Introduction
Popularly known as "Literature Humanities'' or "Lit Hum," this year-long course offers Columbia College students the opportunity to engage in intensive study and discussion of some of the most significant texts of Western culture. The course is not a survey, but a series of careful readings of literary works that reward both first encounters and long study. Whether class work focuses on the importance of the text to the literary historical tradition or on its significance to our contemporary culture, the objective is to consider particular conceptions of what it means to be human and to consider the place of such conceptions in the development of critical thought.
 
A principal objective of Literature Humanities is to teach students the discipline of purposeful intellectual argumentation. An interdepartmental staff of professorial and preceptorial faculty meets with groups of approximately twenty students for four hours a week in order to discuss texts by Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus,Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Vergil, St. Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Goethe, Austen, and Woolf, as well as Hebrew scripture and New Testament writings.