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COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
[ COLUMBIA FORUM]
Lit Hum Revisited
At 48, David Denby ’65, ’66J proved
you can go home again — to the classics
PHOTO: CASEY KELBAUGH
David Denby ’65, ’66J is a familiar
name to readers of The New Yorker;
he has been a staff writer and film
critic at the magazine since 1998.
Earlier, he was the film critic for
New York magazine for 20 years
and won a 1991 National Magazine
Award. During his time at New
York, Denby returned to the Morningside
Heights campus and his
Core Curriculum roots and retook
Literature Humanities and Contemporary
Civilization. The result
was the New York Times bestseller
GREAT BOOKS: My Adventures
with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf,
and Other Indestructible Writers
of the Western World (1997). In
the excerpt that follows, he relates his
struggles as an older student wrestling in his middle years with
the slippery classics of Lit Hum, in particular The Iliad.
Denby’s other books include Do the Movies Have a Future
(2012), Snark (2009) and American Sucker (2004).
Rose Kernochan ’82 Barnard
In the fall of 1991, thirty years after entering Columbia
University for the first time, I went back to school
and sat with eighteen-year-olds and read the same
books that they read. Not just any books. Together
we read Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Augustine, Kant,
Hegel, Marx, and Virginia Woolf. Those books. Those
courses — the two required core-curriculum courses
that I had first taken in 1961, innocently and unconsciously,
as a freshman at Columbia College. No one
in that era could possibly have imagined that in the
following decades the courses would be alternately reviled as an
iniquitous oppression and adored as a bulwark of the West.
One of the courses, Literature Humanities, or Lit Hum, as everyone
calls it, is (and was) devoted to a standard selection of European
literary masterpieces; the other, Contemporary Civilization,
or C.C., offers a selection of philosophical and social-theory
masterpieces. They are both “great books” courses, or, if you like,
“Western civ” surveys, a list of heavyweight names assembled
in chronological order like the marble busts in some imaginary
pantheon of glory. Such courses were first devised, earlier in the
century, at Columbia; they then spread to the University of Chicago,
and in the 1940s to many other universities and colleges.
They have since, putting it mildly, receded. At times, they have
come close to extinction, though not at Columbia or Chicago.
Despite my explanations, my fellow students in 1991 may well
have wondered what in the world I was doing there, sitting in
uncomfortable oak-plank chairs with them. I was certainly a most
unlikely student: forty-eight years old, the film critic of New York
(Opposite): David Denby ’65, ’66J (seated) returned to Hamilton
Hall in February and revisited The Iliad under the watchful eye of
the Lionel Trilling Professor Emeritus in the Humanities Edward
“Ted” Tayler.
PHOTO: LESLIE JEAN-BART ’76, ’77J
SPRING 2013
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