COOK FAMILY WRITING PROGRAM

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.

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.

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. Course readings/viewing will include works of fiction, journalism, and writings from the natural and social sciences 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.

We live in a time when hostility toward immigrants has made many Americans forget that, as Barack Obama said, "We are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too." This hostility has obscured the complex reality of the lives of immigrants. In this course, we will study fiction and poetry by immigrants and their children in order to understand that complex reality. We will explore such questions as: How do social attitudes and institutions impact the lives of immigrants as they seek to pursue the "American Dream"? What happens to the relationships between parents and children through the process of acculturation into American society? How do differences in national origin connect with other differences, particularly gender, race, ethnicity, and class?

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.

Embark on a captivating exploration of heroic journeys, including your own journey into Northwestern University. In this course, we'll examine timeless tales, classic to contemporary. From ancient legends like the epic of Gilgamesh to modern bestselling novels, our journey will traverse cultures and millennia. We'll analyze cinematic masterpieces from studios like Marvel, Disney and Universal, watching as heroes embark on epic quests that inspire and captivate. Through immersive discussions, written analyses, and interactive activities, we'll unravel the archetypal stages of the hero's journey - from the call to adventure to the ultimate showdown with destiny.

More than an academic pursuit, this seminar is a call to adventure, an invitation to embark on your own heroic odyssey. In this course, you'll craft your own hero's journey narrative, exploring themes of courage, resilience, and personal growth as they apply to your journey into college. The hero's journey you create will become a time capsule - your professor will email it back to you in four years so you can relive the heroic journey you took during your first quarter at Northwestern.

This class seeks to unpack the ways in which ordinary Americans experience race in various facets of American Life. This serves the purpose of unpacking the distinctions between race, culture, and ethnicity so that we can critique the role race plays in spaces such as the workplace, schools, military, and even our personal relationships. It also serves the purpose of assisting us in being able to discern the meaning of actions between groups along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

This class takes a backwards glance at understanding racial perceptions and policy through a rather unlikely but well-documented event in recent US history, a hurricane. Though, not just any hurricane. The social impact of Hurricane Katrina, which occurred nearly 20 years ago, in New Orleans also had implications for the US nationwide. We will look at the impact that the media coverage of Katrina had on popular culture, education, sports, and social policy. The legacy of Katrina is inextricably bound with that of race. The class will use Katrina as a case study to understand the real consequences of one of our nation's most divisive and destructive social ideas, some might even say an illusion…race.

Imagining worlds gone wrong, dystopian stories plunge us into places that may seem not only unthinkable but also troublingly familiar. We'll explore a number of questions about these worlds: how do the people in them understand why things are the way they are? What stories about the past do these worlds rely on? What exactly is dystopian about these worlds, as imagined? How do the people in these worlds envision the future? What about their ways of thinking or about their practices challenges the dystopian? How do these dystopian worlds compare with worlds we already know, or with the way things were when these stories were written?

Short stories, novels and films may include (among others) some of the following: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, "Friday Black" or "The Era"; Heather Lindsley, "Just Do It"; Emily St. John Mandel, "Station Eleven"; Ted Chiang, "What's Expected of Us" or "Understand"; Kazuo Ishiguro, "Never Let Me Go"; Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery"; Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"; Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, "The Matrix."

 This course examines legal writing and advocacy, focusing on strategy and reasoning techniques valuable for law-related careers, graduate studies, and a range of professional disciplines. Students will engage in an immersive exploration of a legal case from start to finish—conducting discovery, drafting motions, memos, and briefs, and participating in a mock trial. Designed for students at all levels, this course progressively builds expertise in legal writing and advocacy through hands-on experiential learning. The course also covers Bluebook citation mechanics and focused techniques for excelling on the LSAT, which are integrated into the curriculum in a way that develops analytical and logical reasoning skills. Taught by a former attorney and current Northwestern professor, this course satisfies the Advanced Expression requirement and serves as an elective for the Legal Studies minor. Open to all Northwestern students.

While generative AI [Gen AI] can automate certain tasks, human expertise remains crucial for optimizing its use. Indeed, the ability to apply critical thinking, creativity, and empathy is what sets humans apart from machines (AI and the future of work, Statista, July 2024). This course is designed to help you learn to use Gen AI critically, responsibly and productively in written communication at NU and later in the career field you plan to enter, whether that be business, healthcare, law, science, engineering, journalism, education, or something else. We will explore ways to use Gen AI in various stages of the writing process--brainstorming ideas, organizing information, and revising drafts--while still remaining firmly in control of that process. We will also examine the ethical issues related to the use of Gen AI, as well as its limitations in terms of accuracy and credibility. As a final project, each student will present the results of their research into the current and prospective uses of Gen AI for communication in their field of interest. This course fulfills the Weinberg Advanced Expression requirement as well as some writing requirements in other Northwestern schools.

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.

From the crafty protagonist of the medieval Romance of Reynard to Sonic the Hedgehog's bestie Tails, pop cultural foxes have delighted us for centuries. In this course, we'll zero in on this particular species to think about bigger questions: what makes an animal an animal and a human a human? Why do people like to read and write stories starring nonhuman characters? And what can we learn about real foxes from imaginary ones? During the quarter, we'll encounter a variety of fictional foxes in books and movies, including George Saunders's novella Fox 8, Wes Anderson's adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox, and the 1973 Disney animated film Robin Hood. And we'll think about animals more broadly (what it's like to be one, and how humans interact with and think about other species) through science writing, philosophy, and creative nonfiction, material that will help us analyze our primary sources. Using this array of texts, we'll think about why and how we use writing and imagination to understand experiences and perspectives radically different from our own. Through peer review and group discussions, we'll practice reading critically to identify a writer's objectives and to assess how well they're achieving them (this includes you!). Most of all, this class is intended to help you develop a personal writing process that's useful, practical, and even fun, with the hope that doing so will serve you not just in your other classes but in the rest of your life, too.

From the mythic landscapes of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to the cosmic confederations of Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish novels, speculative worlds often capture and dazzle our imaginations. But what exactly makes a particular world compelling? Why do writers build their own worlds and settings? What histories do they draw on, and what futures do they imagine? In this course, we'll examine various examples of worldbuilding, worldmaking—or, as Octavia Butler terms it, worldweaving. We'll analyze how writers evoke a sense of "world" across multiple scales through the ecologies, atmospheres, characters, politics, and languages that they craft. In the first few weeks of the course, we will discuss worldmaking through historical lenses, from creation myths and origin stories to medieval maps and early modern utopian fiction. Then, we will move onto more contemporary texts such as Tillie Walden's On A Sunbeam and Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution, investigating how writers weave speculative worlds with lived experiences and discourses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. By the end of the course, we will look to other mediums, such as video games and tabletop role-playing, to consider the immersive potential of worldmaking practices. This course is primarily a writing course. Writing comes into being not only through recording your thoughts on paper, but also through reading, analyzing, and engaging with the world around you. Through short analytical assignments building up to a longer research paper, we will reflect on the ways in which our own practices of writing bring us closer to the worlds we wish to inhabit and the worlds we wish to make.

When the rappers of Migos say their girl is "bad and boujee," what exactly do they mean? For those uninitiated in the world of African American vernacular (AAV) , being bad is not always good thing. Yet, as many Black women know, being called "bad" is a compliment that speaks to not only appearance but a general aura that transcends language. The term boujee, a shortened version of bourgeois, is an insult for women who are seen as too high maintenance or demanding of the finer things in life. Yet, boujee can also be a desirable trait highlighting a woman's aspirational status. In this class, we will look at the multiple meanings of these terms in both their positive and negative connotations to critically engage the intersections between class, race, and gender in Black women's writing. Reading across a range of sources, including poetry, prose fiction, music and film, produced from 1900 to today, we will look at women who are imagined outside of the norms of Black American sociality: "fast" girls in New York City who were arrested for being too "wayward," queer femmes who attempted to build relationships with each other rather than their husbands, and girls abandoned by their mothers that have to learn how to be bad all by themselves. Ultimately, we will assess the promise and peril that characterize Black women as bad and boujee. Texts for this class may include:, Toni Morrison's short story "Recitatif" (1983), Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider (1984), Bridgett Davis' Naked Acts (1997), and Claudia Rankine's Citizen (2014), Jazmin Sullivan's Heaux Tales (2021).

This course will explore alternative worlds and histories imagined by Black and Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists. We will explore the ways Black and Indigenous Studies mourn past and present injustices while also imagining possibilities for the future. In a world of tumultuous uproar and devastation, how do these writers dream of other possibilities? Our readings will be grounded in site-specific histories, like the Anishinaabe land Northwestern currently occupies. We will often work in post-apocalyptic and fantastical contexts, such as the cyborg-futures of Janelle Monáe. We will attend to a variety of mediums—from video games to music albums and more—to consider how dreaming and imagination play out across varied genres. Assignments will emphasize expository writing skills as a means of imagining, articulating, and expressing possibilities for more just worlds.

If you’ve ever encountered a fictional monster, or enjoyed a horror story, chances are you were reading a gothic text. Originally considered to be a form of trash writing, the genre now manifests itself in various cultural forms: novels, short stories, movies, poems, theatre, and graphic novels. Gothic texts thrive on depicting the unspeakable horrors and pleasures that make up our psychological lives. Unsurprisingly, then, they have been hugely popular across history. They make great examples of how popular writing has served as a medium for authors to think through complex and broad-ranging issues, engaging questions of identity, race, gender, and sexuality. 

Writing Trash looks at gothic literature to think through the following questions: how do we write, and how do we write better? In this course, we will examine a few exemplary instances of gothic writing — such as Jekyll and Hyde, and Destroyer — to illuminate and demystify the process of expository writing. Our insights about gothic literature will serve as material for understanding and asking questions about how we practice the art of writing. What constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing, and who decides? What is style? What is the relation between fictional or creative writing and expository or critical writing? Our chosen gothic texts will allow us to see how writing to tell a story involves careful use of the raw materials of language: vocabulary, syntax, style. In turn, Writing Trash will inculcate a practice of thinking about the writing process that you can take away and apply further in telling stories that are important to you.

Prepare to delve into the hidden realms of ancient myths, mystical traditions, and historical narratives, where goddesses and heroines shaped the course of human history. Discover the captivating stories of women who have been obscured by time. In this course, we'll peel back the layers of history to uncover forgotten wisdom and examine heroic journeys, thus exploring the rich tapestry of the human experience. From forgotten figures of wisdom and empowerment like Inanna to modern historical leaders like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, our seminar will illuminate the multifaceted roles of women in shaping culture, spirituality, and societal norms across continents and eras. We'll interrogate ancient myths, best-selling books and blockbuster movies, exploring themes of empowerment and resilience in both mythical and contemporary contexts. Along the way, we'll develop skills essential to academic writing, reading, and success.

Get hungry! ENG 105-8 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. 

In this seminar, we will explore the question of what is and what might be the relationship between human and nonhuman animals. To guide us in that exploration, we'll read, discuss, and write about short stories, essays, and poems. These literary works powerfully dramatize the many ways in which we experience animals: as companions and as sources of food, in zoos and in nature, as objects of scientific study and as reflections of ourselves. The readings will offer us the opportunity to reflect on such questions as: Is it possible to know what an animal is thinking and feeling? Why are our pets so important to us? Are we justified in using animals for food and in laboratory experiments? Through class discussion and varied writing assignments, you'll articulate your answers to those and other questions to your colleagues in the seminar.

From viral podcasts to streaming documentaries, True Crime has become an increasingly popular genre of media in the 21st century. This course traces its evolution from 19th-century crime writing to modern investigative journalism, films, TV shows, podcasts, and online communities. We'll explore how True Crime balances storytelling, ethics, and activism—sometimes sensationalizing crime, other times exposing flaws in the justice system. Through critical academic and pop cultural readings, we will examine the genre's legal, ethical, and social ramifications, questioning why True Crime captivates audiences and how it impacts our understanding of justice.

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 language diversity and linguistic justice in papers, presentations, and class discussions.

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 children's stories of Dr. Seuss, the hyper-empathy of Octavia Butler, the "new weird" landscapes of Jeff Vandermeer's Area X and a selection of other short works. Film viewings will include Pixar's 2008 Wall-E and other films (TBA). Course readings/viewing will include brief readings from literary criticism. 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. This course will use a traditional grading structure. Content warning: Some readings and viewings include references to sexual violence, self-harm, torture, and suicide.

While print novel and magazine readership may be down, podcast listening is hugely popular. Podcasts are now where many people encounter news, pop culture, and stories. Good podcast creators—of both fiction and nonfiction podcasts—engage in the art of storytelling, making carefully crafted plots, characters, settings, and themes. This course will expose students to narrative theory and storytelling tools and then teach them to apply these concepts to podcasts. Just as they do with written texts in other courses, students in this course will learn to consider podcasts using close-"reading" techniques, rhetorical argumentation, and character, plot, and setting analyses. In addition to these more classical academic analyses of podcasts as literature, the course will also ask students to consider the serial and documentary genres. Furthermore, students will consider how technology affects storytelling. In the first half of the course, students will analyze existing podcasts and write academic papers on the podcasts of their choosing. In the second half of the class, students will make 2 podcasts themselves. One of the podcasts will be an original podcast of their choosing. The other podcast will be a class project wherein students make a podcast that gives other students tips and tricks to improve their writing processes.

Recent controversies about "fake news" and disinformation would appear to suggest that contemporary mass media is newly unreliable. This course will explore how the distinction between truth and fiction in all media technologies has always been muddy. To do so, we will examine fiction that pretends to be true from 17th-19th century literature and philosophy to documentary-styled novels, films, and radio programs that span the 20th century. We will study the predominance of "found footage" films and digital media in the current millennium that parallel the rise of reality television, YouTube, and the smart phone. We will begin and end the quarter with considerations of "fake news," from founding father Benjamin Franklin's fabricated newspaper propaganda to contemporary digital media. We will also read selections from philosophy and critical theory that question the concept of truth and the construction of reality through media technologies.

In this intermediate writing course students will read and write about poems. Students will be asked to prep two to four short but challenging poems for each class. As part of the prep, they will be asked to look up particular words in the online Oxford English Dictionary (and an important secondary goal of the course will be to teach student how to use this amazing resource). The poems to be studied will be examples of traditional accentual-syllabic verse, written from c. 1580 to c. 1960, and some introductory instruction on poetic meter will be included. We will read newer and/or easier poems first and then move on to older and/or more challenging poems. Some possible authors (in reverse chronological order) include Robert Hayden, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Emily Dickinson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Johnson, William Shakespeare, and Sir Phillip Sidney. Each student will write three short essays, each of which will focus on a single poem we have read or a particular crux within a poem. Students will receive guidance on academic writing and will participate in workshops in which they read and comment on each other's drafts.