The Pedagogical Imagination: The Republican Legacy in Twenty-First-Century French Literature and Film

by Leon Sachs

Overview

French school debates of recent years, which are simultaneously debates about the French Republic’s identity and values, have generated a spate of internationally successful literature and film on the topic of education. While mainstream media and scholarly essays tend to treat these works as faithful representations of classroom reality, The Pedagogical Imagination takes a different approach.
In this study of French education and republicanism as represented in twenty-first-century French literature and film, Leon Sachs shifts our attention from “what” literature and film say about education to “how” they say it. He argues that the most important literary and filmic treatments of French education in recent years—the works of Agnès Varda, Érik Orsenna, Abdellatif Kechiche, François Bégaudeau—do more than merely depict the present-day school crisis. They explore questions of education through experiments with form.

The Pedagogical Imagination shows how such techniques engage present-day readers and viewers in acts of interpretation that reproduce pedagogical principles of active, experiential learning—principles at the core of late nineteenth-century educational reform that became vehicles for the diffusion of republican ideology.

 

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803255128
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	05/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Leon Sachs is an associate professor of French and francophone studies at the University of Kentucky.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Reading the Republican Legacy 1

1 A New Language of Learning: Object Lesson Pedagogy and the Modern Reader 24

2 Visualizing Literacy: From Pierre Larousse to Agnés Varda's Les glaneurs et la glaneuse 53

3 Teaching Suspicion: Erik Orsenna's La grammaire est une chanson douce as a Modern Tour de la France par deux enfants 81

4 A Classic Dodge: Republican Conflict and Islamic Solutions in Abdellatif Kechiche's L'esquive 112

5 Writing on Walls: Laïcité and Literary Form in François Bégaudeau's Entre les murs 145

Conclusion: The Strangeness of Republican Culture 176

Notes 191

Bibliography 209

Index 219

Editorial Reviews

“Sachs weaves together disciplines that have traditionally been distinct (literature, literary theory, reading pedagogy, film studies, history), and he does so in a way that is strikingly original and provocative.”—Mortimer Martin Guiney, author of Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic

Mortimer Martin Guiney

"The Pedagogical Imagination showcases Sachs' own fine pedagogical skills."—Lisa Connell, French Forum

French Forum - Lisa Connell