In A Democratic Enlightenment Morton Schoolman proposes aesthetic education through film as a way to redress the political violence inflicted on difference that society constructs as its racialized, gendered, Semitic, and sexualized other. Drawing on Voltaire, Diderot, and Schiller, Schoolman reconstructs the genealogical history of what he calls the reconciliation image—a visual model of a democratic ideal of reconciliation he then theorizes through Whitman's prose and poetry and Adorno's aesthetic theory. Analyzing The Help (2011) and Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Schoolman shows how film produces a more advanced image of reconciliation than those originally created by modernist artworks. Each film depicts violence toward racial and ethnic difference while also displaying a reconciliation image that aesthetically educates the public about how the violence of constructing difference as otherness can be overcome. Mounting a democratic enlightenment, the reconciliation image in film illuminates a possible politics for challenging the rise of nationalism's violence toward differences in all their diversity.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Past as Prologue
- PART I. THE RECONCILIATION IMAGE IN WHITMAN
- 1. Democratic Vistas: Democratic Enlightenment and Reconciliation
- 2. Whitman’s Discovery: Aesthetic Education through the Visual Image
- FIRST BRIDGE: Thinking with Adorno against Adorno
- PART II. THE RECONCILIATION IMAGE IN ADORNO
- 3. Aesthetic Reason and Reflexivity, Twin Economies and Democratic Effects
- 4. Aesthetic Analogues: Art and Film
- SECOND BRIDGE: The Reconciliation Image versus the Narrative Structure of Film
- PART III. THE RECONCILIATION IMAGE IN FILM
- 5. The Help: Entangled in a Becoming
- 6. Gentleman’s Agreement: Beyond Tolerance
- 7. The Reconciliation Image in Film as Universal Art Form
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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