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CLASSIC READINGS, MODERN TECHNOLOGY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
CLASSIC READINGS, MODERN TECHNOLOGY
Students in Lit Hum are expected, in the words of Dean James J.
Valentini, to “engage with others in a broad way about big ideas
specific to the human condition.”
PHOTO: MATTHEW SEPTIMUS
My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and other Indestructible
Writers of the Western World (1996) — in which Denby described
retaking the Core in middle age (see Columbia Forum in this issue)
— Harvard professor Helen Vendler bemoaned “Columbia’s tendency
with literary texts, which is to fasten on the political and the
moral over the erotic or aesthetic or epistemological; and such an
emphasis is a standing invitation to correctness or incorrectness.”
Nevertheless, this emphasis on examining the human condition,
approached through powerful and resonant works of literature,
remains central to the Lit Hum experience and to a Columbia
College education. As Edward Mendelson, the Lionel Trilling
Professor in the Humanities, says, Lit Hum is a “course about
problems people have never been able to solve.”
Kathryn Yatrakis, dean of academic affairs and senior associate
v.p. for Arts and Sciences, underscores Lit Hum’s value as a
bridge: “It provides a common intellectual experience that binds
students to each other, and to generations of alumni.”
Here’s the answer to the most common question asked
about Literature Humanities: The Iliad, Oresteia, Oedipus
the King and Inferno. The question: What are the
texts that have been read in Lit Hum every year since
the course was first required That’s it — four texts. (King Lear
would make the cut were it not for several years when the syllabus
only required students to read one Shakespeare play, leaving
it to the teachers of each section to decide which one.)
For those who perceive Lit Hum as a staid, inflexible “great
Hutchins’ original experiment at Chicago and the successful program
at St. John’s College (in Annapolis and Santa Fe). Lit Hum
always has been flexible about which texts it uses, and remains so.
Indeed, this flexibility calls into question whether “great books” is
an accurate description of the course at all.
The books that make it, explains Mercer, are the “books that
people keep commenting on,” just as Virgil mined Homer but
adapted him to the exigencies of imperial Rome. Mendelson says
Lit Hum embraces “books that people have been arguing about.”
The point isn’t that everyone likes them or agrees about them, he
says. “The point is they’re disturbing.”
Williams agrees. “To read these texts is to introduce yourself
to being unsettled about life,” he says. The course “is intended to
raise more questions than it answers, and to nurture a curiosity
about written human experience.”
Non-Columbians often don’t appreciate the significance of apparently
incremental changes. “What is astonishing about Columbia’s
Core offerings is how little they have changed over the years,”
says The Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, who surveyed the “great
books” movement at Chicago, St. John’s and Columbia in A Great
Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books
(2008). (Beam is the father of Christopher ’06.) But the faculty who
teach the course disagree. “The course has never been the same because
the context has always changed,” says Williams. “The generation
of WWII had a different experience from the first Humanities
A students,” and the Cold War, civil rights and women’s rights, he
says, all affected the context in which the course was taught.
Lit Hum On Exhibit
For those who can’t get enough Literature Humanities,
two 75th anniversary exhibits and an ongoing web exhibit
offer the chance to go deeper.
An exhibit in the Hamilton Hall lobby highlights the material
history of the Lit Hum texts, emphasizing that they are not only
intellectual creations but also objects of craftsmanship, manufacture,
publication and distribution. Two display cases focus on
the contributions of John Erskine (Class of 1900) and Jacques
Barzun ’27, ’32 GSAS to the creation and evolution of the course.
The Columbia Alumni Center also will have a 75th anniversary
exhibit, set to open in March.
Columbia University Libraries’ Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
meanwhile, has established an online exhibit, “Core Curriculum:
Literature Humanities” (along with a companion exhibit
about Contemporary Civilization) featuring materials from the
RBML collections. Among the items are a papyrus fragment of
Homer’s Iliad dating from the first century BCE, an illuminated
manuscript of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and early editions of Pride
and Prejudice and To the Lighthouse. View these and more at
exhibitions.cul.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/lit_hum.
Lit Hum is a “course about problems
people have never been able to solve.”
The books that make the syllabus are the
“books that people keep commenting on.”
which were the backbone of reading assignments in Contemporary
Civilization for decades and which have made a comeback
at Columbia in recent years.
More importantly, the approach matters. Any entering firstyear
expecting a formal literature course is likely to be surprised
by Literature Humanities, because the
course’s ambitions are so much broader. As
Dean James J. Valentini says, students in Lit
Hum are expected to “engage with others in a
broad way about big ideas specific to the human
condition.”
It’s fair to say that this approach — what Valentini
describes as “thinking in a broad way as
a civilized person” — has puzzled many, both
on and off campus. In the early 1960s, a College
committee reviewing Lit Hum chaired by Professor
Fritz Stern ’46, ’53 GSAS, now University
Professor Emeritus, had difficulty understanding
“the philosophical or pedagogical ends of
the course.” While the committee didn’t suggest
abandoning Lit Hum, it noted that the traditional
justifications — such as thinking in a
broad way about books — were “scorned by the
committee.” Similarly, in a savage New Republic
review of David Denby ’65, ’66J’s Great Books:
Christia Mercer, the Gustave M. Berne
Professor of Philosophy, says, “Every
generation has to reinvent Lit Hum.”
PHOTO: MATTHEW SEPTIMUS
books” course, four texts is not a long list. Indeed, anyone who
looks to Lit Hum for a fixed canon that all educated people
should read is likely to be disappointed. Humanities A initially
used most of Erskine’s original syllabus, as had the earlier colloquium.
But the course’s administrators have since adapted
the syllabus regularly to reflect faculty and
student interests. Molière and Voltaire were
represented for decades but have fallen off;
in the past 20 years, most students have read
Cervantes, Austen and Dostoevsky.
Gareth Williams, the Violin Family Professor
of Classics and chair of Lit Hum, speaks for
many instructors in rejecting the idea of a fixed
list of “classic” books. “As a classicist, I object
to that sort of viewpoint. The course is not a
museum-like visit. It’s about the interrogation
of texts,” he says. “I ask my students, why on
earth read that book now”
Mercer puts it another way: “We need to
get the students to read the books and feel the
importance of them.”
The variety of texts that have appeared
on the syllabus during the last 75 years distinguishes
Lit Hum both from great books
programs, such as President Robert Maynard
“Every generation has to reinvent Lit Hum,” agrees Mercer.
That has never been more true than today. “The Lit Hum experience
now is completely different from 20 years ago because our
students grew up with the Internet,” Williams says. “Students’
minds work differently,” he adds, because they are used to easy
and immediate access to information.
Paradoxically, that makes Lit Hum more valuable than ever. Lit
Hum encourages the process of “slowly unfolding a steady stream
of argument,” says Williams, for students “accustomed to nearly
instantaneous communication.” He believes that “certain areas of
the human experience resist the technological hand,” and in Lit
Hum, students “learn to formulate, deliver and defend arguments,
both in speech and in writing.” And they learn to listen. “The art
of listening is a fundamental aspect of Lit Hum,” Williams says.
This is not to give the impression that Lit Hum encourages
a community of modern-day Luddites, rejecting
technology and the Internet in favor of dog-eared paperbacks
full of scribbles. Nothing could be further
from the truth. Under Mercer’s leadership, Lit Hum has developed
a rich online presence to supplement class readings and
discussion.
The thinking behind the website (college.columbia.edu/core/
lithum/texts), says Mercer, was to make Lit Hum more intellectually
engaging for students, more a part of their lives on campus.
“We wanted to present Lit Hum as edgy as it really is,” she says.
The goal was to make the course “more alive, more vital.” Mercer
wanted students to be able to explore the contemporaneous
worlds and artistic interpretations of their readings.
Using the theme of “explorations,” the website allows students
to delve not simply into the context of Lit Hum texts but
also into the conversations that have flowed from them. For The
Iliad, for example, the website includes ancient depictions of the
Trojan War from classical pottery and sculpture, examples of ancient
arms and armor, and Renaissance depictions. But it also includes
modern works, including streaming music — Bob Dylan’s
“Temporary Like Achilles” (1966) and Led Zeppelin’s “Achilles
Last Stand” (1976) — as well as a clip from the blockbuster film
Troy (2004), starring Brad Pitt as Achilles. Other texts are accompanied
by materials ranging from Hedwig and the Angry Inch (a
2001 musical about a rock ’n’ roll band with a transgendered German
lead singer) to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), a somewhat
irreverent artistic response by Seth Grahame-Smith to Jane
Austen’s masterpiece.
The website, says Williams, contextualizes readings and connects
students to the history of discussion about them. “The website
frames the texts,” he says. “It provides supportive picturing.”
Mercer sees this as an aid to instructors as well. “Teachers
have to finesse how much time they spend on context in class,”
she notes. The website makes this an easier task. It also provides
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