In his dissertation, “In the Place of Abandonment: The Poetics of Counter-Progressive Pedagogy,” Ramsey McGlazer (Comparative Literature) locates an alternative tradition within modernism whose commitment to outmoded educational forms constitutes a powerful critique of progress. Reading across the Italian and English-language contexts, McGlazer brings poetry, novels, and film into comparative conversation with histories and theories of education to consider engagements with instruction that challenge progressive discourse. Whereas this discourse and the educational reforms to which it gives rise seek to break with the past, the literary and cinematic pedagogies that McGlazer studies in Pater, Pascoli, Joyce, Pasolini, and Rocha all register the past’s persistence. In this way, they remain in touch with the traditions that progress levels while pretending to liberate. But these works make memorization, recitation, copying out, and other rote techniques serve radical ends, so that precisely their traditionalism produces other possibilities for thought.