Broadening the discussion

I love the classics.

In my literary preferences, I have always held Eurocentric works in high esteem. Thus, Barnard’s First-Year English course, “Legacy of the Mediterranean,” provides a reading list well-suited to my palette.

During the first class of my First-Year English course this semester, I was pleasantly surprised that my professor distributed Italo Calvino’s essay entitled “Why Read the Classics?” This piece clearly illustrated the belief I have always had on reading—and re-reading—Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante. According to Calvino, “every reading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.” Given this, I understand why I should read the classics. However, it was never really explained why all first-years take First-Year English.

With this in mind, I feel that First-Year English remains an imperfect course whose mission has not fully come to fruition. According to the “Reinventing Literary History” descriptions on the Barnard English department’s Web site, “Legacy of the Mediterranean” is meant to “investigate key intellectual moments” through the framework of lectures by distinguished professors, close reading of “some of the world’s greatest masterpieces,” and engagement with resources in New York City, which would help place the texts into a larger historical context.

Unlike courses at peer institutions, First-Year English is by no means a college writing course. Rather, it expects that all students are prepared for college-level work. While I certainly do not believe that “strong, beautiful, Barnard women” need their hands held as they compose their first collegiate research papers, I do feel that First-Year English goes too far in the opposite direction. In some classes, students are sent to Butler armed only with the requirement of finding seven sources with which to sculpt an eight- to ten-page paper on a topic of their choice. Many students would benefit from more direction before submitting the first drafts of their first college-level English research papers. With only two versions of two essays and a research paper that comprise 70 percent of the semester grade, some students are left to play catch up.

As the grading is based highly on writing—and on the research paper in particular—the course has difficulty motivating students to delve into their reading in the latter half of the semester. At the beginning of the semester, it is clear that the reading will aid students as they consider topics to write about. However students lose the motivation to continue the course reading after a topic is chosen for the research essay, the course’s last assignment. At this juncture, students merely read for the sake of reading. Though this is a noble cause and an enjoyable pursuit, when students are also juggling a research paper on texts studied weeks ago, it becomes an exhausting one.

Furthermore, class discussions too often stray from actual material into the deliberation of how to read the texts as women, which limits the broader scope that the course aims to achieve. Though the study of women, literature, and women in literature are excellent topics, they should neither dictate how the classics are read nor the direction of discourse on these texts as there are many other lenses through which to examine the classic texts that do not get their due attention. As much as the feminist perspective interests me, I opted to rank “Legacy of the Mediterranean” first in my order of preferences, ahead of another choice, “Women and Culture.” However, it turned out that “Legacy of the Mediterranean” also approached each text through the lens of gender. It should not be assumed that I should examine every text from this perspective simply because I’m sitting at a seminar table with 15 other women. Rather than making the material more accessible and appealing to students, this narrow focus further thrusts some students towards ambivalence to the classics.

Though I feel that Barnard’s approach to First-Year English is flawed, there remain several strong merits to the program. Aside from introducing and re-introducing students to the classics, the seminar format does encourage students to engage with the texts and their peers. But its merits will be overlooked so long as students question the purpose and structure of this mandatory course. Although my professor and her peers are quite insightful and the emphasis on close reading has pushed me to truly study the text, I do not understand the place of First-Year English in the larger context of a student’s first year in college and her overall Barnard experience.

The author is a Barnard College first-year.