The Sublime and Education

Romantic Circles

Book

The Sublime and Education Public Deposited

Analytics

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/books/z890rv91v

Abstract

This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by J. Jennifer Jones; essays by Christopher Braider, Frances Ferguson, Paul Hamilton, Anne C. McCarthy, Forest Pyle, and Deborah Elise White; and an afterword by Ian Balfour.

What kind of scene of instruction is built into the sublime experience, or is the sublime antithetical to the teaching paradigm? Consider Socrates' dialogues, for instance. The great ones may be ninety percent about instruction (they are seminars), but then there is the ten percent in which he soars out of the dialogue into sublime myth-telling. In those moments, does he actually instruct, or is something else happening that leaves his students behind except possibly through a kind of identification or transference with the role of the teacher-who-leaves-his-students-in-the-dust? And how does all this sort with the notion of application? Can there be an applied sublime? Is there not just a transcendental but an immanent sublimity? An immersive sublimity? What can we learn by critiquing the storeis by which we have been taught of and with the sublime? How do we teach the sublime well? How can we continue to be good students of the sublime? How might we practice immanent critique in the face of the sublime?

"The Sublime and Education" offers a series of essays in which contributors meditate on how the concept of education intersects with sublime theory and Romantic aesthetics more generally.

Broadly speaking, this volume produces a set of revisionary readings rooted in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and its place in our ongoing understanding of Romantic aesthetics and sublime theory. Kant's phlosophy serves as critically-engaged foundation for a volume that also offers a highly-diverse body of texts and methods of interpretation, criticism, and critique that moves between Romantic-era literature and cultural theory of the 20th and 21st centuries.

An underlying inspiration of this volume is the pedagogical theory of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who has thought widely about humanities-based training using Romantic-era texts as principal theoretical and literary tools, formative among them the aesthetic philosophy of Kant. Spivak's pedagogical theory can perhaps best be apprehended through the adroit but monumentally graceful claim that proper pedagogy consists in "the uncoercive rearrangement of desires," which is also to say a pedagogy founded on a notion of an immanent rather than a transcendental sublime. In complementary but nevertheless diverse and highly-individuated ways, contributors offer just this type of reformative work. Taken together, the contributions of this volume are inspirational of the simultaneously abstract ad practical idealism that adheres in a pedagogy whsoe goal is the uncoercive rearrangement of desires.

Creator