Jennifer Cognard-Black

I find The Great Courses to be pretty hit or miss. Some are excellent, engaging, and even fun. Others are merely ok, boring, and even tedious. This one falls in the latter group.

The content is basic, which in and of itself is fine -- everyone needs to grasp the basics of a subject first. My only gripe here is that I think the title misleads on this point. There are surely a couple intermediate steps between being a shitty essayist and a great one, and sticking 'great' in the title implies something beyond the basics.

Far worse is that it's not engaging in any way (at least to me). I'm also not a big fan of a lecturer drawing so much on their own work. Some is fine, and getting the first-person view of a essayist and their struggles with writing and the reactions to more personal essays is of great value. But Cognard-Black draws upon her own work too much for my tastes.

In the end, this TGC has some good content for beginners willing to push through the tedium, but most essayists with more than a little experience won't get enough from it to offset the negatives.
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