America, the land Lit Hum forgot

Soon the last of us will close the cover on “To the Lighthouse.” Some cannot wait for that moment to come. Others will find solace in the saying: “All good things come to an end.”

Everybody will fill out a course survey with the question: “What did Lit Hum lack?” Before you answer, consider the following Lit Hum quandary.

Print out a map of the world. Not a Google Earth one, just one that has water in black and land in white. If you don’t know any geography, print out some country labels too. Then go steal a crayon from the nearest six-year-old. Next, color in what you consider to be the Western world.

At this point my Lit Hum professor would throw his arms up, protesting that the “Western world” is impossible to define because it is influenced by countless “Eastern” traditions. While he has a point, take an intellectual leap of faith for the sake of the exercise and assume that the concept of a Western world exists. What parts of the world would you color in?

Almost a century ago, the creators of what is now Lit Hum took this leap of faith and applied some color to Greece. Magically, “The Iliad” appeared on the Lit Hum syllabus. From there they began to expand into other parts of Europe. At some point they celebrated their seventh birthdays and bequeathed their crayon to the next lot of six-year-olds, who did some more coloring. At this point Columbia students were reading books by guys such as Virgil and Augustine. This magical crayon is now in the hands of some mysterious committee of Lit Hum gods who make decisions regarding the reading list.

We all know what this committee has colored in. If every work in Lit Hum work counted as one shade of color, then France, Spain and Russia are pretty pale, England is two shades darker, Italy and the Near East (counting the bible as separate works) have a full five shades, and Greece has so much crayon on it that the paper becomes three dimensional. America is colorless.

The Lit Hum syllabus is already long, and many of the works are staples that will be read beyond eternity. But surely, not all of the works are sacred. Why do we need the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter” when we already have “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey?” Is Thucydides really worth reading after Herodotus? Do we really need four books from the Bible? Meanwhile it seems that other writers are on the syllabus not least because they increase its demographic breath. By literary influence alone, I can’t see how we can objectively choose Dostoevsky over Dickens or Woolf over Eliot. By including Cervantes, Austen, Dostoevsky, and Woolf, we broaden the focus of a syllabus that could easily have had Milton, Scott, Orwell, and more Shakespeare.

While gladly rejecting the literary hegemony of dead, white Englishmen—but interestingly not dead, white Greek men—by listing works from two women, a Russian, and a Spaniard, the gods of the Lit Hum syllabus have forgotten that American literature had equally profound influences. Many argue that as Americans (mostly), Columbia students have read American works in high school. Yet Classical “masterpieces” such as “The Iliad” are read widely in high school as well. Ironically, this is due in no small part to the influence of Columbia’s Core Curriculum and its signature course—Literature Humanities. By helping to establish the tradition of reading Classical works as part of a liberal education, Lit Hum put Homer on a pedestal in the world of American academia. If anybody wants to argue that American works have no place in Lit Hum because they are already read, then by the same reasoning, we should toss “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” out of the window first.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Lit Hum. I just wished that after seeing Dante in hell and going to the lighthouse with James Ramsay, I could have rafted down the Mississippi with Huck Finn as well.

The author is a Columbia College first-year. He is a Spectator associate editorial page editor.