Build on Your Basic Program Experience

Upcoming Sequence:

The Modern Tradition

Prerequisite: Completion of two years of the Basic Program
Next Opportunity for Entry: Autumn 2025 

Modernity is characterized by the emergence of an entirely new form of consciousness, one that is critical, uprooted, autonomous, and intensely self-reflexive. This two-year sequence is an exploration of the “modern tradition” through classic texts of the modern period (1750 through the middle of the twentieth century) in conversations with earlier classical and premodern sources.

This two- year Alumni Sequence begins by examining “the discovery of the individual” around the early fifteenth century as an unprecedented social and political fact. But what kind of discovery is this? What does it mean to be individual? This sequence will discuss several major philosophers and social theorists and what is perhaps the supreme literary treatment of the role of memory in the construction of the self: Proust’s Swann’s Way.

Future Alumni Sequence:

The American Tradition

Next opportunity for entry: Autumn 2027

From its founding—and even before—America was as much a contested ground of ideals as it was a geographic region or state. Democracy, religious freedom, the pursuit of individual happiness, self-reliance, and perhaps above all liberty: America’s history is the history of struggles over the meaning and implications of these ideals and their collision with American realities like the destruction of native populations, slavery, the exclusion of minorities, the marginalization of women, the excesses of capitalism, and a culture of consumption. In this two-year Alumni Sequence, we will explore all of these issues as we try to understand what America really is and what it aspires to be. 

Future Alumni Sequence:

Asian Classical Traditions

Next Opportunity for Entry: Autumn 2029

This sequence introduces Basic Program students to the literary cultures of Asia, using carefully selected English translations of texts from the Sanskrit, Pali, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese traditions. “Asian” is an admittedly imprecise term: this roster of traditions is far from exhaustive, and its historical impact reaches deep into Africa and Europe as well. 

We approach these non-Western literary classics in the same spirit and with the same methods as in the four-year Core Curriculum, emphasizing close reading and Socratic conversation, and following the fascinating threads that connect these texts together. The introduction of several new classical traditions into the mix means that instructors will spend more time on historical and contextual background, but the focus will remain on lively engagement with the texts. 

Beyond classical works of narrative and poetry, the sequence also features a range of religious, philosophical, and historical materials—Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Confucian, and Daoist—which we will approach not just in their own terms but also as products of their respective literary cultures.