Well, they either love him or hate him. Truthfully there shouldn't be any controversy over professor Wohl's brilliance or his value as a professor and an educator. Great minds like Wohl's are what make UCLA such a distinguished institution and the chance to learn from such a remarkable person should be taken advantage of. With that said, his lecturing-style could be considered a bit sedate but anyone who claims he is boring is either shallow or immature. I prefer to describe him as a comfortable and composed speaker with a sweet voice whose lectures feel more like a performance than, well, lectures. You get the sense that he has an intuitive understanding of his subjects and that he sincerely cares about conveying that knowledge to his students. In response to a criticism about his habit of introducing "large words" he does so only because such terms (like psychoanalysis) either novel concepts or take on profoundly new meanings in the context of the 20th century.

His class is difficult and involves copious amount of reading, but that is par for the course with the History 122 series (if you're considering taking him you've probably assumed as much). I have to contend, however, that 122F was the most difficult of the series. The pace is brisk and the amount of information crammed into the 12 weeks is almost absurd. As mentioned in other posts, Wohl will list a lot of key terms at the beginning of lecture, most of which he will discuss, but rarely does he touch on all of them. It's definitely tough to keep up at times but the subject matter is so interesting you won't even care. This class if for anyone who was a fan of Reill.

The major historical figures covered are Sartre, Foucalt, Marcuse, Ortega, Freud, Shaw, Wagner, Darwin, Sartre and much, much more. Nietzche is the first author you will read and his thought, as you will learn, is fundamental to much of what follows it. Existentialism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Post-Modernism, Literature of Great Circumstance are some of the interesting subjects that you'll get to explore.