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Course Description


Instructor: Dan Zins, PhD

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.� Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.� Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Henry David Thoreau--mystic, transcendentalist, sage, ethicist, prophet, seer, ecologist, gardener, economist, citizen, abolitionist, journalist, lecturer, educator, patriot, radical, conservative, artist, saunterer, contrarian, iconoclast, humorist, and bad subject but good neighbor--came into the world exactly two centuries ago. I offer this course in the conviction that even more than a century and a half after his death this often misunderstood “dead white male� might well be the voice we need to hear more than any other on the most pressing and troubling issues of our own radically different age. I would like students to read at least the first, second, and final chapter of his masterwork, “Walden,� and his essays “Civil Disobedience� (also known as “Resistance to Civil Government�), “A Plea for Captain John Brown,� and “Slavery in Massachusetts.� We will look at Thoreau’s influence on such thinkers and activists as Tolstoy, Emma Goldman, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the many parallels with our “contemporary Thoreau,� Kentucky farmer, writer, citizen and patriot Wendell Berry. Time permitting, I would also like to suggest how an understanding of Thoreau’s life and writings can enrich our reading of Herman Melville’s great story “Bartleby the Scrivener� and Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful.� I would like us to also examine various Thoreau and Frederick Douglass connections/intersections.
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