"I like it a lot," agrees McNamara. "It's probably one of the only courses where we haven't already had so much discussion on the subject that it's already dead. It's really interesting."

McNamara says his favorite part of the course is the sections.

"[Section] often goes off on these strange tangents," he says. "One of the sections we had, someone brought in something they had found on the Internet which was actually a recipe for human barbecue sauce, and it--ended up being a whole discussion on what people would taste like."

None of the students interviewed said the course met their expectations--although many said it exceeded them.

Roxby says she appreciates the creativity the course allows.

She said she wrote a story for one of her projects about "a guy who obsesses about women and them kills them and eats them."

"I wrote the story and then I made a book of it with illustrations," she says.

"The focus of the story isn't really the cannibalism as it is the fact as being a cannibal forces you to focus on people in a different way than normal, so it's [about] ways of seeing," she says.

Why Take This Class

Many of those interviewed say they decided to take the course because it was something that wouldn't normally be taught at Harvard.

"[I'm taking it] mostly just because of a very sick interest in the subject matter," McNamara confesses.

"I was casting around for an English class I could take and then I stumbled upon this one," says Caitlin Roxby '98. "The professor was interesting and he showed cool slides of people eating each other, and I thought it seemed a little bit different."

Although the material may seem off the beaten path, Huggan says it is more conventional than at first glance.

"I think the course is less controversial than it appears to be," Huggan says. "The cannibal may seem off-beat, but if you see the material that is actually looked at in class, it is actually quite conventional."

But the professor says the class is somewhat more unconventional in the variety of approaches he takes toward the material.