Lisa Gordis

I had super low hopes for this class because it is a boring topic, but Gordis did a good job connecting to modern themes. She is super sweet and understanding. I wouldn't take this class unless you like history though. It is tons of reading. 2 short essays. 1 long essay. and a hard final exam. The saving grace of the course is Lisa. She is an amazing person which makes the class fine.

I should start by saying that I think Professor Gordis is a kind, flexible, and dedicated professor. Her lectures and the course itself was incredibly thorough and it's very clear that she cares a lot about the readings and the students in the class. That being said, this class was miserable for me. Her lectures are tedious and difficult to get through. They consist of obscenely long powerpoints (like 60-80 slides per reading) with just giant blocks of quotes from the texts we had to read. She reads the quotes out in their entirety, which kind of defeats the purpose of struggling through the readings (of which there are MANY) and doesn't provide any visual aid for the complex topics that she's trying to illustrate. It's clear she's read reviews that complained about how she just lectures at us, so every couple of slides, she'll stop and ask the most unthoughtprovoking question ever: what does everyone think of this? This class would be a lot more bearable if it was a discussion but for some inexplicable reason she insists on lecturing at us.

I'll be candid here... she is the most cynical and draconian grader I have ever had here at Barnard. If I hadn't taken other English courses I would be dissuaded from majoring in English because this lady has a way of discouraging students through her harsh grading style and "reverse psychology" method employed in class. You can tell she uses reading and work as an escapist activity from socializing with people, because she lacks the empathy and ability to connect with her students. If you are doing poorly, please remember that your proficiency as a writer is not reflected by the grades she gives out. She is an intellectual snob who is unhappy with the card she has been dealt with in life and takes it out on her students.

Lisa Gordis is very kind, but this course was unfortunately unbearable for me on account of the content and readings. It was just so boring, and I actually tried to drop it but didn't due to very strange advice from my advisor. Gordis tends to jump around in lecture from topic to topic in the reading we are looking at for the day, which ends up being confusing. Course objectives are not laid out in a straightforward way, so I just assumed everyone was a Quaker author once we finished Bradford. She doesn't cold call, which is nice, but sometimes she'll ask if students would like to expand on comments they made on the online platform Yellowdig she incorporates in class (more about in Workload section). She isn't a harsh grader; in fact, I would say she's quite objective. She gives very helpful feedback. Sometimes in class she'll read very long passages when she doesn't need to, subsequently asking what we think of it, which I found to be a waste of time. I don't think she exhibits favoritism at all, but it was obvious that some students ruffled her feathers a little more than others, but she's human. I appreciate her passion, and she is clearly very learned and accomplished. She also responds to emails really quickly, which is great. On the first day, she said she understood that this class may be difficult due to consisting of material written by "old dead people," which I foun…

Have to disagree with those that believe Gordis to be cruel or overly-harsh; her tough grading (with always the offer of a thorough review if turned in a week early that can be rewritten and turned in!) improved my writing more than any other single class I have taken. She was always willing to discuss texts further outside of class, or make suggestions for outside research. If you are a serious Americanist, she will help you more than you know. Yes, she is not always easy to get ahold of, and may seem rigid in her scheduling, but she's crazy busy and simply expects students to respect her time. Yes, the class is a lot of work, but the weekly writing etc helps you engage with often dense or less exciting texts--let's be honest, America doesn't begin its literary golden age until the end of the this course, and really, most of the great writers are in the 20th. Despite that, she provides a number of ways to approach the text and find meaning (except The Last of the Mohicans, fuck that book, I mean I get why its there but GOD I hate it). Basically, if you really care about understanding American lit, and why we are the way that we are, take a class with Gordis.

I LOVE Professor Gordis. She is the most involved professor I have ever had--that is, she is the only professor I have ever had who seems to be working as hard as the students in the class, if not harder. She accepts drafts of all papers and will edit and return them within a few days, she answers e-mails quickly, and she seems really invested in the students' learning. Since this class is a requirement, I wasn't too psyched about taking it, but I ended up looking forward to the classes. The one critique I heard from several students is that she does not cut off people who are dominating the discussion, but for the most part she facilitates discussion well and adds cute anecdotes and stories. Since it's a small, discussion-based class, you must do the reading and put a lot of thought into the essays to get an A. Highly recommended.

I took this course to fulfill the literature requirement and because I needed the course to be in the morning, and Boy Am I Happy!! that I happened to take Professor Gordis' and that I did not read the older reviews before I committed. I don't want to discredit the older reviewers, but my experience was so very different. I went to almost every lecture (2x/week minus one) and I went to as many group office hours as I could (once a month or so) and before each paper submission, we met in an individual office hour. The lectures follow a syllabus that is published at the beginning of the course. When there is more student participation (= discussion in class) the course falls behind. To catch up, Professor Gordis speeds up sections by scripting some parts or we had prerecorded lectures for when there was a scheduling break. All assigned reading material is pretty clearly outlined, which pages/sections/poems to read, and with one of them she mentioned it four times that not the entire printed copy is assigned and she also put it out there electronically. That being said, this is a literature class and fast readers have it easier. I am not one of them, and I did not read everything. The papers and the final are set up in a way that if you missed two or three authors, you'll still be able to do really well. I took this course during COVID times, and everything was online. I took fou…

I felt that this class was neither spectacular nor awful. Professor Gordis is really sweet in class but her lectures are difficult to follow because they don't seem to have any logical progression from start to finish. There's always a lot of flipping back in forth in really large texts and it's easy to get lost. She'll also cite a page number and then immediately start reading from some undisclosed and random point on the page, so by the time you figure out where she's reading from she's already moved on to commentary and you've missed half of what she said. I really enjoyed the blog element of this course. There is no word count minimum for the blog posts (I think they tended to be about 200 words), so it's easy to get these done and the posts actually really helped to make the material more interesting and get people engaged.

HEAVY. Weekly reading responses... and they aren't casual, she expects an essay as well as 5 harshly graded papers.

Pros: If you are interested in American history and religion this course covers many of the texts that are important for a good understanding of them. It is also a fairly small class which is good if you enjoy discussions. The blog is also a great part of this class as it allows you to get participation points fairly easily. Cons: While most professors tend to be nicer in office hours, Prof. Gordis was a strange anomaly. She was very encouraging and enthusiastic in class but in one on one conversations nearly seemed bored and was rather condescending. She's also fairly good at hiding the fact that most questions are very loaded and that she expects a certain response. She will be quick to correct you if you don't say what she wants you to say. As one reviewer said, do not take this class to satisfy the lit requirement.