"When [Justin] McDaniel began teaching Existential Despair a decade ago, he came up with a set of ground rules...."

"Students would read only literature — no biographies or self-help books. He forbade them from taking notes so as not to distract from the act of reading.... He feels that great novels can be read as religious texts, too. Part of the point of most religious stories, he believes, is that other people have endured ordeal after ordeal — and somehow carried on. McDaniel gravitates toward books that deal with bleak subjects: torture, genocide, hopelessness, pain and sickness, guilt and shame.... As one student at the reading group... described him to me as the 'least human and the most human person I know,' meaning that his affect alternates between empathetic and robotic. He keeps a 'crying chair' in his office and allows students to sit in it and cry for 15 minutes at a time, no questions asked (he leaves the room). But now and then, he told me, some students 'needed a little smackdown.' During one reading session last spring, he lost his temper. The class was reading The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles. About halfway through, a few students finished and started chatting. 'It was five or six people who could not stop their self-satisfaction, how clever and interesting they were. Finally, I had to unleash on them. I was actually cruel to them, but they deserved it.' He shouted 'Shut the fuck up!' over and over until the room fell silent...."

From "Gluttons for Punishment Justin McDaniel has developed a cult following for getting his students to read — as long as they follow his rules" (NY Magazine).