A two-day interdisciplinary colloquium on aesthetic education, convened by Patrick Hayes and Nicholas Gaskill

Aesthetic Education:

The term ‘aesthetic education’ refers to the way in which our ability to perceive, imagine and judge is importantly shaped by our responses to works of art and (albeit now less frequently) experiences arising from our encounter with the natural world. The attempt to define how it works and why it matters has a long history, which extends from Plato’s Republic through Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1791), Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), Tagore’s Viśva Sāhitya (1907) and Herbert Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension (1977). This tradition of inquiry, both within Europe and beyond, has fascinatingly explored the role of literature and the arts in shaping moral understanding and promoting a good society. But following a series of influential interventions (about which click here for more detail), there is now a certain lack of confidence, or even suspicion, about what it means to appeal to this tradition for intellectual guidance, or indeed for support in justifying our own role as educators.

The colloquium:

This colloquium aims to generate dialogue between scholars with different areas of expertise — from English and modern languages, philosophy, political theory, and sociology — on the subject of aesthetic education. More precisely, we will consider how best to go about placing ourselves in a productive dialogue with the many-sided inheritance of the past. Each speaker has been invited to ‘think with’ a particular historical interlocutor in relation to some aspect of aesthetic education, to evaluate what is generative and what is untenable in that approach.

On the first day (Thursday 29 May) the main speakers will present short versions of their papers in a series of panels, followed by Q&A. On the following day (Friday 30 May) there will be a round-table event in the morning in which four respondents will comment in detail on the papers, again opening out to wider discussion involving the audience.

All are welcome to attend. Refreshments will be provided.

Confirmed speakers:

Erik Bachman (UC Santa Cruz), ‘The God Who Fails Better: Aesthetic Conditioning in Lukács and Pavlov.’
Amit Chaudhuri (novelist, musician and literary critic), ‘The Emergence of the Impersonal.’
Rosinka Chaudhuri (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta), ‘Tagore’s Viśva-Bhāratī: Aesthetic Education in Practice’
Jennifer Gossetti-Ferencei (Johns Hopkins), ‘Literature, Aesthetic Education, and Ecological Thinking.’
Peter McDonald (University of Oxford), ‘The A-Word, Reading with Wittgenstein and Joyce.’
Tim Mehigan (University of Queensland), ‘Schiller and Aesthetic Cognitivism.’
Yi-Ping Ong (Johns Hopkins), ‘On Imagining the Impossible.’
Lloyd Pratt (University of Oxford), ‘Black Aesthetic Education and Self-Reliance.’
Gisèle Sapiro (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), ‘Rethinking Aesthetic Education in light of Bourdieu’s reading of Kant.’
Noël Sugimura (University of Oxford), ‘The Last Victorian Rationalist: Empson and Aesthetic Education.’
Linda Zerilli (University of Chicago), ‘The Aesthetics of Democratic Persuasion: Thinking with Arendt, Kant, and Wittgenstein.’
Abigail Zitin (Rutgers), ‘Aesthetic Learning: Education and Empiricism.’