Physical Education and schooling process: fragments of body education in fictional and memoir literature

Abstract

The dialectical tradition teaches that one way to understand the spirit of an era is to analyze how it materializes in aesthetic form. In this sense, the present article seeks to investigate teaching practices in certain literary materials, emphasizing the roles of the Physical Education teacher and the discipline itself in fictional and memoir literature. It highlights the centrality of the school form in the constitution of modernity, and then addresses the body and its education in selected works, especially the novel Nemesis by the writer Philip Roth, whose central character is a Jewish teacher during the poliomyelitis epidemic in the United States of America in 1944. Bodily sufficiency and insufficiency, masculinity and sport, school hierarchies, anti-intellectualism, and politics are themes that emerge and gain importance through a dialectic of Enlightenment. Finally, a discussion is presented on Physical Education and its teaching, amid difficulties both in tradition and in the present time.