Professor
Robert Maniquis
3 of 3
Most Helpful Review
An excerpt on this professor form UCLA's English department website: "Along the way, Professor Maniquis has been a shoe-shine boy, a gang member, a boy scout, a dishwasher, a golf caddie, a bowling alley pinboy, a grave digger, a coffin polisher, a hamburger slinger, an automobile worker, a plumber's assistant a human subject in band-aid experiments, a lab assistant charged with brushing hamster's teeth, an organist in a Baptist church, a truck driver, a foreman on an Oregon blackberry farm, an assistant to a private detective, a dialogue coach for several films, a script doctor, a private tutor to the fabulously rich, a translator, and the producer of orchestral music for a silent film." Unsurprisingly, Professor Maniquis is a mysterious man who makes his free-floating lectures consistently fascinating. The richness of his experience certainly colors the method of his teaching, which can be described as stern but highly constructive. He constantly challenges you intellectually, drawing not just from personal experience but from the absolute breadth of history and culture he has read and watched in his lifetime. I cannot even imagine how vast the extent of his knowledge is. I echo the sentiment of other reviewers, that he is an "old school" professor. If you are like me, and believe the study of literature has been bogged down by increasingly esoteric and politically-charged theoretical approaches, then being "old school," being traditional, is a virtue. Overall, he will deepen your appreciation for literature and increase your curiosity for life and for thought, and I highly recommend his classes.
An excerpt on this professor form UCLA's English department website: "Along the way, Professor Maniquis has been a shoe-shine boy, a gang member, a boy scout, a dishwasher, a golf caddie, a bowling alley pinboy, a grave digger, a coffin polisher, a hamburger slinger, an automobile worker, a plumber's assistant a human subject in band-aid experiments, a lab assistant charged with brushing hamster's teeth, an organist in a Baptist church, a truck driver, a foreman on an Oregon blackberry farm, an assistant to a private detective, a dialogue coach for several films, a script doctor, a private tutor to the fabulously rich, a translator, and the producer of orchestral music for a silent film." Unsurprisingly, Professor Maniquis is a mysterious man who makes his free-floating lectures consistently fascinating. The richness of his experience certainly colors the method of his teaching, which can be described as stern but highly constructive. He constantly challenges you intellectually, drawing not just from personal experience but from the absolute breadth of history and culture he has read and watched in his lifetime. I cannot even imagine how vast the extent of his knowledge is. I echo the sentiment of other reviewers, that he is an "old school" professor. If you are like me, and believe the study of literature has been bogged down by increasingly esoteric and politically-charged theoretical approaches, then being "old school," being traditional, is a virtue. Overall, he will deepen your appreciation for literature and increase your curiosity for life and for thought, and I highly recommend his classes.
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Most Helpful Review
I took Violence in Cultural Theory and Literature. It was a tough course with some serious reading. We started with Aristotle's Poetics, did excerpts from Nietzsche, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kierkegaard, and many other challenging and lengthy works. You don't realize how much you've learned until the second week of your next English class. I sat in Professor Maniquis' class for 10 weeks and filled an entire composition book, attempting to capture just the bullet points of what he said. He just stands at the front of the room and talks... for two hours straight. If you need presentations or chalkboard notes, this is not the professor for you. Sometimes his lectures seem tangential, and it's tempting to put down the pen, but he always brings it back around, and you will regret not having written down what he was saying, regardless of how tangential it seemed at the time. He can also come off as conceited and pedantic, but I gladly excuse minor coarseness of personality in light of the incredible amount of information he is capable of imparting. I would highly recommend him to anyone, but with the warning that you must be prepared to dedicate yourself to the class.
I took Violence in Cultural Theory and Literature. It was a tough course with some serious reading. We started with Aristotle's Poetics, did excerpts from Nietzsche, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kierkegaard, and many other challenging and lengthy works. You don't realize how much you've learned until the second week of your next English class. I sat in Professor Maniquis' class for 10 weeks and filled an entire composition book, attempting to capture just the bullet points of what he said. He just stands at the front of the room and talks... for two hours straight. If you need presentations or chalkboard notes, this is not the professor for you. Sometimes his lectures seem tangential, and it's tempting to put down the pen, but he always brings it back around, and you will regret not having written down what he was saying, regardless of how tangential it seemed at the time. He can also come off as conceited and pedantic, but I gladly excuse minor coarseness of personality in light of the incredible amount of information he is capable of imparting. I would highly recommend him to anyone, but with the warning that you must be prepared to dedicate yourself to the class.
3 of 3
