Pay attention--there's a quiz at the end

The problem, they tell me, is that my course needs a sexier title. My Later American Novel class has been cancelled due to low enrollment the last two times it was on the schedule, and now it's on the verge of being cancelled again. If you ask some of my colleagues, students' rejection of the course has nothing to do with the fact that they'd be required to read six novels--it's all about the title.

Now I'll be the first to admit that Later American Novel is not the most compelling title, but it has been in the catalog under that name for decades and serves as a nice parallel to Early American Novel. What else would you call a class focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first century American novels? 

Someone suggested calling the course Sex and Death, and there's plenty of both on the syllabus. We start with a book in which sex creates much of the conflict--or a dearth of sex combined with inaccurate rumors about who is having sex with whom, followed by a death that may be suicide or accident. So maybe Not Enough Sex and Ambiguous Death.

But the course covers so much more! Sex and death play a large part in the war novel in which bloodshed is overshadowed by red tape, violence veers toward comedy, and mindless bureaucracy creates absurd consequences. So maybe we can call the course Sex and Death Go Kafkaesque. 

But that wouldn't do for the short novel in which swimming substitutes for sex and death. A lovely narration of communal consciousness gets fractured by a crack in the bottom of the pool and a crack in a woman's mind--truly a lovely novel, but any accurate course title would reek of chlorine.  

A title that covered the important concepts in all six novels would have to include a hurricane, mad dog, and blossoming pear tree; Dylar and Hitler Studies and an Airborne Toxic Event; a peacock and children's songs and a misidentified bag of bones; women named Pilate and Babette or nothing at all, guys named Teacake and Milkman and Major Major Major Major.

A course title covering all that would have to be encyclopedic: 

Sing a song of sex and death
doused with chlorine--Kafkaesque,
guns and peacocks, courtship rites,
billowing clouds and bombing flights;
swimming pools, mad dogs, and mules,
flying Africans, useless tools,
deaths in wartime, deaths at home,
death and sex in every tome.
(But whichever name you chance, they'll
never take a class that's cancelled.)

(Gold star to anyone who can name all six novels.)