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FACULTY FIND LIT HUM CHALLENGING, FULFILLING
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
In addition to the required work, professors
can add one or more texts of their
own choosing. Popular selections include
Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork
Orange. Ladenson adds Margaret Atwood’s
The Penelopiad — the story of the
Trojan War from Penelope’s point of view
— to the Fall syllabus, following The Odyssey.
In the Spring, she asks the class to vote
on an additional text. “They suggest things
like One Hundred Years of Solitude; I propose
things like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man,” she says. “When we narrow it down,
every single time they’ve voted for Lolita.
It’s a surefire hit, and it alludes to the entire
tradition we’ve read.”
Stalnaker doesn’t assign additional reading
and instead gives her charges breathing
room to read and absorb the required texts.
She says there’s an ongoing concern among
faculty about whether the students can and
do read all of the works versus skim, skip or rely on SparkNotes,
and “whether the ambition of the syllabus inspires superficial
reading. My experience is that the vast majority of them do read
and get a lot out of the experience.”
Ladenson has discovered the same: “It’s a huge amount of
reading — it’s astonishing anyone does it all — but I’ve been impressed
by how many students do most or all of the reading and
come to class prepared,” she says. “And even if they don’t, it’s
good for them to be exposed to it.”
The reading list always has been daunting, for nearly any student,
but Williams thinks today’s students are challenged more
than ever due to technology. “The act of reading is not what it
was 20 years ago. The Internet is a technological marvel in so
many ways but it perhaps has had considerable consequences
for traditional reading practices,” he says. “These books presuppose
a thoughtfulness about life and self-reflection, which are
challenged by the speed of information retrieval in the Internet
age. The students are as bright and committed as they ever were
but now are used to instant access to information and a sense of
speed. Books are slow burners. The character development and
time frames are much slower than what the students are often
used to, and that requires a recalibration.”
The first-year students are largely divided between those who
can’t wait to delve into the venerated Core courses, starting with
Lit Hum — for many, the Core is what attracted them to the College
in the first place — and those who possess little innate interest
in what they initially see as dusty, irrelevant or just plain hardto-get-through
books. “Sometimes you get somebody horrified
Anne Holt, a first-year graduate preceptor,
takes notes at one of the weekly Lit Hum
staff meetings.
PHOTO: BRUCE GILBERT
by the Core, who says, ‘I’m a science guy’
or whatnot, and then they find they love
it,” Ladenson says. “That’s a very gratifying
pedagogic experience.”
Students are known to contact their professors
after the course — sometimes weeks
later, sometimes years — to tell them how
much Lit Hum meant to them and the impact
it has had on their lives. Cavallo cites a
student who returned to his home country
of India and started a vocational training
company he named after Athena. “It really
touches me when students are inspired in
their life choices by Lit Hum,” she says.
Not everyone is so converted of course.
Some students don’t complete all the readings
or participate actively in the discussions.
“Not all of them care or pay attention
or have a good time,” Ladenson says. “With
Lit Hum, as with everything, what you get
out of it reflects what you put into it.”
Cavallo says the romantic ideal of students
debating the books in dining halls and residence halls turns
out to be true. She wasn’t sure until her two children came to the
College and reported the phenomenon first-hand, which she was
grateful to hear.
Students are known to contact their professors
weeks, even years, after the course to
tell them how much it meant to them.
Although the course is billed as life-changing for students, faculty
often get as much out of teaching it as the students do taking it.
Intimacy with the texts informs the professors’ research and writing
in their own fields and enriches their personal lives as well.
When Hurricane Sandy flooded much of Cavallo’s home in Toms
River, N.J., in October, she spent the night on the kitchen counter
watching the tidal surge reach the windowsills and reflecting on
Herodotus. “I was thinking of how Solon warned Croesus that you
never know what’s going to happen in life,” she says. “It was a
confirmation of the wisdom that can be found in ancient texts.”
“If I could teach one course forever, it’d be Lit Hum,” Rosen
says. “But Lit Hum wants you to move on and do other things
and come back to it, and each time you do, the books are different,
the students are different, you’re different.”
Ladenson, too, enjoys being pushed out of her comfort zone
and, in fact, values the experience of teaching Lit Hum so much
that she’s considering expanding her horizons. “I’m toying with
taking CC — oh, that’s a huge slip! — I meant teaching CC, or Art
Hum. It’ll be a stretch for me, which is why I want to do it.”
Shira Boss ’93, ’97J, ’98 SIPA is contributing writer to CCT. Her last
feature was a profile of filmmaker, faculty member and Center for the
Study of Ethnicity and Race Director Frances Negrón-Muntaner in the
Winter 2012–13 issue.
Selig obliged. Among the books were a trio by Mann (Confessions
of Felix Krull, Confidence Man; Death in Venice; and Doctor
Faustus) and two each by Flaubert (Sentimental Education;
Madame Bovary) and Joyce (Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man). He also advised the short stories of de Maupassant,
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Forster’s A Passage to India;
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Crane’s The Red
Badge of Courage; and García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude. All told, there were
about 30 titles.
In 2010, Callan visited Selig a second time,
this time at an assisted living center on the
Upper West Side, to tell him he had finished
the list and to ask for more recommendations.
“Read them again,” said Selig.
Lit Hum for Life
“I left Columbia with an understanding of
the power of asking the right questions.”
B y A l e x i s T o n t i ’11 A r t s
On the day after his college graduation, the last thing Chuck Callan ’78
did before leaving Morningside was visit Professor Karl-Ludwig Selig
at his office in Hamilton Hall to ask for a reading list. “I did not want the
power and pleasure of the Core to end,” recalls Callan, who majored in
economics. “Literature Humanities was transformative for me.”
“Literature Humanities was transformative
for me,” says Chuck Callan ’78.
PHOTO: CHRIS BALMER ’07
It is fair to say that, in 75 years, no student
has left Literature Humanities untouched
by the experience. Some are relieved to
have made it through — and no looking
back, thank you very much. Others come
away with a sense of satisfaction, and the confidence
that the course has in some essential
way contributed to their becoming educated,
well-rounded individuals. And many, many
more experience Lit Hum as a kind of opening
out: It increases their appetite for reading and broadens their
other interests, attunes them to an ongoing and long-lasting conversation
about the world and equips them with new ways of
engaging with others and with themselves.
“The Core is about great, enduring truths that neither I nor, I
dare say, humanity, can live without,” Callan says. (His literary
adviser, Selig, died on December 1, 2012. See
Around the Quads.)
“Before taking the course I thought the
subject matter of many of the books would
never apply to me because of the differences
in times,” says Dana Mondesire ’14. “On the
contrary, by the end of each class I was thinking
about the questions posed in the works
and how they may have applied to my own
life; I found that the themes we discussed in
class were just so relatable.”
“It led to reevaluations of my own worldview.
How much of what I believed was simply
the result of our cultural tradition” says
Michael Carter ’14. “Paradoxically, by examining
the conventional, Western tradition, I
became much more open to alternate ways
of thinking. Everybody always tells you that
college is a place to ‘find yourself,’ to develop
your opinions, to understand who you are.
SPRING 2013
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SPRING 2013
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