HUM 216 (I’m in this right now)</h2>
<p>HUM 216-217 is the first semester of the famed 216-219 sequence. To sum it up in a sentence, you need to take this course. Not because it’s always the most fun, not because you’re going to be an English major, but because these are the seminal texts of Western literature, and without them, cultural literacy is impossible.</p>
<p>The course is double-credit and meets for three lectures and three precepts per week - six hours in total. All attendance is mandatory. Weekly reading assignments range from 300 to >500 pages; one particularly painful week encompasses Plato’s Republic (all of it), the Symposium, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, and Herodotus, and the final week of the spring semester is Dostoevsky’s 1000-page Brothers Karamazov. In the fall semester, you will write six four-page close analyses of passages, two each from a historical, literary, and philosophical perspective. There is also one longer fifteen-page comparison of two texts from different cultures. Especially if you have been assigned a fall writing seminar (as I was), that means there’s a lot of writing to be done. I took five courses that term, however, and I promise you that the workload is manageable under most circumstances. No particular prerequisites are necessary; good knowledge of any or all areas will be of some but not tremendous help. You need to be able to read a specific passage closely and write well about it; do this and you will be rewarded. Be warned, however, that when Professor Rabb says, “start with the text,” he really means that you will not get above a C if you actually have a thesis. Read this carefully and understand it: NO THESIS. Instead, start your paper with a general hint as to the direction you’re going to take, and then develop that idea into a thesis that you actually state in your conclusion. This organization is, conveniently, exactly the opposite of what is taught in writing seminars, but it is not overly difficult and can be gotten over. The final consists of passage IDs and several essays, and I found it to be, though certainly not easy, not impossible, either.</p>
<p>Lectures are meant introduce the historical and intellectual context of a work and to give you as good a discussion of the text as can be compressed into 50 minutes. All in all, they did quite a good job. The professors in 2002 were Sitney, Rabb, Meserve, Prado-Vilar, and Sugrue.</p>
<p>Sitney, the literature reader, though occasionally very good, gives disorganized lectures. More striking is that he seems to think that every work on the syllabus (and thus his precepts and lectures) must revolve around sex. Thus we spent our precept on the Symposium discussing not the philosophies of love in the text but rather the various positions preferred by ancient Greek lovers. Sitney is a Film Studies professor and was, long ago, a Classics major; unfortunately, he seems to have forgotten whatever he once knew about the classics. I found him neither to seriously take student work nor to seriously take it apart, and though he was in some cases helpful during office hours, he added little overall to the course experience.</p>
<p>Rabb, one of the two history readers, is ancient. I’m amazed that the man is still teaching, but his lectures make you glad that he is. He is a masterly historian and supremely helpful in office hours, and, despite his craggy senior-professor appearance, he is very accessible. Precepts were sometimes lifeless, though; he begins each with, “All right, question? Problems?”, and it will help if you have something to say. His grading was fair, though from none of the professors should you expect extensive commentary.</p>
<p>Meserve is Rabb’s polar opposite and the person for whom you will write your philosophy papers. She’s a young lecturer in the history department and is probably the most immediately approachable of all the professors. Unlike Sitney, her commentary on the classical world is quite insightful, though she seemed rather nervous during her first lectures. In a room full of senior professors, however, I can understand why. Her precepts were generally good, although sometimes I felt that she was a bit too willing to say, “Yes, it’s difficult to get a grasp on precisely what [author] is doing,” and move on. The HUM sequence is obviously not going to give you an in-depth understanding of any one text, but sometimes more leadership during precepts and a willingness to come to a basic distillation of a particular author would have been nice. Obviously, that can only be done so much, and part of the HUM sequence’s goal is to acquaint you with the original texts so that you have practice doing that yourself, but nonetheless some further refinement of our ideas would have been nice.</p>
<p>Prado-Vilar is, as far as I could tell, a post-doc fellow. He is the other history reader and will lecture to you only on art history. Here, you will find that AP art history will give you an advantage in following him, as he tends, like Sitney, to make jumps that are difficult for someone without a knowledge of art history to follow. I actually felt that my high-school art history teacher was better than Prado-Vilar, though that’s somewhat like saying that someone isn’t quite as good as Michelangelo - it’s hardly damning him. He’s enjoyable all in all, and the art history component lends a broader component to the course that is very nice to have.</p>
<p>Unlike some courses, though, the real core of the HUM sequence is the readings. These texts are the peak of the Western literary canon, and they speak for themselves. If you don’t believe that there is or should be such thing as a canon, you may find this course very frustrating. If you read the Bible or Koran as the literal word of God, this course will likely be infuriating. Aside from those caveats, these texts must be read - you won’t know any one of them in excruciating detail, but by the end you will have a solid framework on which to hang all the rest of your humanities knowledge. Do the readings; strive to read much quickly rather than little in-depth. It’s frustrating to have to do so, but it’s the nature of the course. You have time to do close reading for the papers and in upper-level courses. One interesting though component was various field trips; these vary from year to year but are generally culturally enlightening and fun. To study for the final, I found it very helpful to make an outline of each book (especially Greek philosophy and the Bible) to organize the ideas. Another tactic is to go back and read all of the introductions in the weeks leading up to the exam. You must study and study well, though - HUM books filled my entire shelf this fall, and it’s tough to keep that much material straight.</p>
<p>HUM attracts a wide variety of students. Several, like myself, are mol bio and/or pre-meds, so whatever your AB major, you really don’t have an excuse. About the only group understandably lacking is BSE students. By and large, the course has two types of people - postmodernists and classicists. Being one of the latter, the first semester of this course was supremely interesting (though more work than the second semester). Regardless of your preferences, though, you owe it to yourself and to whoever’s paying your tuition to take this course. Your education will by no means be complete after it, but it will never be complete without it.
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