‘The Harvard Novel’ takes students back to campus
It didn’t turn out at all the way they thought it would. Being asked to quickly leave campus and return home last month amid the mushrooming coronavirus outbreak was painful and disappointing. But the experience gave the students taking “The Harvard Novel” an additional personal, if unplanned, connection to what they were reading. The narratives in the course often “describe what happens after someone gets to Harvard, both the exhilaration and the disillusionment that can occur with the realization of a new set of struggles or challenges that confront a person once they have actually arrived,” said Beth Blum, an assistant professor of English who created the class this year. “That ties in to [the students’] own feelings of having their expectations subverted by this experience and trying to manage that.” Even before the evacuation there were already lots of touchpoints in the texts, which include Henry Adams’ 1907 autobiography “The Education...