I took Professor Rickles course 10 years ago and it changed my life. At the time, many people in class didn't quite get what he was doing, but were intrigued at various degrees. From reading the recent reviews, it seems as though students at USCB have become more close-minded, less curious, judgmental and less prepared for scholarly work.
class was titled "German Science Fiction" so i took it but that was the last thing talked about during the quarter. impossible to stay focused on lecture. incredibly monotonous, low volume, and stationary professor.teaches at graduate level, u won't meet ur TA (grader). demanding.unrelated material.felt very lost
Must pay attention In class, he talks very low so it is recommended that you sit in the front. I highly recommend his book Vampire Lectures because it helps! Midterm + Final Take home Essay.
Dry speaker, but if you can manage to pay attention to the pauses, the hmms, the hahs, then lecture can be interesting. Rikels gets much more into it when members of the class participate. If he would just prepare his lectures more rather than winging every lecture it would be a lot more interesting. Easy class.
Most boring class ever. 2 in-class essays, no final. None of the material really made sense to me. Try to pay attention to his lecture and the readings as they are what the essays are based on.
His voice is so monotonous its hard to stay awake or understand anything that he says. Two midterm essays and a final take home essay.
Larry is amazing! He's a god.
I went to the first day of this class with every intention of learning about the really cool books from the book list and not a word of his lecture made any sense! It was incredibly frustrating. He has a very soothing monotone voice (not the best for people trying to stay awake) and he talked about things no one had any idea about.
Lectures make no sense. He doesn't explain any of the reading, which is pretty dense, and if you don't have a background in Freud you're screwed. He seems pretty self important. His essay prompts are really difficult to navigate, vague and overly theatrical. His TA was more terrifying than any film we watched and he's hard to get a hold of.
Rickels classes changed my life :)
Rickels is crazy. Very cute dog. Very ambiguous lectures. Likes to connect everything he loves about Freud (and believe me, he loves Freud A LOT) to crazy theories about Satan. If you take good notes in class, you'll do well on the midterm. Final paper? Good luck. Paper topic was absolutely insane. I'm glad I'm done with it.
Easy class. Every lecture he shows 1-3 film clips, and these clips (and his analysis of them) are just as important as the readings in the reader. Just a midterm paper (in class) and take home final paper. Midterm was easy, final was a bit more confusing but doable. Rickels is bizarre, in a interesting way. I wanted to go to class.