ENGL 2599

I honestly thought this class (Medieval Romance Beyond King Arthur) was pretty interesting at first, but Middle English is actually extremely difficult to read and a huge timesink. While the stories are interesting and he does provide translations, if you are not interested in Medieval Studies, it may be worth it to take a different class with simpler language for your Second Writing requirement. Mr. Benson is a pretty good professor and it's enjoyable to listen to him speak, as he's clearly very passionate about the topics and often approaches them with a sense of humor. His grading may be a little harsher than expected at first and he does not tend to be very helpful/specific in the feedback he writes on your paper (he will deduce points for things without telling you what was wrong with them or in fact, will sometimes only give you compliments on a certain component before deducting points), but he is much more helpful at office hours and will give you a better idea of how to improve in the future. I do definitely feel like I got better at writing throughout the semester and learned to make some pretty thorough assignments that I was quite proud of. Also I unironically quite enjoyed the translated French texts that we read (Marie de France's lais and Tristan), which was nice. #tCFS24

I had no idea what to expect when I went into this course, but I had a really great time with it. The topic for this specific section was "Medieval Romance Beyond King Arthur", which covered different medieval romance literature ranging from translated Old French to non-translated Old English texts (Austin promptly provided translations for these texts though, since many of us struggled with the Old English). It definitely took a lot of time to get into the language of Old English, which can be very difficult to understand and piece together. I definitely think that if you don't have an existing interest in Old English or Medieval texts, it might be pretty difficult to get into and might not be worth it if you're just trying to fulfill some sort of requirement (FWR or SWR).

That being said, what really made this course for me was the instructor. Austin is so passionate about this topic and the texts we read and that made it so much fun to go into class and talk about the texts we read. Class was almost always just a pretty lowkey discussion about the reading we had to do, Austin didn't cold call people and it was very much based on what we had to volunteer about the texts. He's also pretty chill and would lean into the weirder topics we were interested in. Definitely had some good laughs during this course.

For papers, I already considered myself a pretty good writer so I didn't struggle that much with any of the papers he assigned.
We wrote 4 different types of papers throughout the semester: a brief analysis, an annotated bibliography, a prospectus, and a final research paper. The final is a 10-12 page research paper which builds off of the skills you gain from each of the previous papers. I kind of knew what my topic for my final paper was gonna be from when I did my analysis, which helped since I basically got to think over my final ideas for the entire semester. I averaged a 98 on my papers, so I don't have much to say about grading, but I do think that the feedback he offers when he returns your graded papers is kind of vague most of the time (but this is why you should go to his office hours if you need help). I definitely appreciate the standard he held us to, I think that really helped me improve as a writer and push myself to do better and write more than I thought I was capable of.

TLDR; Great instructor, the readings can be challenging if you're not into Medieval language/topics, chill in-class experience, papers can be a lot. If you want a bit of a challenge for your FWR or SWR (or are just interested in the course) then I recommend it, if not then you should search elsewhere.