LitHum, CC Modify Fall Book Selection

The recently-admitted students that have dotted Columbia campus in recent days won't be as familiar with Raskolnikov or Elizabeth Bennet as the Class of 2006 is. And current first-years can expect to read more Cicero and less Hume next year.

Recently proposed changes in the Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization syllabi include the addition and deletion of a number of texts. The only definite changes have been moving the teaching of books of the Bible from LitHum to CC and switching translations of Don Quixote. All of the proposed changes will be determined by a faculty vote in the next few weeks.

Every two years, two separate review committees formed by the chairs of each department evaluate the syllabi of LitHum and CC.

Although the members of the committees are not announced publicly, they are typically drawn from a variety of ranks, departments and levels of experience, according to Assistant Director of the Core Curriculum Deborah Martinsen.

The committees meet periodically during the year to review course evaluations completed by students and hear the opinions of teachers and undergraduates. At the end of the year, the general staff of each department convenes and the committees present the proposed changes to the staff for discussion, modification, and approval.

Not surprisingly, the proposals have spurred debate about which texts are most important to the courses' themes and objectives.

In response to students' requests to eliminate repetition of texts within the Core, LitHum students will read Genesis but not Exodus, while CC will cover Exodus in its entirety. In addition, LitHum will teach The Gospel According to Luke and CC students will read Matthew, since those texts are more appropriately geared to their respective courses, according to Martinsen.

For the ancient Greek portion of LitHum's fall semester, the proposal suggests replacing The Bacchae with a different play by Euripides. In addition, the committee recommended that Aristophanes' Lysistrata be substituted for The Frogs. A variety of both authors' writings have appeared in LitHum syllabi since the course's inception in 1937.

For the LitHum spring semester, proposed changes include removing Crime and Punishment from the syllabus and replacing it with two works: Apuleius' The Golden Ass and Goethe's Faust.

Crime and Punishment has been taught in LitHum sporadically since the 1950s, and it was recently re-added to the syllabus. In many cases, professors require their students to read The Golden Ass and Faust in addition to the required spring semester texts.
Many who support the return to Goethe and The Golden Ass say that the proposed syllabus reflects earlier versions rather than maintaining the current departures.

Both Goethe and Dostoevsky have been among LitHum's longstanding authors. Their works have been taught on and off since the foundation of the course. Faust was taught for two-thirds of LitHum's existence before it was removed from the syllabus several years ago.

"Neither adoption nor rejection of these particular alterations would run counter to the tradition of the course," said John Isham, a LitHum instructor and GSAS student.

Students who have read Faust feel that the text, a German poem about self-discovery, fits thematically into the LitHum curriculum.

But many students and LitHum professors say that Crime and Punishment captures the interest of a range of students and is worth keeping on the syllabus, regardless of its length.

"Crime and Punishment is hard to get through in the time period that they give you, but I think that it is a book that everyone should read," Michael DiBiasio, CC '06, said. "It would be better, I think, to test out Faust in a pilot class, maybe, and see how that works."
The LitHum staff will also decide whether to replace Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with her Mansfield Park.

Some students advocate dropping Austen from the LitHum syllabus altogether.

"I love Pride and Prejudice, but I don't think we get a lot out of it," Jane Parshall, CC '06, said. "To go beneath the surface of Jane Austen, you have to have a lot of people who are really interested in it, and you have to have a teacher who knows a lot about Austen, too."

Next year's readings from Don Quixote will concentrate more fully on Part I and less on Part II than before. This change will slightly increase the total number of pages students read from Don Quixote, but professors hope that students will have a better feel for the work's cohesiveness.

In addition, LitHum classes will use a new Don Quixote translation, as the translation currently in use is no longer available. Martinsen said that a professor from the Spanish department studied a new translation and deemed it acceptable, and LitHum will now use that version of the work. That change will take effect without a vote, Martinsen said.

Another proposed change on which the staff will vote is the replacement of Robert Fitzgerald's translation of Virgil's Aeneid with Allen Mandelbaum's version.

Cost is a determining factor in deciding which translations to use in LitHum. For example, Martinsen says that there is a much better translation of Montaigne's Essays available, but "the cost is prohibitive." The difference between the texts is 15 dollars, and the LitHum staff does not feel that it is fair to students to require them to pay so much extra money for a superior translation.

The general staff meeting of the CC department was "lively," according to Jeff Gatrall, a current CC instructor.

"It's great to see how each minor change provokes such animated argument from all the CC staff," Gatrall said. "The result of these bi-annual reviews, I think, is a syllabus that evolves slowly, that never completely satisfies anyone, but that always preserves a diverse and extraordinary selection of texts."

The most substantial changes that the CC staff debated included adding Cicero's "On Duties" to reflect Hellenistic and Roman traditions and inserting Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Other changes include modifying the selections dealing with the American and French Revolutions (including the addition of a reading by Olympe de Gouges), adding an early text on women's rights, adding the medieval Jewish philosophy of Moses Maimonides, and adding Hannah Arendt as a possible concluding course author.

"The changes were, by and large, proposed by the CC steering committee and approved with slight modifications by the CC teaching staff as a whole," said Samuel Moyn, assistant professor of history and CC.

The two most contentious recommendations, Gatrall said, were the deletion of Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, the removal of selections by John Stuart Mill, and the proposal to drop the first semester class on the New World, which focuses on readings by de Las Casas and Sepulveda.

A small group of CC instructors vigorously defended keeping the New World class, even if that meant finding different texts for the subject, Gatrall said.

"The fact that it's hard to find weighty 16th-century works by major European philosophers about the conquest of the New World doesn't mean we shouldn't try to devote at least one class to discussing the origins of colonialism," he said.

Gatrall said that one of the most promising aspects of the revised CC syllabus is that instructors have more leeway to add material of their own choice into class discussions and readings.

"The same instructors who argued most passionately to save certain texts last Wednesday will continue to teach them regardless," he said.