Repairing the Future of France and the New Literary Citizen

• In Event: Rethinking "Good Faith" Educational Practices Through Historical Discourses in International Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
After WWII, the French school system underwent its second most important educational reforms of the 20th century to repair those of the 1900s (Garnier, 2020; Chapoulie,2010; Prost, 2013). The objective was to democratize education by offering a classical French literary education as a new ‘literary citizenship’ and ‘common cultural reference’ to all students (Cardon-Quint, 2010). This research argues that ‘literary citizenship’ was not generated from the educational field but was one thread of a larger tapestry and uses Deleuze’s reappropriation of Foucault’s concept of historical formation to discuss how this ‘literary citizenship’ emerged.

Perspectives or theoretical framework
To delink the idea that the educational field alone generated a new literary citizen, this research uses Deleuze’s rearticulation of Foucault’s work from his lectures ‘On historical formations’ (Deleuze, 1985). As a theoretical framework, a historical formation akin to an epoque combines regimes of utterances and fields of visibility which form the conditions of possibility of common-sense and normative ideas. This research untangles regimes of utterances and fields of visibility in a kind of ‘archeology of knowledge’ to show that the notion of the literary citizen was generated from multiple interconnected sources of which education was one.


Data and Methods
Regimes of utterances and places of visibility come from a large corpus which extends beyond the educational field; therefore, my research materials as historical artifacts include some educational texts like Les Héritiers, Les étudiants et la culture (Bourdieu, Passeron, 1964), L’explosion scolaire (Cros, 1961), La Révolution scolaire (Natanson, Prost, 1963) and the following print, visual and audial texts: Le petit Nicolas (Goscinny, Sempé, 1994), a children’s book about a boy at school, Rien n’est simple, social commentary cartoons (Sempé, 1963) and Le temps des copains (Guez, 1960), TV show about non-Parisian boys attending a Parisian University. Taken together they form the tapestry from which the literary citizen emerges.

To discuss how various discourses are interrelated, I use Kristeva’s concept of ‘intertext’ and intertextuality which posits that all texts have some kind of connection, deliberate or not, to other texts and through any medium to form an intertextual assemblage (Kristeva, 1969). For my textual analysis, I use the structuralist school of discourse analysis, rhetoric and narrative theory drawing from Roland Barthes, Gérard Gennette and Roman Jakobson. In the 1950s and 1960s, French theory and methodology often overlapped. One further objective of this research is to note how Foucault and Deleuze put into practice their textual approaches.

Findings and Scholarly Significance
By using historical formations as theoretical framework to untangle and delink common sense ideas of how students are made, this research offers a theoretical and methodological framework to think about how educational discourses circulate cultural and historical assemblages that are complex and fluid and highlights the ambiguity of causality. What this research demonstrates is that the literary citizen was made plausible through entangled intertextual narratives created and then interwoven in the educational reforms making space for a new kind of literary citizen.

Author

• Britt-Marie Zeidler, University of Wisconsin - Madison