Some teachers chose works by Dostoyevski or Mann or Gide or Borges.
At the end of the year, the individual instructors were allotted a week for a free choice.
I was spending the year reading the same books and sitting in on the Lit Hum classes, which were taught entirely in sections there were no lectures. Both Lit Hum and the other course, Contemporary Civilization, are devoted to the much ridiculed “narrative” of Western culture, the list of classics, which, in the case of Lit Hum, begins with Homer and ends, chronologically speaking, with Virginia Woolf. In short, we were reading Joseph Conrad, the final author in Columbia’s Literature Humanities (or Lit Hum) course, one of the two famous “great books” courses that have long been required of all Columbia College undergraduates. It was the end of the academic year, and the mood had grown agitated, burdened, portentous. “What are the constraints for you? What are the rivets? Why are you here getting civilized, reading Lit Hum?” “Are you natural?” he roared at a girl sitting near his end of the seminar table. It was not, I thought, exactly the answer he had been looking for, but it was a good answer. What Henry was saying was that there are no racial hierarchies among peoples-that we’re all “savages.” “We all come from Africa,” said the one African-American in the class, whom I’ll call Henry, calmly referring to the supposition among most anthropologists that human life originated in sub-Saharan Africa. “Who here comes from a savage race?” Professor James Shapiro shouted at his students.
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