Winter 2023 Class Schedule
Winter 2023 class Schedule
Winter 2023 course descriptions
English 105-0-20: Expository Writing - Textual Catastrophe: Reading, Writing, and Losing (and Finding) Our Minds
Aided by the contemporary 24-hour news cycle, catastrophe is ubiquitous. Social, political, and environmental catastrophes bombard us daily. Yet, for all of its ubiquity, catastrophe resists the reduction to the commonplace. Catastrophes produce feelings of shock, trauma, and upheaval. On a broad scale, they upend systems of organization and structure. On a psychological level, catastrophes fracture ways of understanding the self and the world. For those who survive catastrophic experiences, the catastrophe does not end with the event itself—living in catastrophe’s aftermath demands finding ways to stabilize and make sense of a world transformed from seeming order to a state of flux.
This class will examine works of literature that attempt to represent catastrophic events from European contact in the Americas to the present, along with contemporary music and film dealing with personal and interpersonal catastrophes (i.e., grief/loss and alien/artificial intelligences, respectively). Readings will feature American writers from the canonical to lesser-known including Ralph Lane, Crevecoeur, Melville, Whitman, Simon Pokagon, William Joseph Snelling, Poe, and Layli Long Soldier. Films include Ex Machina (2014), Arrival (2016), and This Much I Know to Be True (2022). For music, we’ll venture to Australia, listening to albums by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Ghosteen 2019) and Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (Carnage 2021). We will pay particular attention to the formal textual strategies used in texts as they wrangle with representing the catastrophic, attending both to the ways texts (including films and albums in the category) use generic conventions and rhetorical strategies to stabilize themselves in a state of flux, and to the moments when those conventions and strategies fail, rupture, or break, and, in turn, are rearticulated.
By examining textual breakage and reassembly, we will try to think about parallels between writing that makes sense of the unmooring effects of catastrophe and college-level writing that engages with complex, ongoing, emerging, and sometimes disorienting conversations and arguments. Our purpose will be to better understand how to make sense of complicated situations and contexts through descriptive, summative, and argumentative writing that carefully synthesizes complex sets of evidence.
English 105-0-21: Expository Writing - Intro To Poetics
Our course will focus on poetics, which is the practice of reading and interpreting poems. This class asks not just what a poem means, but also how it means and makes meaning in the first place. Together, we'll learn about different approaches to poetic interpretation, explore different ways of thinking about poetry, and develop our own unique ways of engaging with poems. Paying attention to poetic form, we'll practice discussing and crafting arguments about poetry, and learn to support our readings and interpretations with textual analysis.
Throughout, we'll be reading plenty of American poetry from the mid-19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, such as June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Leonard Cohen, Craig Santos Perez, Frank Ocean, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Layli Long Soldier, and many others.
As a skills based class, you should expect to walk away with the tools to help you understand, analyze, and write about poetry at a college level, as well as preparation to continue studying poetry throughout your college career. This class is made both for people who love poetry and find it easy to understand, as well as those who don’t like it, are scared of it, or find poems difficult. Poetry is one of the most mysterious thing that we can do with words; together we'll start to unwrap that mystery step by step.
English 105-6-20: First-Year Seminar - Bon Appetit! Mastering the Art of Composition
Get hungry! ENG 105-6 explores the art of composition through writing, reading, and talking about food. From reflecting on personal food memories to crafting arguments about how and why we eat what we do, this course will hone your writing skills in areas crucial to college level writing.
English 105-6-21: First-Year Seminar - The Legacy of Race in the United States
We will investigate how media, academics, policy, and popular culture in US society have defined and codified race. Examples of materials include newspaper articles, podcasts, song lyrics, maps, personal essays, TV, and film. 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 conscientious and ethical members of a diverse learning community. Students will demonstrate their new knowledge about racial formation in the United States through drafting and revising journal entries, analytical papers, and creative assignments.
English 105-6-22: First-Year Seminar - Language and Everyday Experience
This seminar will explore language as part of our social experience. We will examine the spoken and written language we use and observe in a variety of everyday situations, considering such questions as: Why do we call some language varieties "dialects" and others "languages?" Why do some people think you have an accent while others think you don't? Has your own language changed since you came to Northwestern? What patterns govern the conversations we have, and how do we create social relationships, communities, and identities in those conversations? Why do some people mix multiple languages when they speak and write? Is it, like, ok for me to, like, use like so much? What about um or ain't or ya know? Students will formulate and consider their own questions about language and social life in papers and presentations.
English 105-6-23: First-Year Seminar - Ecofiction and Human Metamorphosis
We are all familiar with public discourse about environmental concerns: Descriptions of a future where familiar landscapes have been transformed into alien vistas, newly dangerous and hostile to human life. Recent eco-fiction, however, challenges that familiar narrative, proposing ways that we humans may find ourselves transfigured along with the world around us.
In this class we will engage with accounts of such human metamorphosis, considering the horror narratives of HP Lovecraft, the hyper-empathy of Octavia Butler, the "new weird" landscapes of Jeff Vandermeer's Area X and other texts. Film viewings will include Pixar's 2008 Wall-E and James Cameron's 2009 Avatar and/or Netflix’s 2021 Don’t Look Up. Course readings/viewing will include brief readings from literary criticism, selections from Hope Jahren’s, "The Story of More," as well as popular films.
We will also consider practical topics such as how University library resources and experts can help students locate and evaluate key sources and develop authoritative arguments.
English 105-6-24: First-Year Seminar -The Art of the Personal Essay
The personal essay is known for how deeply and openly it often explores its author's experiences, struggles, passions, uncertainties, doubts, beliefs, etc., but also for the manner in which it does that: it rarely tells us up front what its point is or how we can expect things to unfold in what follows. We'll study different types of personal essays to better understand the ways these writers elaborate their personal experience and reflect on it in relation to larger ideas, and we'll write several different kinds of these essays ourselves. We'll also explore how the strategies used in personal essays can be adapted to other kinds of writing, and how personal essays can generate questions and material for other kinds of writing. Our readings may include essays from Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay (from which this course takes its title) and from Melissa Faliveno, James Baldwin, Ross Gay, Rachel Ghansah, Audre Lorde, Sherman Alexie, Yiyun Li, Dariel Suarez, Alan Shapiro.
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 205-0-20: Intermediate Composition - From Story to Argument
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 205-0-21: Intermediate Composition
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 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.
English 305-0-20: Advanced Composition - Science, Medical, and Health Writing
This writing course will explore various genres used in the health professions and examine these genres with a rhetorical lens; rhetorical study—essentially, the study of persuasion—is a good means of illuminating and recasting problems in health and medicine (Segal, 2005). The course is organized in 4 modules: 1)Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, 2) Science Writing, 3) Medical Writing 4) Health Humanities