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.