Introduction: On Counter-Progressive Pedagogy

This introduction indicates the book’s historical and theoretical coordinates and lays out its argument. The introduction proposes “counter-progressive pedagogy” as the name for a series of surprising, often paradoxical engagements with the “old school” in modernist literature and cinema. Noting that this pedagogy characterizes the work of the figures treated in the book’s chapters—Pater, Pascoli, Joyce, Pasolini, and Rocha—the introduction also provides counter-examples from other literary and cinematic traditions, both realist and modernist. Finding a theoretical precedent and point of departure in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, the introduction discusses Gramsci’s analysis of fascist educational reforms. In its effort to modernize Italian schools and shed the dead weight of what Giovanni Gentile disparaged as outmoded, rote, and repetitive “instruction,” the fascist regime espoused progressive educational principles. Gramsci’s response to this co-optation or crux—this convergence of fascist policy and progressive theory—is instructive. Whereas Gentile sought “the liberation of the school from mechanism,” Gramsci deemed such liberation impossible. But like the other counter-progressive figures treated in Old Schools, he shows that the old school’s repetition, discipline, and even deadness—as in the deadness of the Latin language—can be radically recast and set to work to critical ends.

“Copied Out Big”

This chapter argues that James Joyce’s Ulysses seeks to counter the labor-saving and “liberating” discourse of progressive education, a discourse that begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and culminates with John Dewey. Joyce reimagines the pensum, or the punitive copying-out of text, as a model for both his own creative practice and his readers’ experience. This becomes especially vivid in Ulysses’ fourteenth episode, “Oxen of the Sun.” Here, copying the styles of others in a series of painstaking prose pastiches, Joyce also sends his readers back to school, administering a version of the labor-intensive instruction that he thematizes even while he also considers the labor that takes place in the maternity ward in which “Oxen” is set. Against Dewey’s demand that teachers do away with wastes of time for the sake of students’ freedom, Joyce sets these very wastes to work. As he makes the past palpable as dead weight that is not for all that dispensable, Joyce challenges the reproductive heteronormativity, as well as what Elizabeth Freeman would call the “chrononormativity,” that marks progressive educational theories from Émile through Dewey’s Democracy and Education. Joyce suggests strikingly that it is the old school, not the new, that shelters queer forms of life.

Among Fanciulli

This chapter reads Giovanni Pascoli’s boarding school idyll Paedagogium, a poem written in Latin in 1903, alongside his educational writings, including the essay “Pensieri scolastici,” made famous by Giorgio Agamben. In his reading of the essay Agamben abstracts the fanciullino, the small child privileged in Pascoli’s poetics, from the contexts in which the poet wrote and taught, making this child into the bearer of a “voice” prior to any and every particular instance of human speech. This reading has the advantage of drawing our attention to Pascoli’s striking claim that “the language of poetry is always a dead language.” The chapter contends, however, that Agamben obscures the things that Pascoli’s poetry does with “dead language.” The chapter returns Pascoli’s “Pensieri scolastici” to the context of its first publication: a journal for schoolteachers in which Pascoli warned of threats to the old school, but also to poetry and thought as such. Against such threats, and opposing Giovanni Gentile’s pedagogical philosophy, Paedagogium calls for the preservation of the past in its difference from the present and of the dead language in its difference from the living. Pascoli thus turns out not to celebrate, but rather to take instructive distance from, the nation.

Surviving Marius

This chapter considers Walter Pater’s late-career engagements with the old school and “mechanical exercise.” The chapter argues that these engagements index a refusal of the liberalism that Pater’s earlier work embraced. Whereas Pater’s readers have tended to understand this refusal as a “retreat,” this chapter reads Pater’s turn to mechanical and pedagogical—as well as ritual—forms as critical rather than reactionary or nostalgic. As he challenges what he sees as an impoverishment of thought, imagination, and memory in the present—a loss of contact with the past’s “complications of influence”—Pater returns repeatedly to “the older method” of instruction in his late essays, lectures, and fiction. Through their engagement with this method and other “survivals” from the past, these texts, including Marius the Epicurean, indirectly make the case for the old school. Pater shows that such a school produces or enforces a sociality that is at once temporal and spatial and thus contrasts starkly with the new school advocated by reformers, which isolates the individual student whom it privileges. Pater instead teaches us to affirm the relations that progressive education denies, relations that sustain a “reserve” that is also a minimal resistance.

Schooling in Ruins

This chapter centers on Glauber Rocha’s Claro (1975). Shot in Rome during the director’s exile from Brazil, Claro aspires, like Salò, to the condition of “ritual fact.” Like Pasolini, Rocha asks viewers to repeat the past in the interest of working through it. In order to displace “democratic imperialism,” Claro teaches, we must first return to the dead center of empire and instruction. That is, we must return to—in order to reckon with—Rome. In this way, Rocha revises his own early liberationist position and offers a corrective or key supplement to the more familiar understandings of education and emancipation found in the progressive educational writings of Paulo Freire. In Claro, Rocha makes the surprising case for an anticolonial old school. With onscreen history lessons, voiceover lectures, actors’ rote movements, and the camera’s pans, which compel returns, Claro turns its own opacity to pedagogical profit. The film complicates, rather than clarifies, easier narratives that treat emancipation as a matter of linear progress. But at the same time Rocha insists that a return to the past can enable, rather than thwart, radical change, even revolution.

Salò and the School of Abuse

This chapter revisits Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade set in the fascist Salò Republic. Challenging a critical tendency to see the film as forward-looking or indeed “prophetic,” the chapter attends to Pasolini’s complex and abiding engagements with the past. These include, the chapter argues, engagements with the obsolete forms of what Giovanni Gentile disparaged as mere “instruction.” Salò redeploys these forms as it constructs and compels viewers to inhabit an old school. For Pasolini—whose film was, he said, “conceived as a rite”—the painful, ritual re-enactment of the past becomes a means of countering the collective forgetting of fascism and an alternative to fascism’s remaining “real.” Schooling spectators in what Ernesto De Martino calls the salience of the “bad past that returns,” Pasolini refuses the postwar imperative to disavow the fascist past, to render it a mere “parenthesis.” He draws not only on Sade’s “school for libertinage,” but also on the long-discounted techniques of “instruction” in order to insist that any move beyond fascism must proceed from reckoning with it, not denial. The capacity for this reckoning is what Salò seeks to impart.