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FACULTY FIND LIT HUM CHALLENGING, FULFILLING
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
FACULTY FIND LIT HUM CHALLENGING, FULFILLING
time period, they’re very close to us in life experience.”
“There’s a collegial aspect,” says Joanna Stalnaker, associate
professor of French, who has taught Lit Hum for seven of her 11
years at Columbia. “Everyone is reading the same works at the
same time. There are very few colleges where that’s taking place,
and that’s the most valuable thing I can think of. This course
sends a message that literature matters and is central to a college
education, and that’s something that’s endangered right now.”
“That’s what we do at Columbia: Lit Hum and CC,” says
Michael Seidel, a retired professor of English who taught Lit
Hum for 30 years after coming to Columbia from Yale in 1977.
“There’s really nothing like it in the country, because of its history,
its intensity, that it’s a seminar and because it’s Columbia
students. I read those books with the same intensity the last time
I taught it as the first time.” Seidel adds that he misses Lit Hum
and sometimes wakes up longing to teach a class.
Lit Hum’s teachers hail from humanities departments such as
English and comparative literature, philosophy, theater, classics and
anthropology. The course includes about 65 sections, which puts
it in constant need of those willing and able to take on the rigors
of teaching it. (The aim is for the faculty to be evenly divided with
a third tenured faculty, a third junior faculty and a third graduate
student preceptors.) Many instructors read the assigned text before
class, and not just the first time they teach the course, but every time.
“Anybody who reads books for a living never feels it’s the same
thing over and over again,” Seidel says. “The books reveal themselves
over time, with new insights and new ways of reading.”
Elisabeth Ladenson Ph.D. ’94 GSAS, professor of French and
comparative literature and chair of the Department of French and
Romance Philology, reads each work itself plus as much as she
can get her hands on about the work. “I’m old-fashioned, so it’s
not Wikipedia I’m going to rely on,” she says. “It’s The Cambridge
Companion to Virgil, dictionaries of mythology and things like
that. It’s not just the work; it’s the context of the work, the author’s
life, the influences of the work, mythological references. I
prepare for class surrounded by dictionaries and reference works
and critiques of the work.”
Another challenge to teachers is inherent in the nature of the
course: With such a range of works, many are bound to lie outside
the scope of individual expertise. “Some people only feel comfort-
Gareth Williams, the Violin Family Professor of Classics and chair of Lit Hum, conducts a weekly seminar for graduate preceptors who are
teaching the course for the first time.
PHOTO: MICHAEL DiVITO
“You can teach the course only one way,
and that’s with humility. The works are so
much greater than any of us.”
able teaching material they know intimately. Putting yourself
in front of the major works of civilization is intimidating,”
Seidel says. “You can teach the course only one way,
and that’s with humility. The works are so much greater
than any of us. You don’t really teach it — you read the
books alongside a lot of smart people, both people teaching
the course and the Columbia students.”
For first-time and any veteran instructors who choose to
attend, a Wednesday lunch forum, with a guest speaker on
the upcoming text, helps them prepare for the week ahead.
The Witten Center for the Core Curriculum, meanwhile,
maintains a library of resources online and at its office in
Hamilton Hall. And the Lit Hum chair keeps materials —
notes, articles, hand-outs — that have been passed down
through the years.
“The first year is an Iliad,” Rosen says. “You barely
have time to read the work yourself before you’re with
the students teaching it. It was life-saving that I had
generous colleagues who shared their Lit Hum notes
and offered guidance.”
Though she has taught the course four times, Rosen
still attends every Wednesday presentation. “I love thinking
about the work in the company of other people who
also want to think about these texts,” she says.
Seidel attended the Wednesday discussions every
week for decades and found them one of the most enjoyable
aspects of teaching the course. “They were always
fruitful, with fascinating insights that were invaluable
to the health and vitality of the course,” he says, adding
that he especially enjoyed getting to know colleagues
from other departments — historians, anthropologists,
philosophers, sociologists — who brought their own
perspectives. “That had a tremendous impact on my
work through the years and in the way I approached
the whole academic experience.”
The greatest challenge (and sometimes an enticement)
for first-timers lies in developing even a basic knowledge of all
the books. “These are towering works. One could spend one’s life
studying any one of them,” Stalnaker says. “I’d never read Homer
or Virgil or the Bible. I was coming into it with complete ignorance
and loved the idea of reading these books myself. I now
think it’s crazy to work in literature and not have any knowledge
of the Bible [for example], because it’s so influential in the history
of Western literature and in our language.”
In addition to the Wednesday talk, first-time graduate preceptors
are required to attend a Friday seminar series, led by the chair
of Lit Hum — currently Gareth Williams, the Violin Family Professor
of Classics and chair of the Department of Classics — on
how best to teach the course. Still, aside from the required readings
and a standardized final exam, the faculty is given a good
deal of free rein in how to approach their classes. One’s approach
might lean toward the historical, classical, philosophical, anthropological
or textual. The discussion might be more student-driven
or teacher-led. So although Lit Hum is a shared experience
among students and faculty, individual sections tend to differ in
trajectory, character and interpretational emphasis.
“One of the most important commodities is themselves: life
experience,” Williams says of the teachers. “Lit Hum is a marriage
of methodologies, on which we agree, and idiosyncrasies
of the individual.”
Andrew Feldherr, a professor of classics at Princeton, visited one of the
weekly Lit Hum staff meetings to offer an expert presentation on Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, which was the featured text that week.
PHOTO: BRUCE GILBERT
Lit Hum’s precise content is continually debated by faculty
and students. A common complaint from students in recent
decades has been that the Western-centric syllabus is
exclusionary (the “Why are we reading the works of dead
white males” argument). Faculty are more likely to argue the
merits of one individual text over another, and parse differences
in translations to decide which should be the required versions.
The syllabus is reviewed formally, usually every two years, by
current Lit Hum staff and those who have taught the course in the
previous five years. It’s a popular meeting. “A lot of debate takes
place, often before the meeting. Discussion of and reflection about
what texts should be taught go on all the time,” Williams says.
He emphasizes that no text earns its place in the course by
default: “It’s not a bunch of people who worship the Western
canon. Nobody is treating these as museum pieces. We’re asking
what aspect of the human experience these authors articulated
that draws readers over time and strikes a chord with generation
after generation. It’s not an act of text worship, it’s an act of text
interrogation.”
Currently, Boccacio’s Decameron is off the syllabus, Goethe’s
Faust is on. Pride and Prejudice has been suggested for the chopping
block, perhaps in favor of an alternative Jane Austen novel
such as Mansfield Park. Several years ago, in an effort to be more
inclusive, the Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh was
added but it was removed after just one year.
SPRING 2013
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SPRING 2013
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