If you happen to miss lunch on Tuesday or Thursday, there is still a place to satisfy your appetite.

An upper-level English course, "Cannibals," meets at 2 p.m. and features many choice morsels.

In last Thursday's class, about 20 students watched a video screen as a woman marched down a hall followed by a number of cooks carrying a large food platter. The cooks then set down the platter in front of the woman's husband.

The wife pulled the sheet off the platter to reveal a steaming human corpse on a bed of lettuce, garnished with broccoli, cauliflower and lemon.

The woman forces her husband to eat the corpse, which is body of her lover, whom he killed. Then she shoots him, saying scornfully "cannibal."

While this scene from "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, Her Lover" might seem unfit to be shown in a Harvard classroom, it is the norm for one of the grizzliest classes offered at Harvard this semester, English 195z: "Cannibals."

As students gathered in Boylston 10 Thursday, they laughed and joked with each other in a casual, relaxed fashion, maintaining that atmosphere as Associate Professor of English and American Literature Graham Huggan began his lecture.

Huggan, dressed casually in brown corduroy pants and a brown and white shirt, sat with his legs crossed on the desk at the front of the room and lectured about the assignment of the day.

Huggan discussed the principle of cannibalism in historical context, jumping around from the French Revolution in the 18th century to contemporary society.

About midway into the class, Huggan played the clip from the movie.

As the film ended, Huggan turned discussion over to the students, some of whom were smiling and grinning while others hid their faces in their hands.

Students spent the remainder of the class discussing the incidence of cannibalism in the movie, calling it "a metaphor of force on many levels."

"The...movie, as I tried to explain in my lecture...deals with the appetite of contemporary consumers," says Huggan, who also calls the movie a "vicious political satire."

Huggan's entire class may well be intended as just such a "vicious political satire."

As he wrote on the syllabus, "NOTE: This course does not come with a government health warning, but it probably should!"

Why Cannibals?