular culture.
ENGLISH 105-6-20: First-Year Seminar: Sustaining Sociolinguistic Diversity (S'21)
Scholars of language and writing argue that language and its varieties, genres, modes, and rhetorical strategies are always shifting, flexible, and contested. Thus, sociolinguistic diversity—differences across and within languages and dialects—is inevitable. This seminar will explore how language difference is situated in current US and global discourses, considering language in written, spoken, and signed forms. We will disrupt monolingual ideologies that infiltrate those discourses, focusing on language diversity as an asset to individuals, cultures, and institutions. The course will consider college as one of those institutions and will explore language diversity and linguistic social justice as part of your first-year experience at Northwestern. Using scholarly readings from sociolinguistics and writing pedagogy along with popular non-fiction, the course will consider how we can sustain sociolinguistic diversity, how we can foster equity, access, and inclusion around language difference, and how our sociolinguistic diversity sustains us. You will formulate and explore your own questions about sociolinguistic diversity and linguistic social justice in papers, presentations, and class discussions. Students of all sociolinguistic backgrounds are welcome in 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.
ENGLISH 105-6-01: First-Year Seminar: Writing Race: Exploring Narratives of Race in America (S'21)
Writing race is a critical discussion interrogating the narratives surrounding our evolving understandings of race in U.S society. The course analyzes existing racial narratives in print and popular culture through the lenses of history, sociology, and empirical research. It also focuses on how we develop and write our own narratives. This course will introduce students to the concepts of race, racialization and how these processes impact and shape our social institutions as well as everyday lived experiences.
English 106-1/DSGN 106-1: Writing in Special Contexts
Design Thinking and Communication (DTC), is a required two-quarter course for all first-year students at McCormick. It is also available to any Northwestern undergraduate student interested in design. Every section is co-taught by an instructor from the Writing Program and an instructor from engineering. Part of the Engineering First® curriculum, the course immediately puts students to work on real design problems submitted by individuals, non-profits, entrepreneurs, and industry members. In DTC, all students design for real people and communicate to real audiences.
English 205-0: Intermediate Composition (F’20)
This course is designed to help you write more clearly, coherently, and complexly about what’s important to you. It aims to give you more control of various stages of the writing process—invention, development, revision. Among other things, we'll explore ways of using writing as a tool for discovering ideas. The draft-revision sequence for the main essays, which includes peer feedback and individual conferences with me, is meant to enable a progressive development of ideas for each essay. We’ll take seriously the notion that writing can change us and can change the world, and we’ll aim to create interesting, illuminating, potentially transformative essays.
There will be regular, brief writing exercises and three essays: two shorter essays (3-5 pp); and a research essay (6-8 pp.) on a question of your own choosing. For each of the essays we’ll have conferences to discuss your writing and to prepare for your revisions of the essays.
English 205-0-20: Intermediate Composition (W’21)
The goal of this course is to develop your ability to write clearly, persuasively, and interestingly for a variety of audiences. Students will learn techniques for writing effective informative, reflective, persuasive, and research essays. These techniques include the effective use of specific details; methods of organizing ideas clearly; strategies for editing sentences for clarity and conciseness; and ways to give your writing a distinctive voice. Students will submit drafts and revisions of essays.
English 205-0-21: Intermediate Composition: From Story to Argument (W’21)
This course examines the intersection of story and argument, both to investigate how creative storytelling may provide the inspiration for argument and to examine how effective writers and researchers may be seen to build their arguments (legitimately or otherwise) on the foundation of story. Readings will range from discussions of the graphic novel to considerations of how everyday citizens manipulate social media to tell the stories they desire (or vice versa). We will also look at case studies that illustrate how the ever-widening gulf between the stories told by specialists and non-specialists plays out in the public sphere and the making of public policy.
This course is recommended for students who wish to refine their mastery of the essay form while experimenting with a range of creative approaches to articulating arguments and persuading audiences. Key assignments will require research into a question of the student’s own choosing, refined and developed over the course of the quarter. Students are welcome to use this class to deepen their explorations of research problems that they may have begun investigating in other classes or contexts.
ENGLISH 205-0-1: Intermediate Composition (S'21)
The goal of this course is to develop your ability to write clearly, persuasively, and interestingly for a variety of audiences. Students will learn techniques for writing effective informative, reflective, persuasive, and research essays. These techniques include the effective use of specific details; methods of organizing ideas clearly; strategies for editing sentences for clarity and conciseness; and ways to give your writing a distinctive voice. Students will submit drafts and revisions of essays.
English 282-0: Writing and Speaking in Business
Across all industries, employers consistently rank written and oral communication in the top five skills that a new employee needs. However, employers also say that students overestimate their ability to communicate effectively in a workplace context. English 282 is designed to address that gap. The course is designed to help you think strategically about communication, make effective communication decisions, and produce writing and presentations that are well-organized, clear, and compelling. In addition, course assignments provide an opportunity to enhance your critical reading and thinking; your ability to communicate effectively about data; your understanding of visual communication; and your understanding of interpersonal communication. There will be no final exam. However, students must be present on the final day of class for team-based presentations.
English 282-0-1: Writing and Speaking in Business (W’21)
Eng 282 emphasizes writing and speaking to inform and persuade audiences in business contexts. This course is designed to help you think strategically about how you communicate in written and spoken forms, and to produce documents and presentations that are well-organized, clear, and compelling. In addition to challenging you to write and speak effectively, course assignments provide an opportunity to enhance your critical reading and thinking; your ability to communicate effectively about data; your understanding of visual communication; and your understanding of interpersonal communication.
English 304-0: Practical Rhetoric
Practical Rhetoric is a discussion-based course designed to prepare incoming tutors at the Writing Place the practical skills and pedagogical theories behind effective peer-to-peer tutoring in writing centers. The class is practical in that it centers on in-class writing workshops that simulate interactions you are likely to experience during your tutoring work. The course also focuses heavily on both classic and current theories of the teaching of writing and of writing center-specific pedagogies. We will introduce you to classic works of writing center theory while also asking you to engage in more contemporary debates and studies in the field. Through a combination of reading about writing center pedagogies and practicing teaching each other writing in the classroom, Practical Rhetoric seeks to: prepare you to effectively coach writers at all stages of the writing process; cultivate the necessary skills to work productively and compassionately with writers from different backgrounds and for whom English is not their first language; and provide resources and techniques for working on papers and genres of writing outside of your majors and comfort zones.
In the spirit of the collaborative writing process that is at the heart of the Writing Place’s mission, as writers this quarter, this course will ask you to regularly bring your own writing to class to workshop in a series of mock consultations and writing exercises with your classmates. You will reflect on your own positionality as a writer–– and consider what that positionality brings to your work at the Writing Place–– in a personal literacy narrative. We will ask you to contribute to the work of writing center studies through your own research project, ideally on a topic or initiative that you can continue developing and perhaps even put into action in later quarters to improve and grow our services at the Writing Place. Lastly, the course asks you to visit the Writing Place as writers yourselves, reflecting on what your experiences as the student being tutored teach you about yourself as both a tutor and a writer.
In addition to completing all of the graded elements of this course, students enrolled in Practical Rhetoric are required to work for at least 3 hours/week in the Writing Place. You will be paid for these (and any additional weekly hours) you work.