The Pedagogical Imagination: the Republican Legacy in 21st-Century French Literature and Film by Sachs, Leon (review)

Leon Sachs’s The Pedagogical Imagination: the Republican Legacy in 21^st-Century French Literature and Film sets out to examine the “parallels in the discourses of modern pedagogy and modern literary and artistic production and reception” (25). The ways in which the author draws those parallels constitute a heuristic tour de force. Sachs compellingly shows how contemporary films and narratives, a priori unrelated to supposedly obsolete Third Republic debates on education, provide the attentive reader with a critical commentary on the politics and ethics of education in contemporary France. Sachs’s research is dedicated to reading pedagogy and to the pedagogy of reading. Hence, for example, the surprise of finding the theory that the Nouveau Roman and structuralism (Roland Barthes included) are new avatars of the “leçons de choses,” the civic importance of reading, the priority of interpretation over imitation, and of reading creatively over writing mimetically.