This Professor is not considerate of the fact that students are not only enrolled in his course. What I mean by this is that the Professor expects you to basically read an entire novel every week. None of the books were free and we were expected to purchase about 8 books for 1 class. Additionally, the texts that he selects are not interesting. This class would be a whole lot better if the books were relatable and more diverse. I was really frustrated with this Professor because we were expected to complete 2 papers and the first one did not have a prompt and when we were asking questions in person he never provided one and expected us to come up with our own topic and he did not provide a rubric. In return, I was unable to produce a great paper because I had no idea what was expected. If you want to add extra stress to your life then take this course. Otherwise, please save your soul.

I loved this class but I especially loved Professor Looby! Literally the kindest guy and clearly cared so much about his students, it came out so much in the discussion sections when he would take so much time to ask us how we were and be super happy to hear our personal thoughts and experiences on the subjects. The workload was pretty intense especially if you have hard other classes, you basically have to read an entire dense novel every week which can be a lot especially when they are often a bit dry. He would have a prerecorded lecture for us to watch and then the other class would be a 2 hour discussion which was honestly so interesting, he was great about keeping the conversations going and coming up with really good subjects that we could all relate to to talk about in the discussions and I felt very comfortable talking about my life experiences and thoughts. Work wise it was not too bad, the papers were not too difficult as long as you had done the readings. Overall really interesting class and amazing prof, would highly recommend taking anything he teaches in the future.

I'm not usually the type to write reviews, but my experience in this class was so profoundly negative, I figured I'd warn others not to take it. Firstly, Prof. Looby assigns pretty lengthy readings each week, which would be okay if not for the weekly quizzes. These quizzes ask unusually particular, detailed questions that are normally unrelated to major themes/plot/etc., such as the "type of candy Walt Whitman liked to eat" kind of questions. In class, he does powerpoint slides of block quotes from the texts. There's very little analysis, zero discussion, and everyone (and I mean everyone) is on their laptop shopping or looking at social media. What I found uniquely frustrating about this class, however, is Prof Looby's assigned readings. Nearly each week the reading included graphic physical, mental, and/or sexual abuse. While Prof. Looby does provide "previews" of the information that will be covered in the next class, he does not provide any content warnings. Some of the readings also included detailed portrayals of pedophilia and bestiality. I might add, none of these were explicitly condemned or noted as inappropriate. Finally, Prof. Looby is an unusually hard grader. Not to mention our class didn't receive our midterm essay grade until week 10. If you're considering this class, please don't.