How does the US make sense of its elite educational system, given that it seems to be at odds with core American values, such as equality of opportunity or upward mobility? Sophie Spieler explores scholarly and journalistic investigations, self-representational texts, and fictional narratives revolving around the Ivy League and its peers in order to understand elite education and its peculiar position in American cultural discourse. Among the book's most surprising and groundbreaking insights is the tenacity and adaptability of meritocratic ideology across all three sub-discourses, despite its fundamental incompatibility with the American educational system.
Author(s): Sophie Spieler
Series: American Culture Studies 33
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 276
City: Bielefeld
Tags: Social Stratification; Distinction; Meritocracy; Campus Novels; Capital; Princeton; Elite Education; Class; Discourse Analysis; Neoliberalism; Ivy League; Curtis Sittenfeld; Literature; Education; America; American Studies; Cultural Studies; Cultural Theory; Literary Studies
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Situating the Book: Context and Relevance
Approaching American Elite Education: Theory and Methodology
Chapter Structure
I. Exposition: Approaching the Elite Educational Space
1. Introductory Remarks
2. Starting Points: Eliteness and Education in American Culture
3. ‘Very Important, Very Powerful, or Very Prominent’: Eliteness in America
4. ‘Excellence and Equity’: Merit as the Price of Admission
5. ‘A Touchy Subject’? Class and Elite Education
6. Concluding Remarks
II. Critique: Elite Education and Its Discontents
1. Introductory Remarks
2. Mapping the Critical Landscape
3. Progressivist Critiques
4. Conservative Critiques
5. Concluding Remarks
III. Affirmation: Self-Representation at Princeton University
1. Introductory Remarks
2. Elite College Admissions: A Discourse of Impossibility and Pathology
3. A Meritocracy of Affect
4. Epistemological Frames: Diversity, the Good Life, Community
5. Concluding Remarks
IV. Imagination: Fictionalizations of the Elite Educational Experience
1. Introductory Remarks
2. Exposition: Fiction in the Discourse of Elite Education
3. Prep in the Discourse: Publicity, ‘Preppiness’, and the Neoliberal Imagination
4. Diversity, Class, Mobility: Prep’s Cultural Work
5. Concluding Remarks
Conclusion
Works Cited
