Abstract

Starting from personal experiences which led him to give up teaching at the University of Venice, Alfonso Berardinelli concentrates on the difficulties and paradoxes of the relationship between educational institutions, on the one hand, and the anarchist and misanthropic character of modern literature on the other. The majority of the `classics' of modern times, from Baudelaire to Kafka, from Tolstoy to Svevo, are `scandalous' even today: one cannot teach them without trying to convey the shock of their extraneousness from the modern world and its culture. Modern literature is, in actual fact, almost always anti-modern, asocial, anti-social, apocalyptic. It is not possible to turn it into a simple `object of study' without betraying it