Aesthetic Realism: Life, Love & Learning

Leila Rosen, English Educator & Aesthetic Realism Associate

Blog: About Literature, Teaching & Our Lives

What Satire Really Is: a report of a lecture by Eli Siegel about Satire, by Sheldon Kranz

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Like nearly every teacher of literature, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with my students about satire. Crucial in the study of satire is seeing that there is a huge difference between the kind of mockery that goes on in ordinary life and the kind that comes from wanting to have the world and people be better. I learned very much about this from a report by poet and critic Sheldon Kranz of the lecture by Eli Siegel. Here are two paragraphs from the report:

Satire at its best, [Mr. Siegel said,] has three forms: satire of one person, as we find it in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt; satire of a group like the Rotarians or the D.A.R. Gilbert and Sullivan in their operetta Patience were satirizing the aesthetic movement of the 1890s; and third, there is a satire of mankind in general. Here Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is one of the best examples in literature.

In all of these, Mr. Siegel went on, it can be seen that satire is always about pretense, about how persons will choose what is false in order that their vanity be undisturbed. We have a picture of ourselves which truth will destroy; and so to protect that picture of ourselves, we will accept what is untrue and unimportant. Satire changes a bad thing into a good thing, an untrue thing into a true thing. Satire makes us laugh to make the ugly more apparent.

Read the whole report here.

Opposing Racism & Prejudice through the Study of Rhyme: What I learned from Aesthetic Realism

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Along with all the excitement there is in beginning a new school year, we begin this on at a time of intense anger in our nation. A large part of that anger is about racism and other forms of prejudice against people one sees as different from oneself. Whether we see it clearly or not, every young person in a classroom is affected by this atmosphere, and it is so easy for them to use it to feel the world is unfriendly. Meanwhile, I learned from Aesthetic Realism that it is the same world that’s in every subject we teach. Can there be kindness, justice, in how people see each other? And how can learning the subjects in the curriculum be a means of opposing prejudice in all its forms, and having greater respect for all people, and for the world itself?

That was what I was hoping for when I taught the 9th grade English lessons, I describe in the following article. Based on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, these lessons enabled the NYC students I describe here, who’d had great difficulty reading and had met anger and prejudice in their young lives, to change deeply, in a way that moves me to this day. Not only were they more just and less angry, but they came to love reading as they’d never imagined they could.

Lessons on Rhyme, Using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

“This Summer Morning Mariana Has” — a poem by Eli Siegel

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How richly can our thought linger on ordinary things we might see on any given morning: a leaf; a twig; a rose; the sun; a butterfly; woods near us in summer; our own feet and hair and clothing? Anything in the outside world we might meet, no matter how small or everyday, has the possibility of affecting us deeply, and more than we often realize. That is why I love this musical poem by Eli Siegel. It’s good to read on a warm summer day—or any day.

This Summer Morning Mariana Has

Reading Les Misérables—at long last!

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It’s taken me much too long to read it, but I’m so glad to have read it! This amazing, stirring, complex, passionately-written novel has gotten into me as hardly any other has for a very long time….

Hugo’s desire to see what people feel, and describe this with such kind perception, such tenderness, moves me. I’ll point to some passages and comment on why I feel they’re beautiful, in keeping with this great principle of Aesthetic Realism, stated by its founder, Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Stay tuned!

 

Happy Birthday, Nathaniel Hawthorne

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July 4th is, of course, a big day in the US, even in this turbulent year. We all know it’s the day on which, in 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence from England’s tyranny—an event that deserves to celebrated with gratitude. It’s the day on which, in 1855, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was published. Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong liked to say it was his birthday, though it was actually a month later.

I always think of another person, too, on the 4th of July: the great writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, born on this day in 1804. I love Hawthorne’s work. Its style has power and grace. It is impelled by ethics, by the need in people to see justly—and it shows Hawthorne’s own vivid awareness of the consequences for a self of being unjust.

In an essay on the writer’s short story “The Man of Adamant,” Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, writes:

If there is any one work, it seems to me, where Hawthorne has presented concisely and richly his attitude to the world and the heart of man, that work is the short story “The Man of Adamant.”…

“All through Hawthorne’s work, there is the admonition: “Do not be alone in concealed glory. Do not separate yourself from the rest of things, so that, darkly, you can establish yourself in another world.”…

“Indeed, a meaning never absent from Hawthorne’s writing is that being alone makes for pride, but it also makes for an unresting sense of iniquity within and a sense of hardening that is also corruption. Perhaps Hawthorne never said this so plainly, so unmistakably, so compactly as he does in “The Man of Adamant.”

Because Aesthetic Realism, as conscious study, teaches about the two opposing desires in us—that which Hawthorne is illustrating in this story, the desire to have contempt, and our greatest desire, to like and be just to reality and see our deep relation to other people—it is the education every person needs.

So I recommend two things: 1) Read “Hawthorne’s “The Man of Adamant,” by Eli Siegel, and the story itself; and 2) find out about how to study in Aesthetic Realism consultations. They are thrilling, kind, eye-opening education in how to know and like the world and yourself honestly.