Restlessness and disenchantment at school: Un anno di scuola by Giani Stuparich, from book to movie

Abstract

Recent historiographical perspectives dedicated to collective school memory have opened new research avenues in the way the cultural industry depicted the school, teachers, and students. This contribution follows such direction and intends to tackle the process of stratified transformations that interwove around Giani Stuparich’s narrative Un anno di scuola, (1929). This literary work resulted from a dialogue between the individual memory of the writer and the collective memory of youth during the first decade of 1900. Shared and individual memories within the cultural context of a Mitteleuropean and irredentist Trieste leave their traces in the literary work, and at the same time expand through time in the numerous editions of the text, as well as in the movie by Franco Giraldi released in 1977. The description of the school, teachers, and students is transformed into a space for imagination, where writing and re-writing influence each other, thus modifying the knowledge of the past. As a result, the past moves from one generation to the next in a dynamic flow, open to new interpretations.