Re-Educating the Imagination

by Bogdan, Deanne

• ISBN13: 9780867093056
• ISBN10: 0867093056
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1992-10-05
• Publisher: Heinemann

Summary

This is an important book. - Educational Studies Northrop Frye's conception of the educated imagination has become a major theoretical and practical touchstone for many of today's English teachers at the secondary and college levels. Within the educated imagination, the three crucial issues in literature education address why literature is taught, what is taught, and how it is taught--what Deanne Bogdan terms respectively the justification, censorship, and response problems, all of which form a complex of assumptions about the place and function of literature within the curriculum. Re-Educating the Imaginationexamines the implications of Frye's theory. Bogdan analyzes the educational context of literary engagement, offering a revision of the educated imagination in terms of real readers reading in the classroom.

Author Biography

DEANNE BOGDAN is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where she teaches courses in philosophy of literature, literature education, aesthetics, womens literature, feminist criticism and pedagogy. She is Chair of the NCTE Women in Literature and Life Assembly and former Director of Publications for the Canadian Council of Teachers of English.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prelude
Overview of the Book
The Educated Imagination
The Re-Educated Imagination
Plato and the "Uneducated" Imagination	p. 1
Current Platonic Issues in the Relationship Between Word and World	p. 2
Plato, Poetry, and the "Uneducated" Imagination	p. 6
Plato, the Educational Value of Poetry, and the Meta-Problem	p. 10
The Censorship Problem	p. 11
The Justification Problem	p. 13
The Response Problem	p. 16
Conclusion	p. 18
Sidney and Shelley: The Allegorical and Romantic Imagination	p. 21
Why a Defense of Poetry?	p. 21
Sidney and the Allegorical Imagination	p. 24
Poetry as a "Speaking Picture" and Reader Response	p. 26
Sidney's Defense of Plato and the Meta-Problem	p. 31
Shelley and the Romantic Imagination	p. 34
The Romantic Imagination and the Meta-Problem	p. 37
Conclusion	p. 41
The Educated Imagination and the Justification Problem	p. 45
Northrop Frye and the Meta-Problem	p. 47
The Anagogic Worldview of the Educated Imagination: The Poetics of Total Form	p. 53
The Educated Imagination and the Justification Problem in Language Arts Education	p. 57
The Problem With the Educated Imagination and the Justification Problem	p. 63
The Educated Imagination and the Censorship Problem	p. 73
The Censorship Situation: Some Assumptions	p. 73
The Case of Peterborough County	p. 78
The Censorship Problem, the Stubborn Structure, and the Meta-Problem	p. 85
The Problem with the Educated Imagination and the Censorship Problem	p. 92
The Educated Imagination and the Response Problem	p. 102
The Response Problem, the Meta-Problem, and Educational Policy	p. 102
Literary Response and Frye's Stubborn Structure	p. 109
The Educated Imagination and the Autonomous Reader: A Taxonomy of Reader Responses and Respondents	p. 112
Teaching Total Form as Dialectic	p. 120
Some Real Readers Reading	p. 123
The Re-Educated Imagination and Literary Literacy	p. 130
The Educated Imagination and Literary Literacy	p. 130
The Re-Educated Imagination and Literary Literacy	p. 135
The Poetics of Pluralism	p. 136
The Poetics of Need	p. 140
The Feeling Problem	p. 140
The Power Problem	p. 143
The Location Problem	p. 147
Pluralism, Need, and the Problem with the Meta-Problem	p. 148
(Dis)Identification, Response Development, and the Pedagogy of Need	p. 151
The Meta-Problem Expanded: Feeling, Power, and Location	p. 155
The Re-Educated Imagination and Literary Experience	p. 161
Is There Literary Life After Literary Literacy	p. 161
Transformation and Enculturation: The Sacred and the Profane of Literary Experience	p. 165
Stasis as Transparency	p. 166
Harmony as the Auditory Ideal	p. 167
Self and Other in Literary Experience	p. 169
Literary Experience as Stereophonic Vision	p. 170
Defining Literature and Aesthetic Experience	p. 170
Literary Experience as a Feeling Behavior	p. 174
Literary Experience as a State of Grace	p. 175
The Recognition Scene, Hegemony, and Ethical Freedom	p. 176
Literary Experience as a Literate Behavior	p. 177
Literary Experience as an Ethical Behavior	p. 179
Literary Experience as Misrecognition	p. 181
Literary Experience as a Ludic Behavior	p. 184
Literary Experience and Literary Literacy as Cultural Critique	p. 186
Conclusion	p. 190
The Re-Educated Imagination and Embodied Criticism	p. 195
The Re-Educated Imagination and the Power of Horror	p. 195
Literary Response as Embodied Reading: On First Looking Into Steiner's "Presences"	p. 200
The Poetics of Ordinary Existence: Toward an Ontology of Literary Subjectivity	p. 206
Coda	p. 210
Reading the Seduction	p. 212
Embodied Criticism: The Scale of Seduction	p. 216
Reflection: Feeling Feeling - The Music of the Spheres (Tonic Major)	p. 216
Locating Location: Rupture and The God Trick (Minor Second)	p. 218
(Dis)Empowering Power: Appassionata Furioso (Diminished Mediant)	p. 220
Reconstruction: Reclaiming Power (Perfect Sub-Dominant)	p. 221
Relocating Identity (Imperfect Dominant)	p. 222
Voicing Voice (Augmented Sub-Mediant)	p. 223
Leading Note (Major Seventh)	p. 224
The Re-Educated Imagination and Embodied Pedagogy	p. 228
First Things First: Passion Without a Victim	p. 230
The Professionalization of Literary Response and the Meta-Problem	p. 234
Girls and Boys Together: The Non-Professionalization of Literary Response	p. 239
Dissonant/Dissident Behaviors: From Transgression to Transfiguration	p. 246
Ways in to William Wordsworth	p. 248
The Singing School	p. 250
The Assignment and the Journals	p. 250
Toward An Alternative Sublime	p. 261
The Poetics of Ordinary Existence and Pure Utterance	p. 261
Double Mirror: Frye, Process, and Embodiment	p. 268
Double Vision, Double-Take: Mythology, Ideology, and Gender	p. 273
Literary Convention and Reality	p. 278
The Continuum and the Gap	p. 285
Girls and Boys Together Again? Literary Experience and Literary Literacy	p. 289
Can Literature Education Change the World? Woolf and Three Guineas	p. 290
Old Myths, New Myths	p. 293
Double Perspective: The Pedagogy of Ordinary Existence	p. 294
Transformations and Transfigurations	p. 295
Postlude	p. 303
Appendix	p. 307
Works Cited	p. 309
Index	p. 337
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