A few of the chapters, arguably, are more bibliographical than historiographical, and occasionally--all good intentions notwithstanding--some
schoolmasterly judgments creep in.
Instead of merely summarizing, he takes the opportunity to offer his own brisk, forceful survey of the issues, with a good deal of bibliographical guidance (and just an occasional lapse into a slightly
schoolmasterly, no-nonsense approach to the poet's `workshop'): his main emphases fall on `narrative strategy' and on the relative freedom of the poet -- oral techniques notwithstanding -- to invent, vary, and modify.
In a
schoolmasterly judgment, he writes that Home `did the things that were expected of him conscientiously and accurately, though without a feel for the wider imaginative role' (not an Oxbridge scholarship candidate then).
SOME might call it ieducational, iwith purchases of a rather
schoolmasterly nature freely available...
His book, however, contains much humour -- albeit
schoolmasterly and understated -- and a much greater willingness to compromise than is normally given it.
Nor is the treatise easy to understand, due partly to Burmeister's
schoolmasterly bent -- he was praeceptor classicus at the town school in Rostock -- and mostly to his decision to invent new terminology.
As Maurice Bardeche has observed, The Guermantes Way is in some sense a "reprise" of Proust's earlier novel, Jean Santeuil, with the difference that the former doesn't so much eliminate as dissimulate the "ridiculous" excesses of the latter.(9) In his biography of Proust, George Painter, sometimes as helpful in his
schoolmasterly moralism as in his scholarly positivism, indicts those excesses--defects characterizing its immature author as well as its young hero--in terms stereotypically reserved for adolescence itself:
Walser's use of the verb 'belehren' ('instruct') conveys the image of a
schoolmasterly superego instilling into the childhood self a politically correct reading of memory.
"It is of absolutely crucial importance," Critchley insists in somewhat
schoolmasterly fashion, "that this second moment, that of alterity, be shown to arise out of the first moment of repetitive commentary" (27).
Top Of The Form, hosted by the
schoolmasterly Geoffrey Wheeler, I could take or leave but, after the evening news, Dad''s Army then, as now, would have been a Coleman, would be must-watch TV.
He thinks about the game and he is articulate but there are those who mock him because he can appear
schoolmasterly. What he must avoid at all costs is the cycle of animosity that he allowed himself to be drawn into when he was manager of Liverpool.
The condescending,
schoolmasterly tone Vertov adopts here is but one of the many polemical instruments, ranging from shrill denunciation to subtle on-screen critique of pre- and postrevolutionary genres, that he used in his long, losing battle against fictional, acted cinema in the Soviet 1920s and '30s.