While students have emptied the last scene for two long months, is the perfect time to return to school and talk about the best job in the world (next to the oldest): Professor. Magnificent priesthood, teaching, acclaimed in theory and in practice poorly lived, is proving the perfect material for a writer multiforme. The school as a field of literary investigation, BS Johnson, and Sattouf Bégaudeau are stuck there, in styles, with objectives and outcomes for the less contrasted. Review copy immediately.
BS Johnson, British writer, moved with Albert Angelo, a reading corrosive and funny engaging the school world. Albert Albert (surname of the teacher in a snub to the Humbert Humbert of Nabokov), works hard at a college in suburban London. Her students excel in indiscipline, incompetence him. While it is not recovering from her breakup with his girlfriend, he navigates between drinking at the local pub and being very "personal" to her dear head bungs (and hard). Written in 1962, when the Beatles sang Hard Day's Night, Albert Angelo turns breathtaking modernity, as if the tough guys today that were replicas of the rooms of kids 60s. If the myth of idyllic Sixties takes a sudden slump in the education we used daily in the media (and literature) seems less hopeless. Johnson, while exploding the narrative codes, excels in transcribing the atmosphere and insolent schoolboy College, the chattering class fund and thoughts of a geek teacher who finally gets bored much as his flock. In an apocalyptic geology courses (bravura literary), the reader is near the radiator to hear jokes about Mr Albert and gossip from the sideboard behind her ear, but also near the table to gather the thoughts of the teacher (in this part of the novel, the pages are divided vertically, between words and thoughts of students of the teacher). "No, shhh, we will capture Albert. -Fuck ... "That is what the hell? You believe that? Silence! You, over there, what's on that piece of paper that amuses you so? Standing, will recover. Standing, shit, I caning, not surprisingly, the name of god ... "
With a rough and ready language, we discover not the thoughts of students (it is all spent, it was therefore memories, and then the child king in the center of the narrative, it starts to do well), but those of the teacher. The boundaries of the ethics faculty are trampled. Albert J. Albert kids facies ("orange sweater, too small, soft hair, dirty, distorted mouth"), imagines a family atmosphere ("Two kids in the same year? The damn had to quickly lay to two in one year. She had to raise the return of menses), he briefly turns a thousand times more insolent than the teenagers that "educates". If subversion ago to write about the world of school, it is hardly expected in the stripping of the curses of students (and their rebelliousness eventually classical), but in the psyche of a man who never left school, and that far from having lost his reflexes rude schoolboy has, however, advanced.
the other side of the chessboard and literary school (closer in time and agreed to treat) is The Class Francis Bégaudeau. Prison with its title, this novel delves into the daily life of a fourth class, its difficulties in communicating, conflicting reports the kids (mostly immigrant) have with the French language. Hyperrealist some say Between the walls, and non-fiction essay on the educational world, is characterized mainly by its absence or decline of perspective and his "serious" very first level. We observe what awaits. We hear the speech of a stereotypical teacher, without verve. Of those who bored us when our backs were on the benches of those same schools. From a material that requires a stylization to exist outside the "walls" Bégaudeau merely a chronological narrative and demonstrative, almost academic. Taboos of Education, teachers' frustrations, all subjects flown without ever entering the flesh, the guts back, attacking the bone, with greed or bad faith.
As Sattouf Riad, the eternal teenager, he also delivered a version of school (and illustrated). Back to College with , he plunges into the life of a third class (it reminds me of a pitch ...) where girls are plagues in power, the boys obsessed sexual abstinence, and the names of birds are flying like balls of paper on top of desks. Far from finding economic and social Bégaudeau (suburb and its horrors), Sattouf infiltrates a Parisian institution well in all respects. Taking the pulse of a more golden youth and teachers well in their shoes, it updates the mechanisms for the teen universe. Neuilly, Saint Denis, (almost) the same battle. We may deplore his vision too angelic, but Sattouf talk shows that school is not necessarily a pessimistic way of the cross. Reading is even more gratifying.
In 1964, Bryan Stanley Johnson was taking literary liberties to denounce a system educational breathless and absurd. In 2003, Riad Sattouf pinned universal mores of teenagers, with great bursts of humorous bumpers. In 2006, Francis Bégaudeau wears a white writing to defend the school and the language of Molière. Forty years between the U.S. and the Frenchies, during which the concrete situation of the school has not really changed its course, but when literature, it has sometimes lost its luster and creativity to reinvent the world education. Fortunately some still manage to laugh at it, the better to dramatize and can be change.
Albert Angelo by BS Johnson (Quidam Publisher)
The Class Francis Bégaudeau (Folio) Back to College Riad Sattouf (Hachette Books)
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