Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Aesthetic Education and the Roots of Poetic Education
2. Poetry as Teacher of Humanity
3. Play, Paidia, and Paideia
4. Becoming Who We Are: A Conversation
Conclusion: The Play of the In-Between
Bibliography
Index
Catherine Homan is assistant professor of philosophy at Mount Mary University in Milwaukee.
“Interpretation, play, and creativity are not simply behaviors,”
Homan (philosophy, Mount Mary Univ.) argues in this perceptive and
trenchant new book, “but ways of being in the world” (p. 134).
Tracing, engaging, and building on this ontological orientation in
the works of many key German language poets and
philosophers—including Hölderlin, Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Celan, Fink, Gadamer, and others—the author identifies a
pervasive “as if” stance that marks many of their perspectives on
language, education, and existence. Human existence is groundless
yet finite and thus tragic. And language (while not merely a tool)
is capable of enlarging understanding even though it always remains
incomplete. The poetic, however, keeps these tensions alive and
therefore offers the true promise of a liberatory and playful
education. Homan underscores the seriousness of play as it provides
the bridge that enables one to reclaim an original unity obscured
by ubiquitous dualisms (e.g., subject/object, self/world,
familiar/foreign, and so on). A concluding chapter responds to some
critiques of hermeneutics and offers a justification of education
as Bildung, which Homan regards as consistent with hermeneutics in
that it is premised on “the spontaneity and openness to what is
other" (p. 166). This is exemplary and astute scholarship with a
timely and timeless focus. Summing Up: Highly recommended.
Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
*Choice*
"Catherine Homan makes a compelling case for poetic education,
beginning with Hölderlin’s appeal to the creative arts in the
nineteenth century. Weaving imaginatively different play traditions
from the hermeneutic encounter with Gadamer and Fink to the social
justice concerns of Gloria Anzaldúa, Mariana Ortega, and bell
hooks, Homan brings an original perspective to philosophy of
education, arguing for language to be attuned to dialogical
interplay and affectively rooted in the world. With her focus on an
ethics of vulnerability, drawing on Paul Celan’s poetry, her book
serves as an important corrective to play narratives in the
hermeneutic tradition that merely tarry with the aesthetic."
*Mechthild Nagel, SUNY Cortland*
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