One of the most informative classes I've taken. Cantor puts the major literary movements into context as well as the birth and development of the novel. I will keep these notes for a long time. Ben is awesome.

AMAZING CLASS! It's lots of reading but you leave feeling like you have a handle on most modern literature and movements. Really educating and lecture is interesting and funny. Plus, complit is a small department so you actually make good friends in lecture! Great class for anyone, not just literature majors

There was so much reading which is hard for non-English majors who aren't used to such a reading load. Personally, I had so much bio reading and research to do and I couldn't keep up with the reading every week and ended up not being able to finish all the books but somehow I got a B+. It's kind of disappointing but considering I only read half the book list and thought I didn't do so well on the final, I'm pretty happy about it. You have to write 3 papers which is not bad and there isn't a midterm. The lectures were WAY more interesting than the books themselves. Cantor is probably the best professor I've had even though I'm not a comp lit/english major. You can tell he absolutely loves what he does and he's very entertaining/funny. ALWAYS GO TO THE LECTURES! He does refer to the 1st semester every lecture but it's no big deal as long as you understand the connection he's trying to make. The final consisted of 2 essays (~1 hour for each) and an identification section. For the identifications, you have to do 20/25 of them. For us, they were basically all quotes/lines/passages from the works and I found it to be pretty difficult since I hadn't read all the works. The character identifications were easy but there were only about 5. I'm pretty sure you can get an A as long as you read all the works and not do what I did by only reading 7/8 of the 15 works. I did get a B+ so you shouldn't worry too much about the class. Obviously, you have to do well on the papers, though.

His lectures are phenomenal, and the books are really important. Some of them are tough to get through, but the lectures make the reading worthwhile.

a lot of reading but definitely worth it, its a very interesting class