Modern Approaches to the Canon

Posted on September 25, 2023 by Eli Andrade

On the first day of Literature Humanities or Contemporary Civilizations, you were probably asked to ruminate on what a canon is. Responses to this question vary, yet they typically conform to two distinct categories. Some students hew to the orthodox conception of a canon as a repository of esteemed cultural texts, while others advance

A few foundational texts, Photo Credit: Eli Andrade

a more nuanced viewpoint, considering the canon a compilation defined by individual subjective judgments of cultural significance. Thus, the initial quandary that asks us to define the canon, must also always ask why the preeminence of white males and their works are the quintessential cultural exemplars of the West. This discourse reveals a prevailing skepticism within our cohort concerning the Western canon, primarily because of its historical proclivity to overlook the contributions of women, the working class, and individuals of color. As the semester unfolds, this conviction is only further crystallized as we find ourselves grappling with odd and archaic viewpoints like Aristotle’s “The slave is what he is by nature” (1260b40) or Rousseau’s notion that “the whole education of women ought to be relative to men..to please them, to be useful to them” (352). We, students, itch to rectify these age-old discourses, to participate in and create a philosophy that is mindful of people’s identities and histories—the token gesture to conclude with a singular lecture devoted to the themes of race and gender is not enough. Continue reading →

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Core

Posted on September 18, 2023 by Chase Bush-McLaughlin

The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, Photo Credit: Courtesy of Poets & Writers

While most students really connect to at least one or two texts in the syllabus, many students experience Contemporary Civilization as a painful slog through the dregs of Western philosophy, a subject widely felt to be as stale as it is arcane and as somber as it is nutty. The prospect of reading long, difficult, debatably anachronistic and most often bigoted texts doesn’t appeal to everyone. More than that, I think that few students are in practice swayed by the old argument(cf. Picasso on art, Alexander McQueen on fashion, the fourteenth Dalai Lama on life) that you have to know the rules to break them, as it applies to the Core. If there is some analogue for “the rules” in an age of American cultural hegemony, the Core supposes that it’s the Western canon. However warily, let’s accept this premise against Audre Lorde’s best advice re: “the master’s tools” (a subject for another blog post). How can it ever feel like a drag to have to read Augustine (as it did for me), or Marx, or Ambedkar when these texts are meant to pull you out of whatever proverbial Truman Show you’ve been living in and into real, bona fide reality, where you can change things, for real? Continue reading →

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Reflections on Language, Translation, and the Core

Posted on September 8, 2023 by Mrinalini Wadhwa

“Helen of Troy,” oil-on-canvas, 1863 Photo Credit: Dante Gabriel Rossetti

In September 2020, the first-ever assignment in my Lit Hum section was to develop an intralingual translation of the first seven lines of the Iliad. We had the standard version of the Iliad prescribed by the Core Office—Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 translation—and from the very beginning of the course our instructor made it clear that our access to this text, or to any of the other texts in Fall Lit Hum, would be mediated by a translator; that the translator was hardly transparent; that to engage in a close-reading of any of these works in translation, we had to understand the literary and historical context not only of the original text, but also, crucially, of the translator(s). I still recall rich seminar discussions in which we compared Lattimore’s translation of sections of the Iliad to those of other translators, with an eye towards issues of gender—for instance, interrogating the derogatory language Lattimore’s Helen used in reference to herself to describe her abandonment of her husband, Menelaus. What did this reveal about notions of gender in Ancient Greece—and in 1950s America? For our purposes, whatever Helen thought of her actions in Homer’s text was mediated by Lattimore.

Continue reading →

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From Research to Researcher: Producing Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable Data

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Theodore Nelson

Photo Credit: Theodore Nelson

For the past six weeks, I have been fortunate to join peers from across the United States in learning about the principles of the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) Data, both in its generation and application through the dkNET Summer of Data Student Program.

dkNET is a working group that attempts to integrate data in a FAIR manner across scientific disciplines, which then allows for meaningful collaboration with lab partners and more broadly across the medical and scientific community[1] .At each session, I learned about the challenges inherent in creating a reproducible scientific ecosystem and infrastructure and, with dkNET a pioneer within this field, had some significant take-aways from the program. First, all published products require a persistent and unique identifier, with the most well-known being the digital object identifier (DOI)[2] . DOIs have been widely applied within journal publishing, and now serve as the gold standard for digital objects that exhibit the capacity for easy access and permanence. Within our community, Columbia Libraries manages Academic Commons, a digital repository of scholarship produced by academics at Columbia University. For wet-lab protocols, we were introduced to protocols.io, which assigns a DOI to each published protocol, and allows groups to directly fork, or takeing a particular methodology and building on it, existing protocols, maintaining a clear and communicable genealogy for a particular research methodology. dkNET maintains an up-to-date curated list of repositories for scientific data deposition, attempting to ensure best practices across disciplines.  Continue reading →

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A Month in Paris Researching Olivier Messiaen

Posted on August 23, 2023 by Marco Jimenez

The author, Marco Amadeus Jimenez, researching at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF)

I spent the month of July in Paris as an Undergraduate Research Fellow, researching the influence of Indian classical music, specifically the 120 desitālas, on 20th-century composer Olivier Messiaen’s body of work. Much of the previous research done on Messiaen’s music has focused on the influence that birdsong, Gregorian chant, Catholicism, and the historical context of the 20th-century had on Messiaen’s music. One key area of scholarship, however, which has been critically neglected, is an exploration of the influence of Indian classical music on Messiaen’s music.

When Messiaen was asked about the influences most important to his music, Messiaen himself cited the 120 desitālas, or rhythmic patterns, that appear in the treatise Saṃgītaratnākara, written by the 13th-century Indian theorist Śārṅgadeva. While in Paris, I conducted my research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), where I had the opportunity to flip through hundreds of pages of Messiaen’s manuscripts. I cannot express how overawed I was to not only see these manuscripts, but to also flip through many of them, spending hours poring over a given manuscript. One of the most amazing facets, for me, was the insight that these manuscripts gave me into Messiaen’s compositional process—I was able to see which sections he crossed out, which dynamics he revised, which fingerings he edited, and which parts of the music he deemed most “essential” to the composition. Continue reading →

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The Ground Beneath the Deep End

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Joshua Martin

Mauro Rostagno, investigative journalist killed in Sicily. Photo from RaiPlay, “Memorie – Fatti e persone da ricordare”

I’m a humanities student: I study philosophy and Italian. I love words and ideas, books and seminars. As an aspiring academic, I dream of being able to flourish in a highly focused academic setting. That said, I’ve always been interested in putting my skills into practice with research and other opportunities outside of the classroom. As I began my search into how I could translate my interests into action, though, I had a hard time: the practical, material side of the humanities was intimidatingly broad and I did not immediately feel like I was able to narrow my focus enough to fit the descriptions of research projects and other listings. All the while, I had a lot of computer science, economics, and political science friends finding great summer stints doing research of their own.

In this state of feeling like I would not be able to find research where I’d be able to stay in my element while contributing to a real, tangible project, I got lucky. I found a project description on the Undergraduate Research and Fellowships page for an Anthropology professor who needed students versed in Italian to work on Italian-language archives of legal cases over the summer.

I was then a recently declared Italian major, so I applied for the position and requested a letter of recommendation from my Italian professor. After being accepted, I was still a bit hesitant. I did not see Anthropology as being directly related to my fields of study. I had no prior connections to the professor or their work, being unconnected to my major departments. However, I spoke to the professor, whose passion for the project and affability convinced me to take part. They also assured me that the work was able to be done remotely, providing me a great deal of flexibility in allowing me to travel home for the summer while performing my duties to the project. I looked into their previous academic work to get a sense of the aim of the research and communicated frequently with them to make sure we were on the same page regarding my understanding of the milestones and the methods of procedure. Continue reading →

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Endings and New Beginnings with the Core Curriculum: Seeking Wisdom from Dante:

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Lorenzo Garcia

Dante enters the Empyrean and Prepares to see the Beatific Vision in Paradiso, Photo Credit: Posterazzi: Dante Paradiso 1861

“O you who are within your little bark,
eager to listen, following behind
my ship that, singing, crosses to deep seas,
turn back to see your shores again: do not
attempt to sail the seas I sail; you may,
by losing sight of me, be left astray.” – Dante, (Paradiso 2, vv. 1-6).

Almost everything is characterized by a beginning and ending, and as Seniors get ready to graduate from Columbia, and the underclassmen and Juniors prepare to move into new courses next year, we can get the sense that while new beginnings are exciting, they may also be nerve racking or challenging as we seek to set out onto new waters. For the pilgrim in the beginning of Dante’s Paradiso, the shift to a vision of heaven and the celestial heavens presents its own challenges of forcing one to confront his fears that are often associated with change and asking us whether we’re ready to be led into new places that will force us to change. The reassuring yet also demanding reality is that it is ultimately within our power to adapt well or poorly to the new circumstances that life throws our way.

This semester, I had the privilege of taking a course on Dante Aligiheri’s Divine Comedy with Professor Teodolinda Barolini in the Italian department, and we had the chance to read through the latter half of Dante’s Purgatorio and also Dante’s Paradiso. Dante’s work covered a wide range of remarkable topics including unity and difference, the highest good and justice, and man’s search for the satisfaction of all of his desires. Dante did all of this with a remarkable synthesis of political, historical, theological, literary, and poetic criticism combined into one impressive text. But, while the text can be analyzed in many different ways, I think it is Dante’s theology of love, his vision for how the world is both united and differentiated by love and how all things are to be made new in love, that has the most to teach us about how to move on to new beginnings and to say goodbye to those things that are fleeting, transitory, and which must pass as we move on to greater things. Continue reading →

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Sapere aude! Have the courage to reason for yourself!

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Jonathan Tanaka

Luther Hammers His 95 Theses to the Door,” Ferdinand Pauwels, Photo Credit: (courtesy of UChicago Magazine and Wikipedia Commons)

When Immanuel Kant penned those words at the end of the 18th century, Europe was ostensibly emerging from a dogmatic, intellectual slumber in which well-intentioned heterodox reasoning demanded great courage. That being said, perhaps my most sobering observation regarding academic life at Columbia over the past four years is that immense courage must still precede honest, independent reason. This is not a phenomenon that is restricted to the classroom. It pervades almost all areas of our academic and extra-academic life, whether it be supervised research endeavors, talks with friends on the way to class, or the context of club organizations putatively dedicated to true ideas and their pursuit.

Rather than nostalgically opining about the fictitious ideal of a bygone age in which independent academic reasoning was universally welcomed, we ought to come to grips with the descriptive reality that academic settings have always been rather antipathetic to intellectual dissent, and plausibly always will be. The Pythagorean Hippasus was “mysteriously lost” at sea following his geometric proof of the existence of irrational numbers, the ‘Southern Chan’ Buddhist monk Huineng was (allegedly) driven away from his rightfully-inherited patriarchal seat due to his ‘proper’ exposition of Buddha Nature, Johann Bernoulli was heavily chastised for suggesting that infinitesimals had theological significance in the early differential calculus, and Ludwig Wittgenstein reportedly threatened Karl Popper with a hot poker at Cambridge for asserting that not all philosophical problems are mere terminological disagreements. Continue reading →

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Riggio Travel Seminar: Studying Medieval Art in Germany

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Elia Zhang

Photo Credit: Elia Zhang, Riggio Seminar in Freising, Germany.

Last spring break, I had the good fortune of participating in the Riggio Travel Seminar, a program offered to undergraduate students at Columbia University that enables them to study art history by visiting the sites where the artwork was created and preserved. In this blog post, I want to share my experience and encourage others to take advantage of the many learning and travel opportunities provided by Columbia.

After completing the university’s pre-departure orientation, our group of twelve students, accompanied by our teaching assistant Emma and professors Holger Klein and Gregory Bryda, embarked on the trip. Our first stop was Munich, where we visited the Odeonsplatz, the central square that connects old and new Munich and also served as the site of the Nazi march in 1923. We also saw the memorial for the White Rose movement, a nonviolent resistance group led by five students and one professor from Munich University who opposed the Nazi regime in 1942. We explored the old city center, seeing its inscriptions and architecture, which reminded us of the city’s 20th-century history. Continue reading →

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The Power of Right Living and Intellectual Humility

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Lorenzo Garcia

“Listen to me, my son, and acquire knowledge,/and pay close attention to my words./I will impart instruction by weight,/and declare knowledge accurately” (Wisdom of Sirach 16:24-25).

There’s an interesting moment in one of Shakespeare’s sonnets where the narrator states:

As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st
                                         In one of thine, from that which thou departest;                                                                        And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st                                                                          Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.                               Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase;
Without this, folly, age, and cold decay (Sonnet 11:1-6).

The narrator here writes about the subject, a mysterious young man, who is choosing to put off the responsibilities of maturing and having children for the pleasures and allurements of youth, all of which lead him away from cultivating his natural gifts by procuring offspring. The narrator considers this promising man’s choice to be a great dereliction of his duty to nature to live a life of “wisdom, beauty, and increase,” all of which leads away from the “folly, age, and cold decay” of dissolute living. Biblical language, from which this sonnet draws, expresses this point in even more stark terms.

The Book of Proverbs, Photo Credit: Proverbs an Overview, CPH.ORG

Indeed, as Proverbs states, “Wisdom is a fountain of life to him who has it, but folly is the chastisement of fools…There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Prov. 16:22, 25). In the Book of Proverbs, the reputed figure of King Solomon of Israel wishes to inspire his younger son to remain steadfast to wisdom, acquiring it, and cherishing this possession as the great guide to his life in the face of the temptations away from this arduous but fulfilling path. The older man, perhaps drawing from his own mistakes, begs his younger son not to trust the elusive seductress, an allegorical figure for deception and vice, but rather to take stock in “a good wife,” who “is far more precious than jewels” (Prov. 31:10). Like Shakespeare’s boy, the youth addressed in Proverbs is told to not trust his appearances, and rather to rest on the sure way to success and fruition. Continue reading →

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