EMMA ASHER

What is the best part about teaching the Core Curriculum?

There’s something to be said about encountering first year students in the moment they come into this University, and having discussions about literature with people who don’t have a predisposition to go to literature courses, and being able to put them in contact with people who are already sold on literature — that particular mix is very cool. The Core really does allow for that in a unique way.

It’s also cool to be able to be there for them — coming into a university as diverse and complex as Columbia, to be able to help them digest it all and help them develop a routine and a sense of community. Lit Hum is often the first real experience of an intellectual community that they have, and it’s often the case that our classrooms are the place where they can breathe a little bit and connect to other people, and talk about books and literature, which is always the kind of ideal that you have as a new college student.

How do you innovate and/or bring your own spin to Lit Hum?

I would say my biggest spin is more practical than intellectual; I have my students write and annotate a lot together. When the pandemic hit and I was teaching online, I had this awful sense that nothing was sticking, that everything was sort of evaporating after our classes. So I started encouraging students to annotate text together and to write during our discussions and to build a collective notebook for the whole class, like a journal. And I just never dropped that.

It can take a little while for my students to understand what’s going on, but then they see themselves building something together that is a reflection of their discussions, that allows them to register each other’s thoughts and responses. And I think that it really helps my students warm up to each other, it helps them take care of each other. It’s great for participation, too, because you have students who might feel intimidated when it comes to speaking in class, but then they warm up to these roles of writer and note taker and recorder of the shape of the discussion, which then helps them speak up.

What are you teaching that feels especially relevant for this year?

You know, with all the turbulence and the anxieties we’ve had lately, the seminar classroom can provide a space where your students feel comfortable and at ease and feel a little bit removed from the sort of sinuosity of campus life these days. So I think that’s the first part, creating that safe space.

And then I also talk a lot about literary form with my students. Lit Hum is a literature course, but it’s also about values and ethics and philosophy and problems of communities and existential questions. But I also talk a lot about paying attention to details and understanding what literary texts do, what feels unique and exclusive to them. And I’ve come to realize that, especially now, it can be a good practice to get them to remove themselves from these big, gigantic questions that can often feel unyielding and difficult to deal with, and invite them to look at language, invite them to consider these questions from a less direct and less blunt of a way, and sort of tackle them through close reading. And helping them think esthetically, as well: What makes a text beautiful in your mind? We’re discussing Sappho now — lyric poetry, erotic poetry — and it’s strange, because they love it, but they don’t know how to articulate that love. So to give them a language, to be able to find the beauty — sometimes the smaller picture view is a little easier.

What has been your favorite Core Curriculum teaching moment?

The funniest was, one time my class was reading Augustine’s Confessions, and we were discussing restlessness, because Augustine is a very restless guy. He’s constantly anxious about himself, about the world, about his morality, his virtue. I asked my students to give me an example of Augustinian restlessness, and they all pointed to me. [Laughs] “You seem very, very, very similar to what we we’re discussing!”