[ENGL W3269] British Literature 1900-1950

Sarah Cole's waredrobe is amazing.

The ideas Sarah Cole teaches in lectures are fairly similar to those found on sparknotes.

Sarah Cole's syllabus is interesting: overall excellent authors, but usually their worst work.

I am the 'chuckler' referenced in the entry dated 17 December 2003. I was absolutely mortified that Mendelson chided me for responding to HIS OWN JOKES in front of the whole class. I must admit he was delightful when I met with him individually about the matter.

I completely agree with his assertion that any Columbia student should be able to ask a question that is not peppered with 'like' every second syllable.

EM is one of the best teachers I've ever had. Few professors today inspire students to get up at 8, bust out the highlighter, and strain to hear every word spoken in lecture. In class, Mendelson is brusque -- bullying, even. Do NOT ask questions unless you want to be slammed up against a wall and feel your guts ripped out. And then to have your words repeated in a mimicking, high-pitched voice. But if you catch up with Mendelson on the stairs to ask for clarification, or just listen closely to the self-deprecating jabs that pepper his speech, anyone can see that the guy just wants to be loved.

I missed a lot of the class because of the time but if that had not been the case I would've gone to them all. He's a professor that everyone loves or dislikes--you can't hate the man: unless his ordering you to take off your hat or cell phone bothers the hell out you!
mendelson is to english literature as latoya jackson is to skany clothes and bad music, i.e. equals.

I must agree with the last reviewer. I still cannot believe how much of a following Mendelson has in this school. His moralistic lectures often put you to sleep at nine in the morning; his reading of the books is shallow enough to make you believe you're back to a high school setting. If you love literature and are serious about analyzing it, please save yourself time and mind and steer away from Mendelson. I should have dropped the class the moment he started analyzing Hardy's Tess D'urbervilles in the following way: Was it Tess's destiny that drove her to ...? Or was it really Tess herself that ...? His lectures mostly consists on superfluous anecdotes, moralizing and paraphrasing novels and poems.

what i find most confounding about the cult of edward mendelson is how a man with absolutely nothing to say about what he reads manages to not only to acquire an impressive position in the world of literature (he's auden's executor and as such manages all the publications of his work/writes the introductions to all this books), but also to a respected and - evidentally - loved member of the columbia english faculty.

and then it came to me: these other reviews - and the host of admirers who are in my 9 am - are so pleased to be back in the familiar world of high school english class!
indeed, he'll lecture you about sentence fragments and flip a sh*t if he catches you with a baseball cap on in class. isn't that nice?
but in my opinion he has yet to say anything interesting about the fantastic books we read. he ruined yeats for me. i didn't think that was possible! yeats, for christ's sake.

and he lets the most annoying people ever talk in class. encourages it, in fact. *CULPA censor*

but people love him. so maybe i'm crazy. just don't take this class if you want think about what you read or occassionally hear something interesting in the lecture.

Prof. Mendelson will really bust your balls about certain things: coming to class on time (try that at 9:10 in the morning), being at every lecture (he takes attendance), not eating in class, and not wearing baseball caps (that only applies to the guys). I was skeptical about him at first, but once you become familiar with him, you realize that he's really funny in his own, quirky, dorky way. He also genuinely cares about his students and really tries hard to learn as many of their names as possible. I've grown to be quite fond of him as person. As for his actual teaching, he's disorganized and doesn't really have an opinion on what he's lecturing on. He vacillates on what he thinks about the works and the authors, claiming that he nor anyone else is the absolute judge on matters. While I appreciate his openmindness (something that's quite lacking in most of the English department faculty), I would appreciate it if he simply gave us his reading, whether I agreed with it or not. I leave the lectures feeling like I learned next to nothing about the works. The reading list, however, is amazing. Hardy, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Auden.

BOO! Sarah Cole may be a great professor, but because she takes on a relatively open-ended "discussion" format, the class is often interrupted by unintelligent comments, which are usually made by the same--and more often than not pretentious--individuals. Professor Cole also has a way of feeding questions that generates exactly the answers she wants to hear--answers that are obvious if you actually read the text. By the end of the term you not only want to kill everyone and anyone who confidently states the obvious, but you walk out of lectures wondering whether you are getting anyting out of being a witness to public displays of brown-nosing. The themes covered are tried and true, in other words, dull and unsophisticated. If you are looking for an illuminating literary experience, take Prof. Delbanco's Foundations of American Literature I.

Prof. Cole is personally very appealing, but I felt that her lectures were a bit too disorganized and occasionally unsophisticated. This is a good class for someone just beginning to fulfill the requirements for the major, or someone not ready to do advanced work in the field but looking for a relatively challenging elective. (n.b., The class is by no means an "easy A", mostly because the TA's assigned to it the semester I took it had unusually rigid standards and did much of the grading; she's no push-over either). Despite the challenge of the un-inflated grading, the class can feel tiresome to those who have already had extensive experience with literature classes. Although she places great emphasis on students synthesizing all of the texts in the final exam, her own lectures feel fantastically scatterbrained. I have to give her credit for being a great performer: the classroom is her stage as she gestures theatrically, makes frequent eye contact, and extracts responses from even the quietest of students. I don't wholly regret taking this class because her anecdote peppered lectures and sincere concern for her students were refreshing, but I can't say that I learned much in the classroom.

Simply the goddess of British Lit. Cole's class has perhaps the greatest syllabus I've seen at Columbia, and she knows and loves each and every piece on it. Tangential and stream of consciousness yet still brilliant and comprehensive, Cole makes the class fun. Somehow in a lecture class of eighty people Sarah Cole manages to know everyone's name and stir up an actual discussion without losing any information contained in the lecture. My one criticism is that there are so many works covered that often a given work isn't covered in enough detail. Still, the class is incredible, the lectures interesting, and the syllabus wonderful. And she's cute.

If this were a high school yearbook and I was giving out superlatives, Cole would definitely win for best-dressed. Her up-to-the-minute fashion sense and phenomenal physique will leave you wondering how she ever had the time to receive her Ph.D. All that aside, her lectures were sometimes disorganized. She drew a lot of binaries (i.e. male-female) from the books, which unfortunately made her lectures seem simplistic, when they really weren't. She tried hard to encourage discussion among the nearly 100 students of this enormous class, an attempt that inevitably produced a number of windbag ass-clowns. She also brings cookies every once in a while, although I definitely do not think she eats them herself. GO TO HER OFFICE HOURS. Not only will she provide you with endless hours of help, she also likes to chat about all sorts of things. But don't take that as a sign that she'll grade leniently. Her TA's are fierce graders as well.