"It's not based upon trying to be a detective when you're reading the book, but trying to really understand what you're reading," says Anand Acharya '99, who is taking the course this semester. "It's like using a whole new part of your brain that hasn't gotten any use at Harvard."

Students say the class is unique in other ways as well, including the anecdotal nature of lectures.

According to Flavia M. Colgan '99, few students take notes in lecture, providing a welcome respite from other classes.

"Take notes on what?" she asks. "On your feelings? On your heart?"

The course also departs from average class procedure by employing people who are not enrolled in Harvard graduate schools as teaching fellows (TF).

Coles says some TFs are ordinary graduate students, but the course strives to find "doctors, lawyers, ordinary parents, people who want to live in some kind of intimacy with these [writers]."

Ozug recalls that his TF last year worked full-time in New York and commuted to teach the section each week.

"He wasn't getting paid," Ozug says. "He's in the kind of world where every minute is dollars. For him to give us that kind of time was an interesting choice."

One such 'real person' who seriously considered becoming a TF for the course last year was music legend Bruce Springstein.

According to Coles, Springsteen heard about the class from a friend in New York. He then contacted Coles because of his specific interest in novelist Walker Percy. Coles says the musician had carried on a correspondence with Percy before the author's death in 1993.

Springsteen drove to Cambridge three times in the fall of 1997 to sit in on lecture and speak to students and TFs.

"He's taken the reading list very seriously," Coles says. "He thought he might want to teach a section. We were about to do it, but he was making a new disc."

Yet "The Boss" hasn't eliminated the possibility of teaching the course in the future, Coles added.

Springsteen wasn't the course's only brush with fame. Coles--who sprinkles his lectures with anecdotes from his friendships with novelists such as Williams--was an early mentor of actor Matt Damon '92-'94.

Gen Ed 105 impressed Damon so much that he later arranged an independent study with Coles to explore the works of Walker Percy.