Course description:

During the New England Saints Interim, now in its 17th year, we will be studying the work of Hawthorne, of the transcendentalists like Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Thoreau, of romantics such as Whittier and Longfellow, and of Emily Dickinson. The first three days of the course we will spend at Calvin reading these figures and learning their literary milieu. Then we'll travel to Maine to live on an 1870s farm. (This is not for the faint of heart.) Afterward, we are off to Concord and Boston for on-site presentations. We will tour Salem and visit Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables; we will tour the literary Back Bay of Boston, visit Dickinson's home in Amherst, and Whittier's home in Haverill. We'll journey around Concord and Lexington, and travel to Plymouth and Cape Cod to walk where the pilgrims walked. At Walden Pond, we will stand where Thoreau lived, and back in Concord we will sit in the parlor of Alcott's home. We will walk the streets and beaches of New England as we come to understand how this influential literary group sprang up and flourished.

Come join us on a literary exploration as we study and think about writers whose works still challenge, as we attend services in Concord's First Parish Unitarian Church and examine the impact and meaning of Unitarianism, as we sip tea by fires in the evening, struggle with literary and spiritual issues established by these writers, and try to bring together the present and the past.

Prerequisites:

Permission of the instructors. This course application requires one recommendation.

Cost:

The approximate cost of the trip is $1,875 which includes all but a few meals. We will be staying in an early nineteenth-century bed and breakfast in Concord, and traveling by coach bus.

Contact:

For more information, contact G. Schmidt (office: 526-6540, home: 868-0067) or G. Fondse (office: 526-7186), in the English Department.

For course applications, go to Student Resources.