Pub Date : 2020-01-07DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823286591.003.0001
Ramsey Mcglazer
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.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-07DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823286591.003.0003
Ramsey Mcglazer
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.
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