• The Wealthy, the Brilliant, the Few
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The Wealthy, the Brilliant, the Few

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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 e...
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  • 27 June 2021
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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.
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Price: $55.00
Pages: 276
Publisher: transcript publishing
Imprint: transcript publishing
Series: American Culture Studies
Publication Date: 27 June 2021
Trim Size: 8.86 X 5.83 in
ISBN: 9783837657296
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, HISTORY / Social History
Sophie Spieler studied American Studies, German, and English at the Universities of Greifswald, Dresden, and, as a Fulbright Scholar, at Fairfield University (CT, USA). She received her PhD from the Graduate School of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She has published on class, capital, and education as well as masculinity studies, Edith Wharton, and post-feminism.

Frontmatter 1
Contents 5
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 9
1. Introductory Remarks 21
2. Starting Points: Eliteness and Education in American Culture 21
3. 'Very Important, Very Powerful, or Very Prominent': Eliteness in America 29
4. 'Excellence and Equity': Merit as the Price of Admission 50
5. 'A Touchy Subject'? Class and Elite Education 58
6. Concluding Remarks 67
1. Introductory Remarks 69
2. Mapping the Critical Landscape 73
3. Progressivist Critiques 83
4. Conservative Critiques 95
5. Concluding Remarks 110
1. Introductory Remarks 113
2. Elite College Admissions: A Discourse of Impossibility and Pathology 118
3. A Meritocracy of Affect 123
4. Epistemological Frames: Diversity, the Good Life, Community 135
5. Concluding Remarks 170
1. Introductory Remarks 175
2. Exposition: Fiction in the Discourse of Elite Education 178
3. Prep in the Discourse: Publicity, 'Preppiness', and the Neoliberal Imagination 186
4. Diversity, Class, Mobility: Prep's Cultural Work 211
5. Concluding Remarks 242
Conclusion 249
Works Cited 257