Ellen Reiss is the Aesthetic Realism Chair of Education, appointed by Eli Siegel. The editor of The Rightness of Aesthetic Realism: A Periodical, she also teaches the professional classes for Aesthetic Realism consultants and associates.
A poet and critic herself, prior to becoming Chair of Education in 1977 Ms. Reiss taught in the English departments of Hunter College and Queens College of the City University of New York. As editor of the international periodical The Rightness of Aesthetic Realism, her commentaries on world events, literature, history, and the human self have been educating people worldwide. She is considered by many people the foremost educator in the world today.
Here are links to several issues of TRO, each with her editorial commentary on a different subject. There are many more:
Dickens, Scrooge, & a World to Be Liked. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol first appeared, to a delighted public, in 1843. The novel’s protagonist is the famous Ebenezer Scrooge. He is a means of studying what, in each of us, opposes our possible like of things in the world, and the world itself…. Read more
The Great Subject of Humor. Eli Siegel showed that every instance of true humor gives evidence that the world itself can be liked. That is because all authentic humor—from a good joke to Jonathan Swift’s great, fierce, almost unbearable satire “A Modest Proposal”—has us feel that the opposites in reality are one. All true humor puts together such opposites as hope and fear, emptiness and fullness, awryness and form. And a world in which opposites are one is a world we can see as a friend…. Read more
What Marriage Is Really For. The purpose of love, Aesthetic Realism explains, is to like the world—the wide, inclusive world of things and people—through knowing a particular person. The big mistake, the ever so frequent and ordinary crime against love, is to use a chosen person to put aside the world, feel superior to it and other human beings…. Read more
Why Don’t People Like Themselves? The life of every person is composed of the big opposites that are our Self and a wide, complete World other than our self. Both are real; but the beginning mistake of everyone is to see one’s own dear, intimate self as more real than other things. The need of our lives is to put those opposites together: to feel, “I take care of me by seeing other things and people as having the full reality I have. I have value the more I see the value of what’s not me. I want to be endlessly just to human beings, happenings, objects, history, earth, words; being fair to them is the same as my being important!”… Read more