Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 1 - Exemplarity and Mediocrity -- Exorbitant or Not at All -- Living the "Mean" Life (Aristotle) -- The Rule of Mediocrity (Horace) -- Exemplary Originality (Kant) -- Exemplary Averageness (Kant/Schiller) -- Higher Criticism: Appreciating Mediocrity (Kleist) -- CHAPTER 2 - The Average Audience (Lessing on Bourgeois Tragedy) -- How to Avoid a Tragic Fate -- Middle Heroes -- The Great Commonizer: Compassion -- Art Without Admiration, or, the End of the Age of Great Men -- How Many Tears Should the "Best Human" Shed? -- The Politics of Compassion -- Paving the Way for Mediocre Minds -- When Applause Becomes Suspicious -- CHAPTER 3 - The Average Artist (Goethe and Schiller on Dilettantism) -- The Stamp of the Dilettante -- The Age of Dilettantism -- The Imitation Drive -- "Much I have tried ... and neither learned nor achieved anything" (Goethe) -- The Problem of Popularity -- Art School for Nonartists -- The Art of Renunciation -- The Eternal Return of the Dilettante -- CHAPTER4 - Average Life (Grillparzer, Stifter, and the Art of Prosaic Reality) -- The Museum of Spirit -- Lives of the Nonfamous (Grillparzer) -- The Insight of the Obscure -- The Sublimity of Regularity (Stifter) -- Perceptions of the Unperceivable -- The Statistical Law -- How Gentle Is the Gentle Law? -- The Art of Prosaic Reality -- Conclusion -- REFERENCE MATTER -- Notes -- Bibliography.