Aranye is brilliant. If you put in the effort, her classes will make you a lot smarter. The readings are SUPPOSED to be difficult. Read things more than once, really try to understand each passage before moving on, and then go to office hours. If all you care about is grades, don't take her, but if you want a good education, definitely do.

Aranye is a sweet person. Other than that, she's easily the worst professor I've ever had at UCSB. First of all, she's really disorganized. She assigned the paper way later than she was supposed to and gave us little time to finish. second, she makes everything hard to the point where only a psych major would understand whats going on. BEWARE

Aranye is a sweet person, but is the most disorganized professor I've ever had. The lectures weren't boring, but the readings definitely were. She uses different books every time she teaches this class, but when I took it, I had only psychology texts with Macbeth as the single work of "literature". She's also a tough grader!

Super interesting class and awesome teacher. The assigned novels were amazing and kept the class interesting. Wants her students to do well and grades very fairly!

She is very passionate about the subject: Psychoanalytic Theory & the course materials were interesting. Other than that though, the objective of the course were very unclear. No idea what was going to be on the midterm or final or what was expected of us until about 2 days before. Very disorganized & unclear. Nice though. Just not really worth it

Loved her! The topic we studied was on Language and Feeling. She made it extremely interesting. Her grading isn't too bad. A little bit disorganized but it didn't affect the class too much.

Fradenburg is a really nice professor who is enthusiastic about the material she teaches--in this case, the Canterbury Tales. However, she does not grade in an easy or understandable manner. She deducts points at random without explanation. Furthermore, she seems to expect students to conduct independent research in order to excel. Good luck.

By far the worst class I've ever taken. The professor was unclear and very cold and stiff and the material discussed in lecture had nothing to do with the readings. I had a horrible TA, too. I received D's on both my papers. The only reason I passed the class was because I spent hours doing outside research and reiterated her lectures on the final.

Terrible. She chose interesting texts to read, but her lectures are pointless and don't coincide well with the material. Also... I am still waiting for her to post my course grade... 2 weeks after the final.

You definitely have to work harder in this class, but if you are open to what she proposes, you shouldn't have too hard a time. People seem to be complaining because the professor won't do the thinking for them. But she has tremendous insight. There IS, however, an assumed prior knowledge of literary canon on your part before getting to this class.

Horrible. lectures were painfully dull & off-topic & she rarely, if ever, lectured on the material. Section was pointless. Her PowerPoint slides were useless, and her essay prompts were vague & badly worded. Would not recommend this class unless absolutely mandatory.

terrible. just terrible. the most difficult class i've ever taken at UCSB.