Paradise Gained
THE OLDER STUDENT staff members cheered when Jay Davis '90, an intern at the Composition Center and a six-year veteran as a writing tutor, announced that English 5 professors were now free to teach whatever texts they pleased. What, asked puzzled newcomers, is all the fuss about?
Until the fall of '92, all English 5 (freshman composition) professors were required to teach either Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Milton's Paradise Lost. This choice always struck the student Composition Center tutors as odd: a 90- page nineteenth-century adventure-novella versus a seventeenth-century biblical epic in verse? Why sary that every Dartmouth student confront the forces of Good and Evil, Innocence and Guilt?
Tutors at the 17-yearold center had ample opportunity to discuss this shortened Great Books list because in their little room in the back of Sanborn
House they read pretty much every paper about Marlow, Kurtz, God, and Satan that gets written at Dartmouth. English 5 students are the Composition Center's chief clients, freshmen who take the composition class because they have to—and find themselves assigned weekly papers. They get their first "C," they get scared, and they get their hardcopy over to 108 Sanborn for some free help from their peers.
During the fall and winter of 1991-92, when the 40-odd sections of English 5 were taught, the center gave 908 tutoring sessions, 40 percent of which were with English 5 students. So it was not unusual to have back-to-back sessions with students trying to "Discuss the theme of darkness in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" or "Explain why Milton makes Satan more appealing than God."
Many tutors had been exempt from English 5 and had never read Milton or Conrad, but after wrestling with freshman writers'
logic, argument, grammar, style, and—worst of allboredom, they know Paradise Lost and Heart ofDarkness as if they had written theses on them.
Jay Davis says he shudders to remember the time when, after four years of tutoring at the center, he "started having recurrent dreams about Satan sailing down the Congo."
The first term without restrictions was "liberating," said Jay, especially for the old-timers at the center. He pointed out that some English 5 classes are still assigned Milton and Conrad, so tutors haven't lost touch with the classics.
But he can't help being pleased that Paradise Lost has been lost as a requirement, and paradise at the center—a lush variety of literary topics—has been regained.
