Screening the classic: A case of re-mediation?: The new chronotope and some possible educational consequences

In an insightful fragment, Novalis notes how books are a modern form of our historical way of being and may have come to occupy the place of what was once tradition. Novalis’s dictum could well serve as an epigraph over some of the most important dimensions of the contemporary transition from the book-based school to a new techno-experiential constellation dominated by the screen and by the space of experience which it opens up. In the first part of my contribution, I investigate this transition against the background of the work of Michel Serres, Marcel Gauchet and Vilém Flusser, who – despite their opposite evaluative stances – are at one in identifying a major revolution in our way of experiencing time and history and in indicating this as a major and ‘irremediable’ discontinuity within the educational undertaking (whether it is read in negative terms, as in Gauchet, or welcomed as disclosing unprecedented educational scenarios, as in Serres). In the second part, I want to explore whether it is possible, instead, to promote a re-mediation — to idiosyncratically appropriate Bolter’s and Grusin’s phrase — of our cultural past, by not confining ourselves to indulging either in the remediating discourse of the overcoming of de-traditionalization or in the enthusiastic advocacy of the irremediable gap opened by new technologies. In this perspective, strategic are some tenets of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and his analyses about the new chronotope. By building upon them, with a specific focus on the study of the classics, I would like to explore whether and to what extent the screen could be not so much the gravedigger of historical thought as an unprecedented manifestation of it, thus updating/complementing the evolution drawn by Novalis.