As the editors of the series, New Literary Theory, proclaim in the preface of the book, the purpose of the series is to make more room in literary theory for playful and accessible approaches to li...

Preface -- Introduction -- The burden of English -- Who claims alterity? -- How to read a "culturally different" book -- The double bind starts to kick in -- Culture: situating feminism -- Teaching for the times -- Acting bits/identity talk -- Supplementing Marxism -- What's left of theory? -- Echo -- Translation as culture -- Translating into English -- Nationalism and the imagination -- Resident alien -- Ethics and politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and certain scenes of teaching -- Imperative (...) to re-imagine the planet -- Reading with Stuart Hall in "pure" literary terms -- Terror: a speech after 9/11 -- Harlem -- Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular -- World systems and the creole -- The stakes of world literature -- Rethinking comparativism -- Sign and trace -- Tracing the skin of day. (shrink)

Abstract:The purpose of this introduction is to set out the scope and content of this special issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education, which takes Aesthetic Education through Narrative Art as its subject. I begin by delineating the “aesthetic” itself and then identifying the denotation of “aesthetic education” with which the issue’s authors are concerned. This is followed by a characterization of “narrative art” that belies my preference for representation rather than art and (...) draws attention to the multiple modes of representation that constitute complex narratives. I next turn to the title of the special issue, an abridged version of Aesthetic Education through Narrative Art and its Relevance for the Humanities, which is an installation research project funded by the Croatian Science Foundation to investigate the relationship between aesthetic and artistic values on the one hand and ethical, political, and social values on the other. The project is multidisciplinary among philosophy, criminology, film studies, and cognitive science, and three of the authors are members of the project team. I conclude by introducing each of the six articles, which employ two approaches, one from philosophical aesthetics and the other from critical criminology. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a defence of aesthetic education in terms of aesthetic experience, claiming that aesthetic experience and art appreciation is a vital component of a flourishing life. Given schools have an important role to play in helping prepare young people for their adult lives, it is crucial they should consider how best to equip students with the means to achieve a flourishing life. It is on these grounds I defend arts education as (...) compulsory across the curriculum. In order to adopt this position, I firstly critically engage with two competing defences of including the arts on the curriculum on the basis of firstly, the role art has to play in supporting self-expression, and secondly, a defence of the arts in relation to their role in supporting moral improvement. After explaining why these arguments fail to do the work required to defend aesthetic education as thoroughly as is needed, I turn to the defence based on aesthetic experience because it allows for a defence of the arts to be made on the basis of art’s distinctive value. (shrink)

The poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller was also a profound philosopher, who described his work On the Asethetic Education of Man as 'the best thing that I have done in my life'. This impassioned treatise analyses politics, revolution and human nature to define the relationship between beauty, art and morality. Expressed as a series of letters to a patron, it argues that only an aesthetic education--rather than government reform, religion or moral teachings--can achieve a truly free society, (...) and must be placed at the heart of human experience. One of the most important works of German philosophy, its arguments remain as arresting and inspiring as when they were first written. (shrink)

Aesthetic education plays an important role in people's education and training. Guided by Marxist aesthetic education view, studying the construction of aesthetic education in the new era is not only an important condition for shaping a sound personality and an inevitable requirement for guiding people's better life in the new era, but also a theoretical basis for guiding the cultivation of innovative talents in the new era, and a realistic need for dealing with (...) the misunderstanding of aesthetic education in the new era. As an important part of socialist cultural construction, aesthetic education can cultivate people's perception, acceptance and creativity of beauty, shape individual's lofty ideals and sentiments by purifying the soul and casting the soul, transform the objective world and beautify the subjective world according to the law of beauty, establish a beautiful world outlook, outlook on life and values, and promote people's quality promotion and all-round development. From the perspective of aesthetic education, we media's own characteristics enable it to become a platform for teachers' teaching and students' learning at the same time, and with the new changes shown by the relationship between the media and the audience, we media can become an effective carrier to enhance college students' aesthetic education, providing us with a good opportunity to effectively enhance college students' aesthetic education. (shrink)

This book brings together two experienced educators from the fields of teacher education and arts education. The authors Richmond, a photographer, and Snowber, a dancer and poet, see aesthetic education as aiming to extend creativity, appreciation of the arts and nature, and the sensuous qualities of everyday life, to gain a more intimate understanding of the self and the world. They include poetic, narrative, philosophical, and artistic ways of writing to support a more embodied and holistic (...) aesthetics. Landscapes of Aesthetic Education has significance for educators, scholars, students, and artists, and for all who would like to explore the connections between the arts, aesthetics, and transformation. (shrink)

This essay introduces ideas from Confucius, Xunzi, the Six Dynasties, and Kant about beauty, music, morality, and what we might today call “aesthetic education.” It asks how beauty and morality are related and how they ideally should be related to each other. We know that beauty and morality can drift apart, and we may wonder how aesthetic education might work best. Should the arts be a means for developing morality? Or should it be the other way (...) around? These questions are still relevant today. But our world has changed, not only since Confucius, but also since Kant. We may ask what to make of their ideas in our present time. I argue that there are good reasons for keeping morality and aesthetics apart, somewhat in the spirit of Kant, and in opposition to the idea of “fusing” the two. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy—Aesthetics—Education:Reflections on DanceTyson Lewis (bio)To create is to lighten, to unburden life, to invent new possibilities of life. The creator is legislator—dancer.—Gilles Deleuze, Pure ImmanenceThe Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is perhaps best known for his ongoing interest in the problem of "biopower." Taking up where Michel Foucault ended, Agamben argues that the principle political and philosophical questions of the moment concern the connections between life and power. In (...) this sense, he stands in diametric opposition to one of the leading French intellectuals of our times: Alain Badiou. For Badiou, the key question of the present is not so much power and the body as it is the ethics of truth. According to Agamben, Badiou's project has abandoned thinking about the biopolitics of life and as such is both philosophically and politically suspect. But does Agamben's critique prematurely dismiss Badiou? In other words, does his critique prevent us from recognizing the precise location of biopolitics in Badiou's work? It is my contention that we must read Badiou not against but from within a biopolitical framework in order to realize both the validity of Agamben's criticism and its limitations. In fact, it is through the critical lens of biopolitical theory that we can begin to see the unique links in Badiou's thinking between aesthetics, the body, and education. In conclusion, I argue that Agamben provides insights missed by Badiou's reduction of the animal body to the disavowed grounds for the grace and beauty of truth, while at the same time Badiou provides Agamben's own theory of biopolitics with a unique educative practice: the practice of dance.Here I would like to justify this philosophical inquiry for educational theorists. With the fate of art-based educational programs uncertain in the [End Page 53] face of standardization, it is perhaps time to reassess legitimating claims for retaining arts education programs. By reading Badiou through Agamben, I hope to provide a new reason for advocating the centrality of dance in educational programs and assert the inherently educative qualities of movement-based curricula. Second, I hope to suggest in my conclusion that dance is an important form of educational practice antithetical to current forms of capitalist "bioproduction." As such, I will link together my own theory of dance education with the critical pedagogical tradition in order to anchor the "utopian imagination" in a practice of the body. This is an attempt to fill in a rather vague sphere of critical pedagogical research and theory: aesthetic practice. Overall, this article will bring together two important philosophical traditions—Agamben's biopolitical theory and Badiou's theory of truth—in order to examine their relation to education and, in turn, how education is a central concept for thinking through contemporary continental philosophical traditions.Biopower and Event: Situating the Subject in Relation to TruthMichel Foucault first coined the theoretical concept "biopower" in his work on the history of sexuality.1 In order to understand Foucault's meaning we must first separate biopower from sovereign power, which is characterized by the "right to decide life and death."2 The sovereign—which for Foucault is not simply a form of territorial rule but is a principle of power relations—decides who lives and who dies. Power here is the power of the sword that marks the body directly through overt forms of public torture and violence. But in the classical age and with the rise of capitalist social relations, the form and function of power switched. Famously, Foucault wrote that the highest function of power "was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through."3 This new form of power—whose concern was no longer death but the maintenance and regulation of life—operates on two interconnected levels. First, biopower conceives of the body as a machine, which must be disciplined in order to be made more efficient. Here, power acts as microphysics, training the individual body in order to reach a high level of social efficiency. Second, on the macro level, biopower transforms the populous into a population that has to be carefully regulated in terms of propagation rates, health levels... (shrink)

Laura D'Olimpio argues that aesthetic education ought to be a compulsory part of education for all students, from pre-primary through to high school, as it is essential that young people have the opportunity to make art, experience and understand art and be informed as to the artistic history and aesthetic theories that have shaped their own culture and others. The book defends arts education on the basis of art's distinctive value and centrality to human experience. (...) It also engages with topics such as the art teacher's role in the classroom, curricula concerns and gleaning moral meanings from artworks. (shrink)

When we take the term literally, “aesthetic education” refers to the senses. The etymological root of “aesthetic” is, aesthesis (ai[sqhsi"), the Greek word signifying “perception by the senses.” The corresponding verb is aisthanomai (aijsqanovmai), which means “to apprehend by the senses,” i.e., to see, hear, touch, etc.1 What does it mean to educate the senses? The senses, as Aristotle noted, are what we share with animals.2 The question of their education, thus, involves the notion of our (...) “animal” nature. We see the animals about us. We note our similarities. We assert that that part of them is within us. Doing so, we draw a line between our animal and human nature. The question of aesthetic education concerns this line, both the line and its trespass. The line is between the educator and the educated, the human and the animal. The human, in educating the senses, we could say, educates the animal within it. It humanizes it. It extends its territory. The human, however, includes the animal. Could we not also see this education as the advance of the animal to the human, the extension of its territory? To answer such questions we must come to terms not just with the animal but also the human. Without this, we cannot know the role of humanistic education, understood literally as the” education of the human.” What I propose in this paper is suggest some answers to the question of the relation of the animal to the human. The claim I will be making is that aesthetic education, the education of our sensibility, is humanistic education in the etymological sense of the word, “e-ducate.” It is what first “leads or draws out” the human. It is the condition of the possibility of the being of.. (shrink)

Abstract:In this article, I argue that by integrating aesthetic education into history instruction, teachers can create a "historically relevant pedagogy." This approach paints a more complete picture of history and reflects students' varied learning styles and their sociocultural needs, interests, and experiences. Historically relevant pedagogy integrates the frameworks of aesthetic, historical, and culturally relevant educational approaches. Through this pedagogical combination, students can develop historical literacy, experience academic excellence, and become socioculturally aware of their role in society. The (...) conclusions of this study suggest a need to redesign high school history courses to include more aesthetics-based instruction. (shrink)

A discussion of Hegel's aesthetics in light of Schiller's theory of aesthetic education--and which links aesthetics to politics, ethics, and the project of enlightenment.

This paper examines the iconic conception of aesthetic education in the work of Friedrich Schiller, with the aim of elucidating Schiller’s unique innovation of this notion in understanding i) the relationship between aesthetic and ethical value and ii) the transformative possibilities within a collective, social dimension of aesthetic experience. The paper provides an overview of the Kantian origins of Schiller’s aesthetic programme (Section 1). It then considers Schiller’s critique of the perceived failings of the Kantian (...) and Enlightenment republican models of ethical value and political emancipation (Section 2) before turning to his positive alternative aesthetic programme (Section 3). The paper concludes (Section 4) with some evaluation and reflection on Schiller’s original contributions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 1-3 [Access article in PDF] Symposium:Aesthetic Education in Japan TodayThe purpose of this symposium is to provide readers with a general understanding of Japanese art and aesthetics education and its interaction with other cultures. The essays cover a variety of topics, including historical, cross-cultural, theoretical, and practical perspectives.First, the development and establishment of art education in (...) the Japanese education system is introduced. Kingo Masuda's essay provides a brief history of art education policy and how a formal system of art education has been organized from the modern era to the present. Takuya Kaneda examines the foundation for the historical evolution of the major reform movements in Japanese art education. He focuses on the philosophies of three pioneers who guided the movements and sheds light on to the role that "freedom" has played in the context of aesthetic education. Their historical studies show how the modern Japanese educational system incorporated the Western notion of art education into its foundation. Western art educators have given Japanese art educators the impetus to modernize the theory and practice of art education.The attempt to go beyond the modern framework of arts and aesthetic education is discussed in some authors' essays. Yoko Hino examines a key educational term, "Creative Play (Zokei Asobi)," and points out the dilemma educators face working within the modern framework that divides subject matter completely from individuality. Yasuaki Okamoto, in his philosophical essay, discusses the change in the nature of self-understanding in theage of media expansion. His point is that our sense of reality is no longer confined to physical existence, and that media provides us with a new kind of experience of self and reality. Kinichi Fukumoto illustrates the essential structure of art education with the metaphor of Disneyland, and emphasizes art education as an incomplete, further evolving project. Motoki Nagamori discusses Rousseau's concept of nature as a foundation for modern theory and practice of art education and suggests an alternative concept that incorporates cultural, linguistic, and media aspects. Based on a historical study on evaluation methods, Kazumi Yamada suggests that qualitative factors should play a significant role for improving art education.Some authors emphasize the current concern for integrating art with other disciplines in order to alter our understanding about aesthetic education. [End Page 1] Advocating for the integration of art and media literacy based on the educational principles of the Bauhaus, Kenta Motomura explores the possibility of media technology for a new type of expression. Kazuhiro Ishizaki and Wenchun Wang describe their cross-cultural study on children's aesthetic development to stress the importance of the communal, cultural, and linguistic considerations of integrated study, historically overlooked in traditional aesthetic education. Focusing on blending music and visual arts, Masashi Okada introduces his theory and practice of integrated study developed over many years.In addition, globalization and its effect on art education has become an important topic. Engaging in a cross-cultural dialogue is a critical part of this issue. Akio Okazaki discusses what Arthur Wesley Dow, an Americanart educator, recognized and learned by encountering the otherness of Japanese art. Yoshimasa Kaneko's study shows how Japanese aesthetics and Johannes Itten (the founder of Ittenschule in Germany) had a significant philosophical influence on each other. Toshio Naoe's comparativestudy between Japanese and British educational systems highlights somecrucial differences and similarities and points out overarching themes across the two countries. Mitsuru Fujie compares and contrasts the different educational meanings of "play" between Japan and the United States, and articulates the nature of play in the context of Japanese art education. Masako Iwano's study describes a case of cross-cultural aesthetic education in a small Japanese community and how this cultural interaction through art impacts that community.The perspectives of all of these authors are decidedly international. They are not only committed to, and engaged directly in, the current practice of Japanese education but have developed an international viewpoint through experiences overseas. Some have conducted research at educational institutions in other countries, and others have participated in the activities of international professional... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 1-3 [Access article in PDF] Symposium:Aesthetic Education in Japan TodayThe purpose of this symposium is to provide readers with a general understanding of Japanese art and aesthetics education and its interaction with other cultures. The essays cover a variety of topics, including historical, cross-cultural, theoretical, and practical perspectives.First, the development and establishment of art education in (...) the Japanese education system is introduced. Kingo Masuda's essay provides a brief history of art education policy and how a formal system of art education has been organized from the modern era to the present. Takuya Kaneda examines the foundation for the historical evolution of the major reform movements in Japanese art education. He focuses on the philosophies of three pioneers who guided the movements and sheds light on to the role that "freedom" has played in the context of aesthetic education. Their historical studies show how the modern Japanese educational system incorporated the Western notion of art education into its foundation. Western art educators have given Japanese art educators the impetus to modernize the theory and practice of art education.The attempt to go beyond the modern framework of arts and aesthetic education is discussed in some authors' essays. Yoko Hino examines a key educational term, "Creative Play (Zokei Asobi)," and points out the dilemma educators face working within the modern framework that divides subject matter completely from individuality. Yasuaki Okamoto, in his philosophical essay, discusses the change in the nature of self-understanding in theage of media expansion. His point is that our sense of reality is no longer confined to physical existence, and that media provides us with a new kind of experience of self and reality. Kinichi Fukumoto illustrates the essential structure of art education with the metaphor of Disneyland, and emphasizes art education as an incomplete, further evolving project. Motoki Nagamori discusses Rousseau's concept of nature as a foundation for modern theory and practice of art education and suggests an alternative concept that incorporates cultural, linguistic, and media aspects. Based on a historical study on evaluation methods, Kazumi Yamada suggests that qualitative factors should play a significant role for improving art education.Some authors emphasize the current concern for integrating art with other disciplines in order to alter our understanding about aesthetic education. [End Page 1] Advocating for the integration of art and media literacy based on the educational principles of the Bauhaus, Kenta Motomura explores the possibility of media technology for a new type of expression. Kazuhiro Ishizaki and Wenchun Wang describe their cross-cultural study on children's aesthetic development to stress the importance of the communal, cultural, and linguistic considerations of integrated study, historically overlooked in traditional aesthetic education. Focusing on blending music and visual arts, Masashi Okada introduces his theory and practice of integrated study developed over many years.In addition, globalization and its effect on art education has become an important topic. Engaging in a cross-cultural dialogue is a critical part of this issue. Akio Okazaki discusses what Arthur Wesley Dow, an Americanart educator, recognized and learned by encountering the otherness of Japanese art. Yoshimasa Kaneko's study shows how Japanese aesthetics and Johannes Itten (the founder of Ittenschule in Germany) had a significant philosophical influence on each other. Toshio Naoe's comparativestudy between Japanese and British educational systems highlights somecrucial differences and similarities and points out overarching themes across the two countries. Mitsuru Fujie compares and contrasts the different educational meanings of "play" between Japan and the United States, and articulates the nature of play in the context of Japanese art education. Masako Iwano's study describes a case of cross-cultural aesthetic education in a small Japanese community and how this cultural interaction through art impacts that community.The perspectives of all of these authors are decidedly international. They are not only committed to, and engaged directly in, the current practice of Japanese education but have developed an international viewpoint through experiences overseas. Some have conducted research at educational institutions in other countries, and others have participated in the activities of international professional... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetics, Education, the Critical Autonomous Self, and the Culture IndustryMarianna Papastephanou (bio)IntroductionE Lucevan le Stelle disconnected both from Tosca and Puccini becomes incidental music and brings strong recollections of the detergent advertisement it once coated. Last Year in Marienbad has caused some of the deepest yawn relief to many hopefuls for the title of the sophisticated who wished to cash out the film's cultural and social capital. A (...) painting by a well-known artist in the living room of a middle-upper-class residence often matches the colors of the carpet, and a piece of African art in the corner testifies to the hosts' cosmopolitan respect for otherness and the proper dose of hybridity in their selfhood. The young of the family are said to search for freedom from the puritan lifestyle in Ecstasis. Or, they rebel against the oppressive order of the system through idolizing music bands of an unconventional style and, as a matter of fact, of "unconventional" wealth accumulated precisely through the systemic exploitation of their idolization. The whole family, including the discontented young, will unite in the enjoyment of a new movie in which, just as in hundreds before it, police detectives can solve cases only after their suspension from duty and foreigners prefer to converse in perfect English when they are alone. What all members of the family are sure of by the end of the day, some of them through the prism of heavy drinking and others in the sober appreciation of the latest reality show, is that they exercised once again their free will in all instances. For they oriented their desires, treated as natural and self-posited, to objects they initially lacked but "autonomously" and "critically" found and selected from a rich and all-encompassing marketplace of culture. [End Page 75]How are art, its education, and its educational ideals of autonomy and critique related to this particular cultural reality that I have highlighted? Pseudo-individualism, escapism, Ersatzbefriedigung, fetishization, reification, and educationalization are some of the terms Adorno employed to approach the reality of artistic production and reception in capitalist times while preserving the distance that art offers for critiquing reality.1 In contrast with the above-sketched reality, in Adorno's ultimate aesthetic vision through art the self is not supposed to "forget in dreams the present world, but to change it by the strength of an image."2 Adorno attacks the drive toward a "totally administered" society—that of late capitalism—which "reduces every aspect of present-day life to the dead level of conformist popular 'taste' as dictated by a wholesale culture industry given over to the purposes of mass indoctrination."3 Fundamentally, the culture industry hinders the formation of autonomous, critical, and independent individuals.4I shall argue that such a theoretical framework gives us additional insight through which to combat what has already been perceived in pedagogical discourse as educational inability to cultivate reflective and critical subjectivities. Instead of autonomy, education nurtures narcissism. and instead of critique, it promotes appeasement5 —all the more so when education succumbs to the culture industry or fails to encourage students' critical stance to its imperatives.My position here is that by reclaiming their own valuable connection to reflective artistic experience and reception, aesthetic theory and art education can contribute to a reconceptualization of autonomy and critique and, perhaps more importantly, to a reorientation of educational practice.6 Adorno's aesthetics is exceptionally relevant to this aim because his work exemplifies in a unique way the necessary awareness of the antinomic qualities of autonomy and critique, their ineluctable dependence on society and culture, and their secret culpability in domination. Moreover, Adorno's cultural criticism comprises an unsurpassable diagnosis of those social pathologies that leads away from critical and reflective subjectivity and offers conceptual means for setting a critical eye on some current impoverished practices of teaching art. Above all, Adorno's aesthetic theory displays a remarkable topicality regarding contemporary positions on purely artistic concerns and contentions. Thus, the current neglect of his work in aesthetic educational theory7 must be dealt with since accommodation of such aesthetics within art educational discourse will serve significantly the latter's... (shrink)

In his book Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, Henry Giroux bemoans, “[H]igher education increasingly stands alone, even in its attenuated state, as a public arena where ideas can be debated, critical knowledge produced, and learning linked to important social issues.”1 Colleges of education, like public schools themselves, have become more fragmented and compartmentalized in recent years. Persistent at universities is “the view that students are basically consumers and faculty providers of a saleable commodity such as a credential (...) or a set of workplace skills.”2 Professors and teachers alike feel the impact of neoliberal policies aimed at efficiency and productivity, which further alienate and emphasize data... (shrink)

Schiller's 1795 essay on the educative function of art is one of the most important contributions to the history of ideas in modern times. This English-German parallel text edition includes a long analytical introduction and extensive notes.

A classic of 18th-century thought, Schiller’s treatise on the role of art in society ranks among German philosophy’s most profound works. An important contribution to the history of ideas, it employs a political analysis of contemporary society—and of the French Revolution, in particular—to define the relationship between beauty and art. Schiller’s proposal of art as fundamental to the development of society and the individual remains an influential concept, and this volume offers his philosophy’s clearest, most relevant expression. Translated and with (...) an introduction by Reginald Snell. (shrink)

Rational aesthetic deference becomes apparent when one person’s aesthetic belief gives another person a reason to move his own aesthetic belief in the direction of the other person. It occurs when one person’s aesthetic belief gives another person a normative reason to move your belief in the direction of mine, on epistemic grounds. In such a case, what the first person believes also provides a justification for the second person’s aesthetic belief. This kind of justification (...) is an indirect justification because it is based on reasons that merit deferring to someone else’s judgment, rather than on reasons that support.. (shrink)

Nick McADOO; ‘Realisation’ in Aesthetic Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 235–245, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.

Nick McADOO; ‘Realisation’ in Aesthetic Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 235–245, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.