Moving into the unknown: Literary experimentation and aesthetic education

This dissertation reconceives the role of the aesthetic in English Studies from an experimental vantage, arguing that literary experimentation models the educational qualities of a radical aesthetic. Chapter I surveys the tradition of aesthetic education and philosophies of the aesthetic, establishes the need to refine our understanding of experimentalism in English Studies, and introduces literary experimentation as both a continuation and revision of traditional aesthetic education. Chapter II takes a radically different approach, rendering a conflict between the world of dance and the world of literary studies in dramatic form. A ludic display of some problems we encounter when literary scholarship enters the classroom, this allegorical play invites us to consider experimentalism as an opportunity for crossing over between seemingly discrete worlds. And it aspires to Gertrude Stein's notion of "composition as explanation," whereby expository discourse poetically invites its own interpretation. Acknowledging that a philosophy of liberation through art must reconcile itself with the troublesome history of the aesthetic's affinity for ideology, Chapter III brings together representatives of seemingly oppositional aesthetic philosophies---Romantic idealism and Marxist materialism. I reveal a provocative continuity beneath the surface conflict between Friedrich Schiller and Theodor Adorno, arguing they similarly formulate the aesthetic through experimental literary means. I then turn to contemporary scholars Elaine Scarry and Isobel Armstrong to address distinct avenues of response to the ideological suspicion of the aesthetic in academia. Making a deliberately eclectic selection of works, Chapter IV examines Gertrude Stein's "If I Told Him, a Completed Portrait of Picasso" (1923), Stephane Mallarme's "Un Coup de Des" (1897), and Brigid Brophy's In Transit (1969). I argue that experimentalism's invitation to unknowing educates by way of a disobedient relationship to ideology, beginning with the idea of the literary work itself. Finally, Chapter V proposes experimental changes to conventional pedagogy by expanding opportunities for exploring, engaging in, and inquiring about poetry as a process, and, citing the revolutionary work of Jerome McGann, finds that these changes coincide literally with changes to textuality.