Alumni Sequence: The American Tradition Year I

In the winter quarter, we explore certain features of the young democracy's emergent consciousness—individualistic, fractious, idealistic and critical—as well as of the persistent struggle to define and assume a distinctively American destiny.

In the seminar we consider two different visions of American “self-reliance” and the search for a transcendent good apart from tradition, dogma and authority. Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, which not only expressed but defined American individualism, and Henry David Thoreau’s poetic account of his time in the woods. In conversation with these two American texts, we read also the Bhagavad Gita, which both Emerson and Thoreau were reading, and on which they drew for themes central to their own work.

In the tutorial we will reflect on American democracy’s failures and successes in resolving the problems it creates, focused by Alexis de Tocqueville’s penetrating study of this new experiment in self-governance.

Course Outline

Seminar:

Emerson, Essays, Harper Perennial, ISBN 978-0060909062

J. A. B. van Buitenen, The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0226846620

Thoreau, Walden Shanley edition (pub. Princeton), Introduction by John Updike, ISBN 9780691096124.

Tutorial:

Tocqueville, Democracy in America, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0226805368

Students can purchase books at the Gleacher Center Bookstore online at https://chicagobooth.bncollege.com/shop/chicagobooth/page/find-textbooks using the Textbook order form, or by using the ISBN number to order the correct edition elsewhere.

Notes

Online registration deadline: Thursday, December 29 at 5 pm CT