Alan Stewart

I expected this class to be a survey of 1500s literature. Prof. Stewart definitely did this, and covered a really big number of texts in a short time. I think he's very passionate about his subject and very nice, but his lectures can be boring as he pretty much only reads quotes from the slides.

At first, I was very weary of this course. Having read some Tudor and Stuart plays I was already not a fan of many of the works covered. I will not say that Professor Stewart necessarily made these plays significantly more appealing to me, but I definitely appreciated his knowledge and attempt to make these plays seem interesting. The course does cover a lot, and I agree with the other reviewer that I wish he delved deeper into some of the texts. He picked a wide range of plays that contrasted and were deliberately chosen to give a wide span of the time period. While I didn't enjoy all of the plays, I was pleasantly surprised at how much more I learned about the period by the end of the course (there were a lot of "bad" playwrights and I think it was beneficial to see different styles). He knows A LOT about the period and brings in materials to class to help put the plays in context (and therefore made it clearer why the plays differed in style and quality at times). As a professor, I really grew to appreciate Professor Stewart over the course of the semester. He encourages people to speak up and is very encouraging and open to his student's thoughts in class. He was a very fair grader and he appreciates you coming to his office hours and is very helpful in terms of giving you feedback, improvement, etc. In a university where at times professors give their exams and papers to…

This was a good class. Prof. Stewart did a good job of approaching the works from one or two different angles rather than trying to cover them from all angles. He was interesting and a good lecturer, and he kept a good sense of humor despite the class' slight lack of enthusiasm (myself included). I would recommend this class.

The name of the class pretty much says it all. You read all of Marlowe's plays and poems over the semester, spending one class per play in discussion. Professor Stewart comes well prepared with lots of interesting details and trends to examine for each work, but is open to students' interpretations and willing to let the conversation get off the original track. He knows a lot about Marlowe's life as well as the period in which he was writing, but doesn't parade his knowledge in a showy or irrelevant manner. I would definitely recommend this class.

This is a compulsory course for MA/PhD students, so it took a while to become invested in the reading, but it is a worthwhile course. You get out what you put in. 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2024 Course: ENGLGR5001_002_2024_3 : MA Seminar (Stewart)-ENGLGR5001_002_2024_3 - MASTERS SEMINAR Instructor: Dustin Stewart

Prof. Alan Stewart made the class really interesting, even if this isn't your area of interest within the English major! 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2024 Course: ENGLUN2100 : DRAMA BEFORE SHAKESPEARE Instructor: Alan Stewart

This course provided me with a wonderful and in-depth survey of English prose literature written between the years 1600 and 1660, while also providing me with a wealth of historical context, which greatly enriched my understanding of the literary works I studied in this course. For me, one of the most significant skills I was able to improve by taking this course was my proficiency in reading, deciphering, and writing about literature which may be written in an antiquated style (17th-century, Early Modern English), possibly with strange and variable spellings/verbiage. After completing this course, I feel much more confident about my ability to do this, especially after starting this course with essentially no experience reading 17th-century literature other than Shakespeare and other fairly mainstream required readings for other classes.

Professor Stewart gives really dull lectures that are not intellectually stimulating at all. This might be a good course to take if it's your very first English course ever in your life, but otherwise, you will find it to be incredibly boring and elementary. If you do sign up, expect a semester of Stewart reading the poems back to you in class, then rambling a bit about nothing in particular, and then moving on. The whole class is like that. Not recommended, unless you are looking for a hella easy pre-1800 class to knock out that last requirement.

One reading (book length) a week and a presentation. Two papers. Lots of support.

Dr. Stewart seriously attempted to make this class as entertaining as possible. Many students appeared to enjoy the course. I was not one of them. 1. Stewart's lecture "technique" consisted of glossing the texts. For virtually the entire class. 2. Stewart allowed certain class members to completely dominate the discussions with their inevitably inane comments. 3. I found the texts themselves exceedingly dry and tedious. (After the first 3 plays, I was happy to not read another for a few months.) On the plus side, Stewart knows an incredible (almost scary) amount about this period, and does provide some interesting reads. He's also an extremely fair grader, reasonable, and an overall nice guy. I wish he had focused on delving deeper into the texts instead of just explaining "what happened" and moving on to a cursory interpretation.