Old Schools

This study looks at a puzzling pattern in twentieth-century novels and films: a continuing attraction to outdated, pre-modern schooling, even after progressive educational theory had set those methods aside. Reformers singled out Latin, a subject built on memorization, recitation, copying and repetition, and argued that it had to be modernized or removed so students could free themselves and become modern. Progressive ideas, however, were also embraced by Fascists in Italy, a fact Gramsci criticized. Drawing on his writing about the Latin classroom, the author traces how avant-garde figures, from Victorian Britain to 1970s Brazil, went back to the old school and reworked it.

The works discussed take up the old methods' rigidity and conventionality instead of rejecting them. Their constraints feel restrictive, yet that restriction is what makes resistance possible. Grammar drills become verse and repetitive lectures become voiceovers, turning practices that reformers wanted discarded into sources of critique. Writers and filmmakers such as Pater, Joyce and Pasolini keep their connections to tradition, transmission, ritual and repetitive form while responding to the pressures of modernization.

The central claim is that the pedagogies these artists devised repeat the past to increasingly radical ends, and that repetition can bring about the change it appears to block.