Print version: Spieler, Sophie The Wealthy, the Brilliant, the Few Bielefeld : transcript,c2021 ISBN 9783837657296
Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 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.