Lowenstein is a great professor!

Yes, your papers will be scrutinized. Lowenstein cares a lot about writing and wants the students to become better writers. So yeah, it takes a while to get them back, but its totally worth it in the long run, especially if you're looking into law.

The books are really great, and the discussions are mostly the students talking, but Lowenstein does a good job of keeping it to one topic so that the discussion is constructive. I agree with the comment below that the people who don't talk will miss out, but that is not to say that if you have a quiet temperament, this class isn't for you. Just be active and don't be scared to say whatever you think. I once disagreed with what the professor said and he challenged me on it, but very respectfully, and to the point where I understood my stance better because I had to defend it.

Overall, very enjoyable. I hope to take another one of his classes, or at least his fiat lux's which he offers every winter quarter.

Excellent Professor!

RE: HNRS 158

This is my second class with Professor Lowenstein and I must say that I am incredibly impressed, yet again! (Previous class with him was HNRS 173). However, I warn you now though, you reap what you sow, so in other words, there is a STRONG emphasis on class participation or else the class will not be meaningful (or at least, from your perspective). In light of this, it’s not your typical class, if you just sit-back, remain quiet or wait to be called on or “raise your hand,” you’ll be sidestepped since the burden is squarely on the student to take the initiative to SPEAK UP. As you can imagine by now, I was active, so I loved this class.

Professor Lowenstein fundamentally altered the manner in which I analyze literature in relation to justice, law, language, and society. I consider this class to be the hardest class to get an A+ (or even an A) in terms of writing, participating, and his expectations on students (and I’ve taken some hard classes!). What’s more, Professor Lowenstein utilizes the Socratic method so if you gave a frivolous or smart sounding BS answer, prepare yourself to elaborate deeply on your comments or be caught.

If you consider yourself a thinker or someone that relishes a good debate match around such important topics as liberty, justice, law, society, and literature, then you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t take HNRS 158 with Professor Lowenstein. Every moment of the class is filled with fascinating comments and debates from educated students as we analyze what role individuals, society, justice, religion, law, etcetera play in relation to the great set of literature that Professor Lowenstein selected. It’s because of these aforementioned reasons why our class almost always went over its allocated scheduled time.

It’s true that the same 7 students always spoke up while the other 10 commented infrequently, but I disagree with the below commenter because everyone had an equal opportunity to share their thoughts to make the class better. But instead many opt-ed out to merely listen safely rather than enter the debate round. I blame this squarely on the quieter students (that were possibly intimated by the class environment or were shy, or for whatever other reason) so claims that the class was boring is only from your passive perspective; you can’t be passive for any of Lowenstein’s classes.

It’s also true that as a student we get stressed out if we do not receive a grade on our paper or know our grade at moment in class. His grading isn’t traditional but he will give plenty of constructive criticisms on your paper like you’ve never encountered before! (All immensely valuable to become a good writer but no actual percentage grade.) As a matter of fact, only reviewing his comments in and of themselves have made me a significantly better writer. However, I disagree again with the commenter below about the severity of the lack of not having a grade on the essay because all you have to do is just ask him your grade. He goes beyond what you can imagine by helping every student in anyway possible and he is incredibly educated (his intelligence is sometimes scary!) but nevertheless, he is very approachable in or outside of class.

Ultimately, I highly recommend HNRS 158 or any class by Professor Lowenstein.

Class is interesting and Prof. is knowledgeable. However he goes off on lots of tangents and oftentimes contradicts himself. Harsh with grading papers and he does not change grades & keep this in mind as you are solely graded on 3 papers and attendance. He took the class out to a nice dinner at the end of the quarter, and the class had many chances to bond outside of class at events. Take it if you are a strong writer and genuinely are interested in the topic, I do not regret this class.

I took HNRS 158: "Justice and Moral Responsibility in Literature" with Professor Lowenstein. This class wasn't awful, but I've taken much better ones at UCLA. The three-hour discussions (which always went over time) were often boring and sometimes torturous. Typically 5 people (out of 20) dominated each conversation with mostly dull contributions. I appreciate that Lowenstein did not want to take over the discussion, but I think he could have done a better job facilitating and motivating more people to participate. I offered my thoughts a fair amount, but whatever I said was kind of left hanging— rather than back-and-forth discussion, students blurted out random ideas or summarized the plot of each reading. The literary works themselves were interesting and thought-provoking— classics like "Othello," "Antigone," "Twelfth Night," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "Doubt," etc. But our conversations about them were pretty shallow. Rather than an upper division honors seminar, 158 felt like a tedious book club meeting.

As for Professor Lowenstein, he's obviously a really smart guy, but personally, I did not click with him like I have with other UCLA professors. He's kind of a stuffy intellectual— one of those people who can't hold a conversation about anything that is not academic. Not that I expected him to devote class to pop culture or anything— but a reference/joke once in a while would have been refreshing.

By far, the most irritating aspect of this course is that—get this— Lowenstein DOES NOT PUT A GRADE on the papers (of which there are 3). He also takes forever to "grade" (i.e. write comments in the margins and on the back), so that by the time we got back our first paper, the second one was already due. Basically, you have almost no clue what grade you are going to get at the end of the semester. I ended up doing really well, but I wouldn't have been able to guess that outcome based on his comments on my paper, which were a blend of negative and positive. This grading technique (or lack thereof) puts unnecessary stress on the students, and I really did not appreciate it.

To sum this eval up, I think Professor Lowenstein is a nice person (he took us all out to a Chinese restaurant in Santa Monica at the end of the semester) and undeniably knowledgeable about literature, but his class just wasn't as engaging or stimulating as I had hoped it would be when I enrolled in it.