Voice!

The College of Letters (COL) is one of Wesleyan’s many exciting interdisciplinary programs, and one of the main reasons I, for one, chose to come study at Wes. Despite the grandiose name, the COL is organized like most other departments, with many classes open to non-majors, a great series of first-year courses, and an amazing faculty. The COL’s areas of focus are literature, philosophy, and history, with a strong emphasis on foreign language and creative thought. With its interdisciplinary approach, the COL offers a wide range of courses, including “Francophone Uses of America in Literature and Film,” “Dante and Medieval Culture,” and “Theories and Fiction of Androgyny” to name a few from this spring’s course catalog. The COL was also the home of Wesleyan’s most infamous course (no longer offered), “Pornography: Writing of Prostitutes.”

The Major
For majors, the COL is a uniquely structured program, emphasizing shared learning, creative thinking, and a great ability to explore and develop your own ideas. The ultimate goal of the program is to “cultivate the educated imagination.” The heart of the COL major is a series of five colloquia, which are seminar courses organized thematically and by time period, each team-taught by two COL professors. Majors start the program in their sophomore year with the 20th Century Colloquium, exploring the literature and philosophy of the 20th century in the context of historical developments, then everyone goes abroad in the Spring semester to 21st century Europe, studying mostly in the Wesleyan programs in Madrid (Spain), Paris (France), Regensburg (Germany), and Bologna (Italy). Upon returning in the Fall, the COL juniors are immersed in the Ancient World Colloquium, which focuses on the movement of ideas in the ancient world from the fertile crescent to North Africa, Greece, and Rome. In the Spring, the juniors move on to study the Medieval period, and also begin studying for the Comprehensive Exams, an intense three-day written exam that asks students to make broad thematic connections across time and disciplines, and demonstrate both the writing and critical thinking skills they have developed in the COL. There is also an oral component to the exams, with each student having an interview with two outside examiners. Senior year, COL students take the Early Modern Colloquium and then the 19th Century Colloquium, while doing a culminating full-year thesis or one-semester essay, which allows them to explore a particular area of interest more deeply.

The Colloquium Vibe
The colloquia are lively seminars, and the students are as actively engaged as the faculty. With two professors in the room, there is no sense that any question has a right or final answer, but through discussion students and faculty explore ideas and texts together. Because of this format, COL students have a high tolerance for ambiguity, allowing questions to be raised and discussed, but ultimately linger unresolved. The class grows together through these colloquia, and the ability to draw on previous discussions and readings makes the discussions progressively richer through the program. Classes also see the development of a strong class dynamic that makes the group understand each others’ speaking, learning, and thinking styles and habits, and react more effectively to them. In most colloquia, students are in charge of initiating the conversation, with one or two students given responsibility for leading any day’s discussion and providing relevant background (we occasionally assign each other extra reading, but generally just send out some provocative questions to get everyone ready for the discussion).

Because all classes taken in the COL for major credit are ungraded (we use written evaluations instead), there are a lot of opportunities to take risks—why play it safe when you could come up with something brilliant by going out on a limb, or learn a lot from a spectacular failure? This idea is carried through in COL colloquium papers, where there are rarely specific assignments. Instead, students choose individually how they want to formulate the questions, selecting their texts, framework, and the style of the paper. With two professors commenting on your work, it is common to elicit different reactions to the papers, which gives students a fuller understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in their work, and a good sense of how to improve.

The Application Process
Students apply to the College of Letters at the end of their first year. While acceptance to the major is based on a brief application essay and interview, the process is far from competitive. COL students are a self-selecting bunch, and those students who are passionate about their studies will generally do well in the program. The one strict requirement is that students be advanced enough in a European language to study abroad in their sophomore year.

Sophomore Spring Abroad
COL sophomores study abroad in the Spring semester, and after having had a class together, having all these friends spread across Europe can be really helpful when you’re traveling. COL students study mostly in Wesleyan’s programs in Madrid (Spain), Paris (France), Regensburg (Germany), and Bologna (Italy), though other options are available for those interested in studying in Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, or an ancient language. During my semester abroad in Madrid, I was with three other COL students on the Vassar/Wesleyan program, but also visited the COL majors in Paris, and accidentally ran into one while we were both on vacation in Florence, waiting in line at the Uffizi. The abroad experience gives COL students confidence and fluency in the language they study, and also provides a good background for continued study in the junior and senior years—when we talked about the connections between Medieval scholasticism and Gothic architecture, I had actually seen the buildings!

The Social Aspect
Because of its unique structure, the COL has a strong social aspect. The majors in each graduating class form a tight bond, with a series of five classes together, a shared study abroad experience with many students from the major, and the intense Spring semester of junior year spent studying for Comprehensive Exams together. In addition to these elements, there are also a series of faculty/student dinners each semester, as well as lectures and social hours that bring students and faculty together for food and intellectual engagement outside of class. In addition to the official departmental functions, it is not uncommon for the majors to have parties of their own, welcoming the new sophomores, welcoming the juniors back from abroad, celebrating the end of junior comps, or just to talk about Sartre some more. My class has also organized COL tea, and recently, has had several film viewings outside of class (after all, if you have to read Beowulf, why not see the Angelina Jolie movie version, too?).

What do you read?
The COL is often thought of as the “dead white men” major, but this is only partially true. COL doesn’t use a fixed canon, but rather the texts are selected anew each semester, so we read works that professors and students continue to find relevant and interesting. We follow Western ideas, but don’t necessarily confine ourselves to geographical limitations. In the Ancient Colloquium, the movement of ideas from the fertile crescent through Northern Africa and eventually up to Europe, as well as out of Greece and Rome and into Asia Minor are particular focuses. This concept of the movement of ideas continues strongly in the 19th and 20th centuries, as we look at colonial and postcolonial reinterpretations of the Western canon, and at how the ancient ideas of the Western world can be adapted and used in new ways. Because COL is not just a series of fixed courses but allows a great deal of flexibility, a lot of students take a particularly modern bent on their studies, using the Classical education they can get in the COL to inform their ideas about gender, race, postcolonial theory and literature, etc.

As for the actual books we read, here are a few sample reading lists from my colloquia:

20th Century Colloquium, “Precedence and the Void,” Fall 2005
Dostoevsky, Yeats, Freud, Engels, Eliot, Kafka, Woolf, Hemingway, Benjamin, Orwell, Borowski, Arendt, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Rubenstein, Fanon, Friedan, Garcia Marquez, and Foucault.

Ancient Colloquium, “Geographies of Identity,” Fall 2006
The Bible (Old and New Testaments), Hesiod, Sophocles, ancient historians Herodotus and Livy, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, and St. Augustine.

If you have questions about the College of Letters, please don’t hesitate to email me at pshill [at] wesleyan [dot] edu—I’d love to tell you more about it!

Peter Hill ‘08
Senior Interviewer