Literature as aesthetic knowledge: implications for curriculum and education

Abstract

This paper presents an argument for aesthetic knowledge in the arts and more specifically, for an aesthetic model of literature to be central in the curriculum. I argue that there are important distinctions to be made between the everyday experiences unique to us as individuals, and the universality of human experience. In the English Literature curriculum, this important difference is manifested in the status of the text because it is through a triadic engagement between educator, text and pupil that the meanings of experience can be evoked objectively. Through changing cultural and policy contexts in the post-war period, the text has been marginalised in the curriculum. This has contributed to two detrimental effects. The first is that direct personal responses and experience have been overvalued in the English Literature curriculum. The second is that the idea of objective knowledge in literature has been misconstrued as knowledge of its linguistic substratum. Consequently, an important form of aesthetic knowledge is largely absent in Britain’s secondary curriculum. The paper is organized into three sections. Section one describes main shifts in the cultural and policy contexts. Section two provides a brief empirical example of how shifts at the macro-level have been re-contextualised within the implied curriculum found in examples of national exams. Section three elucidates the deeper significance of these changes in light of a theoretical discussion of Kantian aesthetics and implications for a social realist approach to knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy derived from Durkheim.

Keywords:

• Aesthetics
• English literature
• curriculum
• symbolic representation
• social realism

Note

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These examples are based on my longer empirical analysis of exam papers found in [author].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alka Sehgal Cuthbert

Alka Sehgal Cuthbert is an educator, curriculum consultant and researcher. Her disciplinary background is English literature and the arts. Currently working as a part-time English teacher, she writes mainly on English literature as an aesthetic form of knowledge, the curriculum and the influence of scientistic thought in education.