To: the Columbia College Class of 2012

To: the Columbia College Class of 2012
From: Gareth Williams, chair of Literature-Humanities

I write to welcome you to Columbia, to the Columbia Core Curriculum, and most especially to Literature-Humanities, our fabled course for all entering undergraduates that is designed to enhance our students’ knowledge of certain main lines of literary development that have shaped the western canon over nearly three millennia. As you know, the course takes us on travels from Homeric Greece to Shakespearian England, from the Athens of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Plato to the Florence of Dante and Boccaccio, from Virgil’s Rome to Montaigne’s France. As we journey to these and other places, you will find that our itinerary is not one of simple adoration and spectatorship, but is meant to encourage all of us to become careful, critical readers of the literary past that we have inherited: what was it in the works that we shall read that caused previous generations to value them so highly? What is the artistic or human value that makes these works relevant to a modern age that is technologically advanced in ways unimaginable only a century ago? To what extent, and in what ways, can the different works on the syllabus be seen to be in conversation with each other across centuries and across cultures? PLEASE Click on READ MORE above




These questions offer just a sample of the kinds of provocation that Literature-Humanities is meant to arouse in both students and instructors. The course is designed to stimulate discussion which can allow us all to learn from each other; and to facilitate that discussion, each section of the course is limited to only 22 students. Some of you will perhaps already have read some of the works on the syllabus, but even the most experienced instructors of Literature-Humanities speak of the thrill of encountering (say) the Iliad for the fiftieth time as if it were a fresh text that invariably yields new insights, different discoveries and modified viewpoints. The course is certainly not intended to ‘teach’ you what a given text is ‘about’ in a clinical, finished way; it is intended to raise more questions than it answers, and to nurture a curiosity about written human experience that will perhaps cause you to return to these texts at a later age as if they were companions for life, and not a mere assignment that you left behind so many years ago.

As a foretaste of the Literature-Humanities experience, I look forward to sharing some preliminary thoughts on the course and on your first reading assignment, Iliad 1-12, in a lecture from 12.30-2 on Wednesday, August 27th at the Roone Arledge Auditorium in Lerner Hall. If we glance for a moment beyond the Columbia campus, however, we are fortunate to live in a city that boasts so many cultural riches. I very much hope that, as a form of supplementation to your cultural experience in Literature-Humanities and the rest of the Core Curriculum, you will soon become acquainted with such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (to name only three of countless museums, galleries, musical venues, and so on). In order to give you better access to these riches, the Columbia University Arts Initiative has made available to all undergraduates subsidized ticketing for many events in the five boroughs. I strongly encourage you to take advantage of this wonderful resource by exploring the ticket options that are now available at the Arts Initiative’s Ticket and Information Center in the lobby of Lerner Hall.

I am also delighted to report that the Office of the Core Curriculum has worked closely with the Arts Initiative to organize certain events through the academic year which will beneficially supplement the text-based orientation of Literature-Humanities in the classroom. I have three exciting initiatives to announce:


(i) Two years ago the celebrated Yannis Simonides staged a well received one-man performance of Plato’s Apology here at Columbia: on Friday September 5th, at 11 a.m., he will make a welcome return to campus in a re-performance of ‘The Apology of Socrates’ – a staging that is intended to focus your thoughts on emerging cultural and social tensions in fifth-century BCE Athens before you study the Greek dramatists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, king of comedy) and finally arrive at Plato’s Symposium in the Literature-Humanities syllabus.

(ii) In order to bring the Greek dramatists alive, The Miller Theater is producing a one hour opera in Greek based on Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy. The opera was written by the celebrated Greek composer and architect, Iannes Xenakis. It has a cast of 75 and will be performed at Columbia’s Miller Theater on September 13th, 16th and 17th, with a dress rehearsal on Friday, September 12th.

(iii) Excerpts from Euripides’ Medea and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata will be performed by Columbia students of the Graduate School of the Arts Theatre Division, under the direction of Nikolaus Wolcz and Ursula Wolcz. This performance is scheduled for Sunday, November 9th at 5 p.m. in the Miller Theatre. In the spring semester we also plan to organize a staged reading of Shakespeare, again by students of the Theatre Division, on Sunday, April 5th at 5 p.m. in the Miller Theatre.


The success of these productions depends in large part on your enthusiastic attendance of them, not least because time has been scheduled after each event for a question-and-answer period in which the mechanics of the performance can be discussed with the players themselves, and also with an academic expert on the original playwright. The more support shown now for events that are staged to supplement the in-class experience of Literature-Humanities, the greater the argument for more ambitious planning for future years: I therefore urge you to pay close attention to the announcements which will precede each of the performances I describe above, and I strongly encourage you to attend the events that have been organized for your benefit and enjoyment.

I doubt that any Literature-Humanities in-class monologue will last as long this letter has lasted. But I hope to have given you a sense of our aims and ambitions in this part of the Core Curriculum, and to have encouraged you to embrace all that Columbia and New York City has to offer in terms of its cultural richness. I look forward to meeting, and being heckled by, each and every one of you on August 27th.

Sincerely,

Gareth Williams