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N SEPTEMBER 1991, a tired man in his late 40s caught up with me on my way to class. It was the end of the first week of the fall semester, and I was about to lead a discussion of the Iliad in my section of Literature Humanities, the intimidating "Great Books" course that has been taught at Columbia University for the past half-century. The first few days of class were always fraught, and I resented being distracted.
Perhaps sensing my impatience, the stranger spoke rapidly, introducing himself as David Denby, film critic for New York magazine. He explained that he had taken "Lit Hum" in the early 1960s and was writing a book about the experience of taking the course again. Could ee join my class, Mr. Denby wanted to know. What struck me most forcefully was that he didn't want to observe the class; he actually wanted to take it. I didn't doubt his sincerity, though I thought that he must have forgotten how grueling the demands of the course were: four hours of class discussion a week, frequent papers and exams, a crushing amount of reading. I knew that 18-year-olds could go without sleep for days and still recall with some accuracy the finer points of, say, Achilles' shield or Pericles' funeral oration. Sizing him up, I doubted whether Mr. Denby had the physical stamina for the two-semester course.
I had heard from colleagues that he had already visited their classes. I also knew that a number of people had politely turned down his request to sit in. In recent years, Lit Hum had been at the center of bitter culture wars on and off campus, and those of us who taught the course had grown wary of outsiders, including some Columbia faculty members, who breezily passed judgment on a course they had neither taken nor taught.
Given a syllabus that covered Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, and the Bible-and that was just the first semester-my challenge was less ideological than practical: how to motivate students, say during midterm week, to read a few hundred pages of The Peloponnesian War and be prepared to discuss its literary and historical form. What was the likelihood that a journalist...