What's in a canon?

Starting this year, the Literature Humanities section of the Core Curriculum changes again, adding Goethe’s Faust but dropping three works—Hymn to Demeter, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and The Decameron­—to reveal a new, leaner bookshelf for the class of 2015. The cut in itself is not unusual—the Lit Hum syllabus has evolved plenty in its time, with many texts on the list of revisions having come and gone long before our current batch of Columbia students ever set foot on campus. And, while the change may invite some small uproar from seniors who had to read, Sparknote, or feign ignorance about the few hundred pages that are now no longer required reading, the new 2011 syllabus is less likely to incur an outcry of “If we had to do it, so do you!” than it is to bring up the old question of what makes the Core the Core. First-years will not have to be on campus for very long before they are presented with a laundry list of complaints from aggrieved seniors: Lit Hum, especially, is often criticized of being composed almost entirely of dead, white men.

The Core Text Comparative Chart 2010-2011 could be said to pigeonhole Literature Humanities readings into a straight-line chronology of the Western world, giving Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Archaic Greek Poetry a small fighting chance before plunging forward from Hellenistic Greek and Hebrew Texts to Latin Literature Under Rome, and then on through the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, and so on until we burst out into the brave, new, modern world. For a school that likes to lay claim to a diverse, international student body, Lit Hum can seem like a bald-faced rejection of the fact that the world exists beyond the amorphous geographic region we call the “West.”

Less well-known than Lit Hum is its Eastern counterpart, though perhaps “counterparts” may be a better word for the colloquia that exist in the borderlands of the Global Core requirement. There is, for one, the AHUM V3999 and V3400 sequence, which furnishes students with a historical Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese reading list as (or more) formidable as Lit Hum’s. Professor William Theodore de Bary, who was behind the original conception of Asian Humanities at Columbia, continues to teach these classes as a testament to his belief in the importance of regional voices besides those presented in Lit Hum and Contemporary Civilization.

How feasible, though, is the creation of a Core that distills and teaches everything? As any Columbia student who took first-year Core classes knows, the chances of getting through just Lit Hum alone without “accidentally” forgetting to read a few chapters or double-checking Wikipedia “just to be sure” are statistically improbable. Everyone’s human. Even the mighty get myopia. Dual-wielding Lit Hum or CC with Asian Humanities, as your columnist tried to do on more than one occasion, is an almost sure-fire way to land yourself in a padded white cell. So how are Columbia students supposed to get a well-rounded view of the world—the whole world—when we can’t seem to pin down an inclusive but manageable set of core texts?

The overall problem isn’t, as I see it, that one canon, Eastern or Western or anything-ern, is more important than the other and should therefore receive a position in our schedules that bears more gravitas. The difficulty is in trying to define any canon—and, by extension, any Core­—at all. The uncomfortable truth is that the world is wider than we could ever imagine it to be: Just walk down the corridor and knock on a neighbor’s door. Chances are that the person who answers will have a view of race, gender, sexuality, politics, history, ethics, etc., that is staggeringly different from yours for reasons that are deep and profound. Studying where “we,” as a collective whole, came from is a global project that requires the detailing of endless influences. Yet the Core tries to do just that: to understand, and to find ways of reaching that understanding. As the Bulletin says, “the pursuit of better questions is every bit as important as the pursuit of better answers.” Neither Lit Hum nor CC are, at the end of the day, best-guess answers to the conundrum of what a good liberal arts reading list should look like. Their value lies in the question (often screamed at our books, but more importantly at each other): “Why are we doing this?!” Why do we read what we do, and should we read beyond it, and why don’t we read beyond it? And, on the other side, other canons are waiting: other cores, sans the capital “C”; other shores.

Po Linn Chia is a Columbia College junior majoring in East Asian Languages and Cultures. She is a member of CIRCA and the Global Recruitment Committee. Ever the Twain runs alternate Tuesdays.