Intro; Dedication; Preface; Acknowledgments; Contents; Chapter 1: Introduction: Progressivism's Aesthetic Education; Classical Bildung; Aesthetic Education and the American School: From Horace Mann to the One Best System; Social Action Progressivism; Progressivism's Aesthetic Education: Three Authors and Three Movements; Pragmatism's Aesthetic Education; References; Chapter 2: The Doctrine of Interest: Abraham Cahan and the Herbartians; Cahan as Journalist; The Herbartians and the Doctrine of Interest; Cahan's Aesthetics: The Thrill of Truth; Rafael Na'arizokh as a Herbartian Bildungsroman
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Cahan's English FictionThe Rise of David Levinsky; References; Chapter 3: The Classroom Démueblé: Willa Cather and Maria Montessori; First the Education of the Senses; Montessori Aesthetics: The Iridescent Shell; Cather's Desire; Cather's Progressivism: Miraculously Preserved Youthfulness; References; Chapter 4: Herland and Zond: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Social Efficiency Educators; Social Efficiency, Social Service, Social Control; Brainpower and the Human Game; The Fearful Figure of Duty; Gilman and the Bildungsroman; Gilman's Aesthetics: The Smooth-Ground Lens; References
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Chapter 5: Living Has Its Own Intrinsic Quality: John Dewey's Aesthetic EducationEducation as Growth; Growth and the Authority of the Educational Profession; The Qualities of Educative Experience; Interest; Purpose; Meaning; Freedom; The Affinity between Aesthetic Experience and Deliberative Democracy; Democracy Within Education; Reconstructing Dewey: Existentialist Challenges; References; Index
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
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During the Progressive Era, literary writers such as Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman engaged with ideas emerging from the newly consolidated educational profession about art's capacity to mediate between individual and social development. These ideas varied widely in their philosophical, pedagogical, and political implications, but all reinforced the authority of professional educators at the expense of democratically elected boards of education. Novels working through these ideas can be usefully theorized as Bildungsromane if the definition of the Bildungsroman is refined to be more sensitive to the wide range of educational philosophies that can inform it, and to the range of attitudes, from critical to worshipful, that it can assume toward these philosophies. This reimagining of the genre opens up the possibility that the Bildungsroman, and the Bildung idea more broadly, can have a more positive political valence than most scholars have acknowledged. In particular, a viable project of aesthetic education can be discerned in the philosophy of John Dewey, although it lacks a clear literary corollary.