Notes
I wish to express my gratitude to the numerous individuals who have helped me with the work of this special issue. First and foremost, I thank the contributors; it has been a profound honor and privilege to work with each of them over the two years it has taken to complete this issue. Thanks to Laura Mandel, who helped to inspire this project, and to Steve Jones, who has been a kind and supportive general editor at Praxis. Thanks also to Stephen M. Barber, Alexandra Cook, and Bohun B. Kinloch III for their generous attention to this work as readers and critical interlocutors. Thanks finally to Mary Cappello, who invited me to give this essay as a public lecture in the University of Rhode Island Faculty Colloquium series in spring 2010, where I received excellent support, feedback, and suggestions. I would like to dedicate this issue to those who have trained me: the dressage and three-day eventing coaches of my past as a competitive rider—Karen Ball, David Collins, and Eike von Veltheim—and my academic mentors, Julie A. Carlson, Jeffrey N. Cox, and Alan Liu.
1. I would like to extend my gratitude to the students of my fall 2008 graduate seminar Romantic Landscape at the University of Rhode Island for discussions about the intersections of the Romantic sublime and pedagogy that were not only a great pleasure but were also useful to my work here: Rebekah Greene, Rosaleen Greene-Smith, Benjamin Hagen, Eva Jones, Sarah Maitland, Sara Murphy, and Maximilian Orsini.
2. I refer most specifically to the drowned man episode of The Prelude, which has long been associated with the schoolmaster James Jackson, who taught at the neighboring village of Sawrey, and who was drowned on June 18, 1779 while bathing in Esthwaite Lake.
3. Lectures on Pedagogy is an artifact produced over the course of a decade (1776-1787) during which Kant taught a required course on practical pedagogy as a member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Königsberg. It is now collected in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant under Anthropology, History, and Education (Eds. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden. Trans. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). As the translator explains in an introductory note, Kant had offered his many teaching notes for this class to his younger colleague, Friedrich Theodor Rink, who first published them, and whose edition (much as it is impossible to know where Kant's agency might end and Rink's begins) has largely determined all future editions of the piece, including this most recent one.
4. As she makes clear here and elsewhere, Spivak's conception of imagination is diametrically opposed to sympathetic identification, in which imaginative work is intent to produce affinity and correspondence between the imagining self and its other(s) by learning to read the other as "like" the self, which causes, inadvertently or otherwise, an occlusion or negation of the unknown aspects of the other which had heretofore posed severe epistemological anxiety, contempt, indifference, or a combination of those responses. For an alternative, Spivak turns to the poetry of Wordsworth, particularly Lyrical Ballads, which she sees as modeling a "risky othering of the self" (In Other Asias 267) that precisely avoids sentimentality.
5. For critical insight on the concept of example in literary criticism more generally, see Ian Balfour's essay entitled "The Gift of Example: Derrida and the Origins of the Eighteenth Century" (Eighteenth Century Studies, 40.3 2007, pp. 467-472).
6. Paul de Man, "Time and History in Wordsworth" page 79, from Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers. Ed. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.
7. Geoffrey Shepherd suggests in an editorial note that "homo" and "equus" were familiar examples used to embellish the more abstract concepts of "A" and "B" in Scholastic argumentation. His note reads as follows: "Cp. the similar wish expressed by one of Crato's pupils in logic in De disciplina scholarium, PL 64, col. 1230 (a favourite medieval text long ascribed to Boethius but probably of 13th c. composition). Homo and equus were used as fixed terms in the syllogisms of medieval logic" (144-145).
8. I would like to thank Travis D. Williams for an illuminating discussion over this example as well as for bringing it to my attention when I offered this essay as a public lecture at the University of Rhode Island Faculty Colloquium Series in February 2010.
9. The passage to which Griffin refers is as follows:
One evening, walking in the public way,
A peasant of the valley where I dwelt
Being my chance companion, he stopped short
And pointed to an object full in view
At a small distance. 'Twas a horse, that stood
Alone upon a little breast of ground
With a clear silver moonlight sky behind.
With one leg from the ground the creature stood,
Insensible and still; breath, motion gone,
Mane, ears, and tail, as lifeless as the trunk
That had no stir of breath. We paused awhile
In pleasure of the sight, and left him there,
With all his functions silently sealed up,
Like an amphibious work of Nature's hand,
A borderer dwelling betwixt life and death,
A living statue or a statued life. (draft material MS. W, pg. 498 Norton Critical Edition of The Prelude)
10. Classical dressage is an Olympic sport the art of which has been practiced for hundreds of years and some movements of which can be traced to ancient equine pedagogy largely bent on war training, specifically the treatise On Horsemanship (350 B.C.) by Xenophon, in which he argued that horses must not be used as tools and must be loved as partners rather than forced to obey through constraint. Dressage reached the artistic zenith that still determines the way we practice the sport today during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at various courts of Western Europe, including those of Maria Teresa and of Louis XIV through Louis the XVI at Versailles.
11. The following Grand Prix musical freestyle performance of the horse/rider pair Moorland Totilas and Edward Gal at a Dutch competition in 2009 is a brilliant example not only of the art and sport of dressage generally but of the collected trot in particular: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvUDAlsLo20
12. It takes a single horse and rider on average a decade to reach the level of accomplishment required to compete in Grand Prix Olympic-level competition.
13. There are two formal qualities of Kant's example worth reflecting upon as one reflects on the comparison of the case of the horse I offer here with Kant's birds. The first, which I have explored above, is exclusivity. Kant's birds are claimed to be a sole exception and so bear the weight of that claim. The second is the almost violent brevity of Kant's bird example, to which I hope to have drawn attention through the elaborate quality of the horse example in relation to it.
14. Oliveira writes, "once the horse is dead, nothing, not even films, can reproduce the sensation felt when the horse is seen in movement. . . . After the horse is no more, only those who have admired him keep a remembrance of his quality in their hearts, which is gradually effaced by Time, and others who have not seen him know him only by romanticized tales, recounted, and sometimes embroidered, by those who have truly loved him" (118).
15. The translation of this passage changes slightly from one edition to another. In the Cambridge edition by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (1999), it reads, "one cannot learn any philosophy; for where is it, who has possession of it, and by what can it be recognized? One can only learn to philosophize" (695). In the Doubleday edition edited by F. Max Muiller (1966), it reads, "Of all the sciences of reason (a priori), therefore, mathematics alone can be learnt, but philosophy (unless it be historically) never; with regard to reason we can at most learn to philosophize"(533).
16. David Clark has been formative in my thinking on the role of the teacher in relation to the key concepts of this issue, the sublime and education; for that and for all of his wisdom and erudition from which I have had opportunity to benefit since I met him and in his written work long before that, I offer thanks.
17. I refer here to Alan Liu, my dissertation advisor, whose recent book Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (2008) gives numerous examples of a strategy of thought experimentation that permeates his writings and his pedagogy. I think with especial fondness of a graduate seminar that Alan taught in the winter of 2000 entitled The Culture of Information, in which he encouraged all of us to make presentations as thought experiments and which produced the most rigorous and yet playful interdisciplinary work in which I have ever had the pleasure to take part and from which I learned what type of teacher I myself aspire to be.