Damrosch: Meetings of the Mind

David Damrosch, Meetings of the Mind. PUP.

Comic in tone and serious in intent, this book gives a vivid portrait of academic life in the nineties. With campus populations and critical perspectives changing rapidly, academic debate needs to look beyond the old ideal of common purposes and communal agreement. How can we learn from people we won't end up agreeing with?

This question is explored by four very different scholars, who meet and argue at a series of comparative literature conferences: David Damrosch, liberal humanist and organizer of the group; Vic Addams, an independent scholar of aesthetic leanings (and author of The Utility of Futility); Marsha Doddvic, a feminist film theorist; and the Israeli semiotician Dov Midrash. Throughout the 1990s, in four cities, they meet and debate the problems of disciplinary definition and survival, the relation of literary theory to society, the politics of cultural studies, and the virtues and vices of autobiographical criticism.

As their partly antagonistic, increasingly serious, surprisingly fond, and always funny relationship develops, Damrosch seeks common ground with his friends despite the fundamental differences among them. Can a self-parodying deconstructionist and a Proust aficionado appreciate and improve each other's work? Can a wealthy, windsurfing medievalist and a champion of Chicana lesbian memoir find friendship?
Hilarious exchanges and comic moments, as well as cameo appearances by well-known theorists, will entertain all literary-minded readers. Academic insiders will also be reminded of the foibles and quirks of their own disciplines and departments. At the same time, this exploration of the uses and abuses of literary and cultural criticism offers a running commentary on identity politics and poses serious questions about the state and future of the academy

The Oxford Murders

The Oxford Murders (film) - Wikipedia

The Oxford Murders is a 2008 thriller film adapted from an award-winning novel of the same name by the Argentine mathematician and writer Guillermo Martínez, directed by Álex de la Iglesia and starring Elijah Wood, John Hurt and Leonor Watling.

Cinebel:

Aan de befaamde universiteit van Oxford worden een student en een hoogleraar gedwongen

om samen te werken bij het oplossen van een reeks moorden. De moorden worden telkens gekenmerkt door wiskundige tekens die wel eens naar de dader zouden kunnen leiden.

The Oxford Murders

The Oxford Murders (film) - Wikipedia

The Oxford Murders is a 2008 thriller film adapted from an award-winning novel of the same name by the Argentine mathematician and writer Guillermo Martínez, directed by Álex de la Iglesia and starring Elijah Wood, John Hurt and Leonor Watling.

Cinebel:

Aan de befaamde universiteit van Oxford worden een student en een hoogleraar gedwongen

om samen te werken bij het oplossen van een reeks moorden. De moorden worden telkens gekenmerkt door wiskundige tekens die wel eens naar de dader zouden kunnen leiden.

Voskuil, Bij Nader Inzien

J.J. Voskuil, Bij Nader Inzien. Van Oorschot

De roman Bij nader inzien, voor het eerst verschenen in 1963, is de fascinerende beschrijving van een groep studenten Nederlands in Amsterdam tussen 1946 en 1953. Met een grote rijkdom aan onvergetelijke details weet J.J. Voskuil de typisch na-oorlogse atmosfeer van het studentenleven uit die tijd op te roepen. Vooral via de talloze op studentenkamers gevoerde discussies, waarin de literatuur een belangrijke rol speelt, raakt de lezer heel geleidelijk bekend met de persoonlijkheid en de opvattingen van elk van de personages: de studenten voelen verwantschap met het gedachtegoed dat het tijdschrift Forum in de jaren ’30 uitdroeg: het denken in ‘vriend en vijand’, de nadruk op intelligentie en de afkeer van wetenschap.

Maarten Koning, alter-ego van de schrijver, leert zichzelf bij stukjes en beetjes kennen, door te letten op hoe hij reageert op verschillende situaties, alleen, of met anderen. Een centrale vraag voor hem, en daarom ook in de roman, is die naar de betekenis van vriendschap. Maarten Koning moet uiteindelijk ervaren dat vriendschap bij nader inzien niets te betekenen heeft.

Course: Campus Novel

ENGL 491:20 “The Campus Novel”
English Department, St.FX University

This course will investigate selected campus novels from Britain, the United States, and Canada. Areas of focus include the novels’ textual strategies, their various affiliations with satire, comedy, tragedy, and popular forms (the detective plot, ‘chick lit’, for example), their hybridity, and their discursive potency with respect to constructions of power, class, gender, and race. The course will also consider ways in which the ‘campus novel’ or ‘academic novel’ has been conceptualized by scholars such as Elaine Showalter, Adam Begley, Ian Carter, and Janice Rossen, and how ‘the academy’ as a site of signification resonates more broadly with cultural discourses around social institutions and the production of knowledge.

May Sarton - Faithful are the Wounds

May Sarton, Faithful Are the Wounds.
Powell's Books -

Set in the academic world of Harvard and Cambridge, this novel dramatizes the plight of the embattled American liberal in the 1950s. Its central character is Edward Cavan, a brilliant English professor, who commits suicide. His death sets off a shock wave among Cavan's friends and changes things for some of them forever.
Synopsis:
Its central character is Edward Cavan, a brilliant English professor, who commits suicide. His death sets off a shock wave among Cavan's friends and changes things for some of them forever.

Howard Jacbobson, - Coming From Behind

Howard Jacbobson, Coming From Behind

In LRB

Howard Jacobson’s first novel, Coming from Behind, was published last year, and made one think that a new exponent of the comic academic narrative had arrived. Jacobson’s hero, Sefton Goldberg, Jewish and highly suspicious of his Gentile surroundings, is aggressive towards the literature he’s supposed to be teaching, to a degree that makes Leavis seem like a nice auntie. He’s also racked by consciousness of his own literary failure. To his misery, he finds himself stranded in Wrottesley Poly, where the enfeebled Liberal Studies department is threatened with a twinning with the local football club in order to revamp its decaying image. Goldberg sits in his office, envying the World Out There, which he imagines in the form of a mansion in Hampstead called Bradbury Lodge, where celebrated writers meet to have a good laugh at his expense. Meanwhile he puts down his own hopelessness as a littérateur to his incompetence in the matter of Nature. It seems to him that all Eng Lit is really about country walks, so ‘what the fuck did it have to do with Sefton Goldberg who was Jewish and who had therefore never taken a country walk in his life?’ Wrottesley Poly, however, is as much Tom Sharpe territory as a part of the Amis-Bradbury-Lodge world, and it is in the matter of comic plotting that Coming from Behind seemed to me to fail. Jacobson’s portrayal of Goldberg is flawless, but he seems to have little idea what to do with him, and the book tails off without any great comic debacle. One therefore turns to Jacobson’s second novel in the hope that he may have learnt something about construction.