woensdag 28 januari 2009

Showalter Review

Saturday, October 08, 2005
Katesbookblog

The Campus Novel as Social History

Elaine Showalter, /Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and its Discontents (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

I practically grew up on a university campus. My family immigrated to Canada when I was very young so that my dad could take up an academic job here. For our first few months in the country, the university put us up in student housing. Hence the many baby pictures that show me toddling across the campus green. I spent the latter part of my teens and most of my twenties as a university student, and ultimately opted to support my fiction writing by way of an academic career. The university is an institution that looms large in my life.

It’s no surprise then that I have a fondness for campus novels or that, once alerted to its existence by this excerpt, I quickly snapped up a copy of Elaine Showalter’s /Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and its Discontents/. I thought that I would love Showalter’s book. I didn’t. I was often frustrated, occasionally irritated, and, at one point, even enraged by it.

The Headmaster Ritual

"The Headmaster Ritual" | Salon Books
Taylor Antrim, The Headmaster Ritual

Aug. 1, 2007 | The appeal of the boarding-school bildungsroman is contradictory. The classics of the genre, at least in its modern incarnation, aren't really about the privilege that permeates the setting. Indeed, an anti-materialist tone generally creeps in, and the reader is pretty much guaranteed that the protagonist will be having a miserable time. The books, then, resonate because they make geographic and social isolation stand in for the loneliness of the soul in formation. The dorms are emotional pressure cookers; the quad and dining hall and field house are stations of the cross. Mid-century offerings like "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951) and "A Separate Peace" (1960) are still in currency alongside more recent examples such as Curtis Sittenfeld's exquisite mope-fest "Prep" and the Harry Potter books, which for all their magical invention have an angst-filled hero at their core.

Set at the fictional Britton Academy in Massachusetts, 's debut, "The Headmaster Ritual," initially appears to be a modest entry into the field. With its shades of Andover ("The country's current president, at least two senators he knew of, the secretary of state: all Britton alumni"), the school is "a game preserve for New England Wasps," according to Edward Wolfe, the recently arrived headmaster. But Wolfe's pedigree is both Harvard and Students for a Democratic Society, and it soon becomes clear that he has his sights set on activities and causes beyond the school's -- and country's -- borders: namely, the plight of North Korea.

Educational Landscape

Per-Olof Erixon, Understanding the Educational Landscape through the School Novel
L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature
Volume 2, Number 1 / January, 2002
Abstract Swedish literature includes many novelsabout school experiences. These novels help usunderstand how teachers experienced changes inthe Swedish school system during the previouscentury. The most interesting novels are thosewritten by professional teachers. In thatrespect it is possible to connect this work tolife history research, an established field ineducational research for examining how privateindividuals perceived and related to events inhistory. This article I based on a researchproject entitled: ldquoEducational work in theprism of the novelrdquo.

autobiography - ldquoBildungsromanrdquo - education - life history - life story - narrative research - school novel

The School Novel. A guide.

CAMPBELL, ALASDAIR *The School Novel. A Guide to Fiction for Adults with a Background of School.*Antiqbook

Boarding School

A Good School - September 12, 2007 - The New York Sun

Boarding school novels, from John Knowles's execrable "A Separate Peace" to Curtis Sittenfeld's excellent "Prep," have long been a staple of American popular literature, even though almost no one in America goes to boarding school. Readers simply have a persistent interest in the ribald and bittersweet experiences of young people away from home for the first time. But while Louis Auchincloss's affected but engaging new novel "The Headmaster's Dilemma" (Houghton Mifflin, 177 pages, $25) takes place at a boarding school, the students are a virtual afterthought ? it's the administrators who get all the attention.

Peter Høeg Grensgevallen

'Grensgevallen' van Peter Høeg

Op een internaat wordt onder geheimhouding een project gestart om mondjesmaat 'randfiguren' ('grensgevallen') in het normale schoolleven te integreren.

Drie van hen, weeskinderen, staan in /Grensgevallen/ centraal: Peter en Katarina besluiten om het project, dat henzelf direct in hun dagelijks bestaan raakt, te ontraadselen en komen tot de ontdekking dat het verschijnsel 'tijd' de geheime kracht is achter alle regels en maatregelen die hun (school)leven lijken te domineren. Dat er met het schoolsysteem iets grondig mis is, blijkt uit het lot van nummer drie, August, die door de leiding slechts met sterke psychofarmaca kalm kan worden gehouden. De beide anderen ontfermen zich over hem zonder evenwel zijn voortdurende zelfmoordpogingen te kunnen verhinderen.

Peter Carey His Illegal Self

His Illegal Self - Peter Carey - Book Review - New York Times

On the day the book begins, Che’s sheltered life of doormen, museum visits, country house retreats and spinsterly games of ludo comes to an end. The elevator to his grandmother’s apartment opens upon a defiant young hippie, come to collect him. Beholding her, Che is “deaf, in love,” dazzled. “He had thought of her so many nights and here she was, exactly the same, completely different — honey-colored skin and tangled hair in 15 shades. She had Hindu necklaces, little silver bells around her ankles, an angel sent by God.” When he asks her, “Can I call you Mom?” she responds, “You can call me Dial.”

Dial is short for “dialectic.” A self-styled “S.D.S. goddess,” Dial has just become an assistant professor in the English department at Vassar, but she’s still caught in the ideological web of the Movement, “although what the Movement was by 1972 depended on whom you were talking to.” As the boy looks at the unknown woman, “adoringly,” giving her “little glances, smiles,” she thinks “how glorious it was to be loved, she, Dial, who was not loved by anyone. She felt herself just absorb this little boy, his small damp hand dissolving in her own.” Where does Dial want to take Che, and is it for the Movement or for herself?

Who's afraid of the campus novel?

Michael's latest book ACADEMIA NUTS gets coverage in a recent issue of the UK newspaper THE GUARDIAN
Saturday October 2, 2004

Who's afraid of the campus novel?

Universities have served writers well, offering subjects for serious study - lit crit, pc, AI - and opportunities for farce. Aida Edemariam conducts her own research

Ever since Vladimir Nabokov published his lovely, sad, ruthless and very funny novel Pnin, the beginning of term has been a staple scene in the campus novel. "The 1954 Fall term had begun... Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as 'Description of nature', or 'Irony'; and in a pretty edition of Mallarm?'s poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and scrawled above it 'birds'."

Academic & Adulterous

Academic Discourse and Adulterous Intercourse
The Atlantic


Everyone needs escape reading, and for me it’s always been campus novels. Maybe that’s because as an undergraduate I attended the two colleges about which more academic fiction has been written than any others—Bennington and Harvard. Thinly veiled Benningtons appear in a small shelf of novels by its celebrity alums, Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, and Jonathan Lethem. And as for Harvard—well, the books are legion, perhaps because life at Harvard so often seems to mimic a campus novel.

Campus Arts Admon

The campus novel. Blog Arts Admin.

Taking a break today, outside on a rare spring afternoon that actually felt like spring, conversation turned to novels about professors. There is no attempt here at anything like a comprehensive list - academics are well-represented in fiction, to say the least - or even all the campus novels I have read. These are just novels I remember having enjoyed. As always, de gustibus non est disputandum.

Satire strikes

Times Higher Education - Satire strikes unfunny chord
Satire strikes unfunny chord
27 October 1995
Bericht publiceren

Jennie Brookman, Hamburg
Germany's overcrowded and bureaucratic university system has provoked one professor into a rather un-German line of attack - satire.
Dietrich Schwanitz, professor of English studies at the University of Hamburg, caused a sensation this summer when his provocative new novel, Der Campus, was serialised in the regional daily, Hamburger Abendblatt. Bricks were thrown through a bookshop window and one venue where he gave a reading provided bodyguards.

Campis Big League

Campus novels join the big league- Education-Services-News By Industry-News-The Economic Time

Ellenberg Jordan Intvervew

Interview with Jordan Ellenberg - R A I N T A X I o n l i n e


*1.* Is /The Grasshopper King/ a campus novel? What's a campus novel, anyway?

*JE:* Campuses are interesting places for two reasons: people pursue difficult knowledge there, and kids grow up there. The part of their growing up that happens between 18 and 21 /seems to them/ to involve the acquisition of difficult knowledge, but actually most of what they learn is developmentally automatic. So from the juxtaposition of these two pursuits you get some irony, and this irony produces comic novels.

My sense is that "typical" campus novels—or at least, the novels people mean when they say "campus novel"—use that irony as follows: Look! professors think they are in search of difficult knowledge, but really they are more like adolescents at play; that is ridiculous!

/The Grasshopper King/ is maybe a bit different in that I really do believe that pursuing difficult knowledge is, at bottom, important and non-ridiculous; so I'm less interested in the ironic fate of the professors and more interested in the ironic fate of adolescents who take the analogy between their automatic development and their coursework too seriously.

Quiz campus novels

Creators of "Campus Novels": University In Fiction . Quiz.


This quiz is about the authors of ten campus (also called academic) novels. The distinguishing feature of the academic novel is that its action occurs in or around a college or university campus. Given all of the university English departments, it is not surprising that there are a plethora of campus novels or that many of these explore similar themes and have stock characters that represent academic types.

The ten novels in this quiz were published between approximately 1950, when modern academic novels started coming to market, and 2000. All of these novels were written by well regarded novelists who have had commercial success, albeit not necessarily for a campus novel.

I will give you the name of a campus novel and additional information about the book and/or its author. Based upon the clues, the task is to correctly identify each author. I think that question 6 is likely to be the hardest of the quiz. Thus, I introduce this quiz with a photo of the author who is the correct answer to question 6.

Sources: Showalter, "Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents" (University of Rennsylvania Press, 2005), "Benet's Third Edition Reader's Encyclopedia" (Harper & Row, 1987), and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.

maandag 26 januari 2009

School Daze

School Daze: The Best Novels About The Campus
By Stefan Kanfer
Minding the Campus

/"I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most
of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior."/

- Evelyn Waugh, /Decline and Fall/, 1928


Those were the days. A novelist could teach for a year or two and emerge with enough satire to fill a library. Alas, the Academy has grown more ludicrous and exaggerated with each succeeding generation and is now almost beyond parody. Today, all a smart writer has to do, in Emily Dickinson's memorable phrase, is tell the truth but tell it slant.

Showalter Interview

Showalter Intveriew

'Faculty Towers' :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
May 5, 2005
‘Faculty Towers’
Elaine Showalter opens her new book on the academic novel by noting the theory that the novel generally took off because people wanted to read about people like themselves. So it’s not surprising that Showalter, an emeritus professor of English at Princeton University, would consider the academic novel her favorite literary genre.

Forum Academic Fiction

On-line forum Academic Fiction


The apparent dearth of novels about academia suggests that there is more to life than the ivory tower. Perhaps we can put that insight to good use in the various threads that treat of failure to get tenure. "Look, there are rich fields of endeavor out there--crime, romance, and self-help!"

Malcolm Bradbury The History Man

School Daze: The Best Novels About The Campus (Originals)
Mind the Campus


Bernard Malamud, one of the triumvirate of prominent Jewish writers (the others are Saul Bellow and Philip Roth) specialized in the human condition, not the campus situation. But he, too, paid his dues as a college instructor and later used his experience to animate an overlooked novel, /A New Life/. The protagonist, Seymour Levin, is a New Yorker who snags a job teaching in the West (Malamud once taught at a college in Oregon.) Levin's very first class sets the anticlimactic tone. As the students listen to him raptly he reflects: The young people "shared ideals of seeking knowledge, one and indivisible. 'This is the life for me,' he admitted, and they broke into cheers, whistles, loud laughter. The bell rang and the class moved noisily into the hall, some nearly convulsed As if inspired, Levin glanced down at his fly , and it was, as it must be, all the way open." Malamud's gentle humor touches on Levin's late awakening of love, as well as on the professor's melancholia when he realizes he's "engaged in a great irrelevancy, teaching people how to write who don't know what to write." An overlooked work, low-key but perceptive and witty.




David Lodge on Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man | Books | The Guardian

The title of Malcolm Bradbury's third novel, published in 1975, has become a proverbial phrase, invoked in journalistic headlines and echoed by other writers (eg Alan Bennett's The History Boys) without any thematic reference to its source. To understand why The History Man impressed itself so deeply on the British collective consciousness and the English language, the novel itself must be placed in its historical context - or contexts (for there were two).

Bradbury is often labelled a "campus novelist", but in his work, as in all the best examples of the genre, the small world of the university is a stage for the dramatisation and examination of larger issues. The History Man is set almost entirely in and around the University of Watermouth, a fictitious town on the south coast of England, but it dealt with an international phenomenon, the movement for revolutionary change in social, political and cultural life which erupted in western Europe and the United States in the late 1960s, and set the progressive agenda until it ran out of steam at the end of the 70s. It was a complex phenomenon, made up of many different elements from Marxism and Maoism to rock music and recreational drugs, but it was essentially a rebellion of youth against a patriarchal old order, largely inspired by middle-aged gurus, and launched from the expanding universities of the post-war world.



if anderson

wikipedia


/*if....*/ is an award-winning 1968 feature film by British director Lindsay Anderson satirising English public school life. Famous for its depiction of a savage insurrection at a public school, the film is associated with the 1960s counterculture movement because it was filmed by a longstanding counter-culture director at the time of the student uprisings in Paris in May 1968.


Malcolm McDowell - Google Video

Amazon collections

Amazon.com: "Prep School movies/books"

Back to School

BFI | Sight & Sound | Back to School

As the final Harry Potter book approaches its publication date we still await a truly inventive screen treatment of the series. Of the four Potter films so far, only Alfonso Cuarón's Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) manages to evoke the surreal melange of Mervyn Peake, C.S. Lewis, Enid Blyton and Anthony Buckeridge that informs J.K. Rowling's vision of Hogwarts and its denizens. The Harry Potter films are the most commercially successful entries in the time-honoured British boarding-school genre. From the 1930s onwards, the stock scenario was comfortingly routine: an exploration of how our hero, a potentially recalcitrant individual, could be brought to accept the wisdom of a traditional value system. And for all their CGI wizardry, it is to this system that the Potter films have wholeheartedly returned - as though Lindsay Anderson's system-smashing If.... (1968) had never been made. The Hogwarts world of midnight escapades, school sports, rival houses and a wise headmaster surrounded by Malvolio-like teachers is familiar to anyone who has seen the boarding-school films of the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s.



BBC News | EDUCATION | Harry Potter makes boarding fashionable

Harry Potter has become the acceptable face of modern boarding schools.
According to the Boarding Education Alliance, the best-selling stories of the boy who lives in an exciting school for wizards, have helped to re-invent the image of boarding schools.
"The books have probably done more for boarding than anything else we could have imagined," says Ann Williamson, campaign director of the BEA, which represents 170 boarding schools". The Harry Potter books, which have sold in large numbers in the United States and the United Kingdom, are set in an adventure-filled boarding school where pupils learn magic and play games on broomsticks. And Ann Williamson believes that the favourable publicity from the Potter series has contributed to the "levelling off" of the long-term decline in boarding.

Mary McCarthy The Groves of Academe

American fiction. Suite
/The Groves of Academe/, by Mary McCarthy, is a hilariously satirical campus novel from the 1950s. It makes a striking contrast with its contemporary in the genre, /Lucky Jim/, by Kinglsey Amis: where /Lucky Jim/ is focussed on the frustrated antics of one character, and narrated from his point of view, /The Groves of Academe/ is detached, ironic and ranges over a number of characters, never letting quite letting the reader know everything.

The plot of /The Groves of Academe/ revolves around a minor liberal college in the 1950s, and particularly the problems in the literature faculty. The possible dismissal of the devious, self-serving professor Henry Mulcahy takes up much of the book, with running political battles being fought on the basis of alleged verbal promises about contracts, suspicions of past Communist affiliations, and triple-distilled emotional blackmail. The professors hog the limelight in this campus novel: students, when they appear at all, tend to be either provide general; scenery and atmosphere, or anecdotes with which to praise or blame a faculty member in committee.

Like many campus novels, /The Groves of Academe/ makes a great deal of material out of rather few events. Everything is analysed, discussed, analogised, and even at one point submitted to the demand “What would Tolstoy do?” Far from being irritating, however, this over-analysis provides much of the novel’s claustrophobic atmosphere, and McCarthy is evidently satirizing the characters whose meticulous and sometimes tortuous thought patterns she records. In a telling line, a “poet of the masses”, who has been invited to a conference at the college tells himself “Possibly they were all very nice high-minded scrupulous people, with only an occupational tendency toward back-biting and a nervous habit of self-correction”. Even in this brilliant barb however, McCarthy leaves ambivalence in the “perhaps” and “only” – and leaves the reader wondering how far the poet has appreciated what is going on around him.

Unlike the academic novels of Tom Sharpe (/Porterhouse Blue, Grantchester Grind/), her satire does not rely on farcical capers or grotesquerie, but rather on giving her characters enough rope, if not to hang themselves, then certainly to become hopelessly entangled. Her lightness of touch whilst indulging in pages of apparently academic discussion or the Byzantine politics of the college, recalls Robertson Davies’ /The Rebel Angels/, but there is an edge of criticism in McCarthy which Davies’ good-humoured humanism lacks.

Though it deals with a very enclosed and parochial world, at a very specific point in history, /The Groves of Academe/ has failed to date over the last fifty years. It is still an absorbing, devious comedy, and its implied critique of academic life comes quite close to the bone at times.

Nabokov

Cycnos |Nabokov and the Campus Novel



Vladmir Nabokov's /Pnin/, (1955) is, in one of its many aspects, a very early example of the “campus novel”, written and published before that subgenre of modern literary fiction was identified and named. In /Pale Fire/ (1962) Nabokov returned to the university campus for the principal location of his story. I will try to identify the specific nature of Nabokov's contribution to the evolution of the campus novel and his possible influence on other practitioners of this kind of fiction.

Alison Lurie

Scenes from a marriage unfold amid academic rivalries and campus politics.
By Jonathan Yardley

Washington Post. Sunday, October 16, 2005;

So it goes in the groves of academe as envisioned by Alison Lurie, who has made a career out of writing satirical novels about love and its discontents among the professoriat. The best of these, /The War Between the Tates/ (1974), nicely impales its academics against the background of the 1960s counterculture, and /Foreign Affairs/ (1984) does the same against the background of Anglo-American rivalries and tensions. Still, by contrast with the most rapier-like American practitioners of the academic novel, Randall Jarrell and Mary McCarthy, Lurie tends toward a kinder view of her professors and administrators, perhaps because she has spent the past three and a half decades teaching literature and other subjects at Cornell, where she is now professor emerita. She is both of the academic establishment and apart from it, and her tightrope-walking act is often apparent in her fiction


/Truth and Consequences/ is a case in point.(...)

Still, the novel moves along briskly. Jane is 40, Alan about a dozen years older. She is the administrative director of Corinth University's Matthew Unger Center for the Humanities (MUCH), "an endowed facility for visiting scholars and artists housed in a handsome Victorian mansion just off campus." Alan is a fellow in history at the center, with a specialty in 18th-century architecture; he has an endowed chair at the university but has been shuffled off to MUCH in the hope that it will place less strain on his back, since he will "have peace and quiet and no stairs to climb."

Showalter

Showalter, From David Lodge to David Brent? Times Higher Education -

Over the past 50 years, the faculty novel, or Professorroman, has offered a social history of the university as well as a spiritual, political and psychological guide to its professional culture. I called my personal take / Faculty Towers / , in reference both to Trollope's / Barchester Towers / , the archetypal Victorian clerical novel; and to the archetypal TV series / Fawlty Towers / , about an irascible and deluded hotel owner. Now / Faculty Towers / , revised for British readers, is being published by Oxford University Press.
(...)

This would update the campus-election plot created by C. P. Snow but bring it into connection with the management styles of the 21st-century university. As Lodge commented recently on / Changing Places / , the differences between American and English higher education are no longer as stark and funny as they were in the 1960s: "The two systems have drawn closer together: American universities have become less euphoric places, English universities more competitive, as have the countries to which they belong." But those changes could also be subjects of a new academic fiction, even if the common room now resembles / The Office / and assistant professors are as cutthroat as the contestants in / The Apprentice / .

Myth and reality

Myths and Realities for Today's College Professors; or, Et in Arcadia Ego -- Winkelman 5 (2): 175 -- Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture

Myth and reality

Myths and Realities for Today's College Professors; or, Et in Arcadia Ego -- Winkelman 5 (2): 175 -- Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture

Satire in the Ivory Tower Gets Rough; You Can't Make an Academic Spoof Without Breaking a Few Eggheads
By SARAH BOXER
Published: October 21, 2000 NYT
Once upon a time, the world of academic satire seemed to be a British protectorate. Kingsley Amis's ''Lucky Jim'' set the rules of the game and David Lodge's trio of academic farces, ''Changing Places,'' ''Small World'' and ''Nice Work,'' earned him an adjective: Lodgean.
There were, of course, American attempts. The mid-1950's were bountiful years, bringing ''The Groves of Academe,'' Mary McCarthy's novel about a man who tries to save his job by pretending that he's a blacklisted Communist; ''Pictures From an Institution,'' Randall Jarrell's spoof of Mary McCarthy as she was writing that novel; and ''Pnin,'' Vladimir Nabokov's tale of a Russian professor in America with a tenuous grip on the English language.
But this year the American campus novel has staked out rougher territory, something more tragic. Three new novels have appeared in 2000: ''Ravelstein,'' Saul Bellow's fictional memoir about the death of Allan Bloom, his high-living friend at the University of Chicago; ''The Human Stain,'' Philip Roth's tale of a professor ruined by his use of the word ''spook''; and ''Blue Angel,'' Francine Prose's novel about a professor undone by his student's sexual harassment plot and novel. This trio followed fairly closely on the hooves of ''Moo,'' by Jane Smiley, and ''The Handmaid of Desire,'' by John L'Heureux.
What has changed? What has made these later works darker?

Dai Sijie Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

ReadingGroupGuides.com -

In 1971, as Mao's Cultural Revolution swept over China, shutting down universities and banishing "reactionary intellectuals" to the countryside, two teenage boys are sent to live on the remote and unforgiving mountain known as Phoenix in the Sky. Even though the knowledge the narrator and his best friend Luo had acquired in middle school was "precisely nil," they are nevertheless considered dangerous intellectuals and forced to spend their days carrying buckets of excrement up and down the mountain to fertilize the fields. But when they bargain their way into obtaining a forbidden Balzac novel from their friend Four Eyes, a new and dizzyingly vast world opens up to them. Through Balzac, the narrator discovers "awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden" [p. 57]. And when Luo falls in love with the beautiful Little Seamstress, life and literature come together in a passionate romance. Luo and the narrator plot to steal Four Eyes' suitcase full of books both for their own pleasure and to transform the seamstress from a simple peasant into a sophisticated woman. Their success in doing so, and the unexpected consequences that follow, drive the novel to its stunning, heart-wrenching conclusion.

Part historical novel, part fable, part love story, *Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress* is a moving testament to the transformative power of literature.

Patrick McCabe The Dead School

The Dead School by Patrick McCabe

ReadingGroupGuides.com -



From the award-winning author of The Butcher Boy comes a new novel of extraordinary power that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "confirm[s] McCabe's standing as one of the most brilliant writers to ever come out of Ireland."

In The Dead School, Patrick McCabe returns to the emotionally dense landscape of small-town Ireland to explore the inner lives of two men: a headmaster and a schoolteacher, each man the product of a soul-stifling culture, each battling his own demons of loss and betrayal. Tension coils--until tragedy strikes a young student in their charge, and the latent despair and rage that has festered in their hearts explodes onto the page. As in The Butcher Boy, McCabe demonstrates his remarkable command of the vernacular and an uncanny ability to pinpoint the exact moment when ordinary minds take flight into madness. Equally compelling, equally heartbreaking in its impact, The Dead School has established McCabe as one of the most celebrated writers of literary fiction today.

Curtis Sittenfeld Prep

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

ReadingGroupGuides.com -


Curtis Sittenfeld's debut novel, *Prep*, is an insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.

Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school's glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.

As Lee soon learns, Ault is a cloistered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantucket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of --- and, ultimately, a participant in --- their rituals and mores. As a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider and is both drawn to and repelled by other loners. By the time she's a senior, Lee has created a hard-won place for herself at Ault. But when her behavior takes a self-destructive and highly public turn, her carefully crafted identity within the community is shattered.

Ultimately, Lee's experiences --- complicated relationships with teachers; intense friendships with other girls; an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boyfriend and more than a crush; conflicts with her parents, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant, coalesce into a singular portrait of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.

Haruki Murakami Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

ReadingGroupGuides.com

This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed *Wind-Up Bird Chronicle* has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event.

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

A poignant story of one college student's romantic coming-of-age, *Norwegian Wood* takes us to that distant place of a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.

Joyce Carol Oates I'll Take You There

I'll Take You There by Joyce Carol Oates

ReadingGroupGuides.com

*I'll Take You There* is told by a woman looking back on her first years of college, at Syracuse in the 1970s. Her story, softened by the gauze of memory and the relief of having survived, nonetheless captures a harrowing ordeal of alienation and despair, heightened by a wrenching interracial love affair and her father's death.

Cursed by insatiable yearning and constant dissatisfaction, "Anellia" has always been haunted by her mother. With her father and brothers making her feel responsible for her mother's death, she longs for acceptance and the warmth of human compassion. When Anellia begins college, she naively seeks that compassion at a sorority house, with disastrous results. Gradually she descends to deeper levels of estrangement, until she is nearly an outcast. She is swept up in a turbulent love affair with a black philosophy student only to be abandoned. Her sense of rejection reaches a turning point when she's called away to be with her dying father.

With deftly cast philosophical meditations -- on love, death, identity, the body -- *I'll Take You There* is a portrait of a young woman surprised to discover strength in simply enduring. It is a thought-provoking meditation on the existential questions that arise in burgeoning adulthood, a tender evocation of the dignity and power of young love.

J.M. Coetzee Disgrace

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee


ReadingGroupGuides.com


Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced.

Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie—whom he describes as having hips “as slim as a twelve-year-old’s”—obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts. In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa. But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers. Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point.

Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, *Disgrace* explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.

Phillop Roth The Human Stain

The Human Stain by Phillip Roth

ReadingGroupGuides.com

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of /The Wall Street Journal/, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

Pamuk Snow

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

ReadingGroupGuides.com


*3.* While Ka and Ipek are having coffee in the New Life Pastry Shop, they witness the murder of the director of the Institute of Education. Discuss the conversation between the Institute director and the young man who has been sent to assassinate him [pp. 38–48]. What are the elements that make the scene so effective?

*5.* Ka's conversations with Muhtar, Blue, the boys from the religious high school, Sheikh Efendi, and Kadife [chapters 6, 8, 9, 11,13] explore the gap between traditional Islam and Western secularism. How do these conversations affect Ka's sense of his spiritual condition? How strongly does he need to identify himself as a secular intellectual, and why is the possibility of his own belief in God, which he admits to, so unsettling to him?

Tobias Wolff Old School

Old School by Tobias Wolff

ReadingGroupGuides.com -

The protagonist of Tobias Wolff's shrewdly --- and at times devastatingly --- observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself.

The agency of revelation is the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying alliances, exposing weaknesses, *Old School* explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master.

Showalter review

The campus novel and its writers
Contemporary Review, Autumn, 2006 by Stephen Wade
Faculty Towers. Elaine Showalter. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]12.99. 166 pages. ISBN 0-19-928332-X.

Carter New England White

New England White - Stephen L. Carter - Books - Review - New York Times


For one thing, he has spiked his thriller with wryly affectionate campus satire, somewhat in the vein of Randall Jarrell’s “Pictures From an Institution.” President Carlyle is threatened with a no-confidence vote for seeking to merge the gender studies and women’s studies programs. And Carter has fun with the ambiguous function of “a divinity school that only half believed in God.”

Roberto Bolano 2666

Roberto Bolano, 2666. Macmillan.
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

"His masterpiece ... Bolano borrows from vaudeville and the campus novel, from noir and pulp, from science fiction, from the Bildungsroman, from war novels; the tone of his writing oscillates between humor and total darkness, between the simplicity of a fairytale and the false neutrality of a police report." --Minh Tran Huy, LE MAGAZINE LITTERAIRE (Paris)

Entre les Murs

Uit: Word Press

The film starts with a few people in cars and on trains - teachers on their way to the first day of school. It’s a tough middle school in Paris. The new and old teachers introduce themselves, all chitchat, try to trade classes, ask about what books to use, look at each other’s class lists. And we meet François Marin, who teaches French to a class of roughly 8th or 9th graders. And for the rest of the film we stay in school, between the walls (the French title), and with M. Marin.

The class is mostly immigrants and children of immigrants: from Mali, from Morocco, from China, from the Carribean (probably from other places, as well, but we don’t learn where everyone is from). The kids are rowdy at times, focused at others. Their French is laced with slang, foreign words, and, occasionally, profanity. Some participate, you know the posture, leaning forward, arm fully extended, up and forward (but they don’t say “me me me me me”). Some lean back, laugh, don’t pay attention. (continues beneath the fold)

They talk back. He talks back. They say things they shouldn’t. So, at least once, does he. There’s parent conferences, trips to the office. There’s also a few scenes with other teachers, with administrators. We don’t see their classes, though, just a bit of their conversations with François.

There’s just enough of a story to follow. But that class! This is not Boston Public or Welcome Back Cotter (or Room 222) or Wonder Years. It is not Blackboard Jungle (filmed here in the Bronx, Wootwoot!), or Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Heathers or Carrie or The Breakfast Club. It feels very very real. Much realer than even Dazed and Confused. And for good reason.

The cast: one actor*. All others are real teachers, real students. The author plays himself. The scenes are mostly improvised. The kids never had a script in hand. The former teacher who wrote the book the film is based on, consulted, and removed anything that seemed unrealistic. Fifty students participated in a year long workshop - and 24 of them ended up in the film. They play characters, not themselves, but do it incredibly naturally. (*playing a parent)

Go see the film, and then read the interview with Director Laurent Cantet and Author François Bégaudeau. (From the main page click “The Film” and then “Laurent Cantet and Francois Begaudeau Interview”). Click each line, and scroll through. It is amazing how they pulled this off. Two quotes:

I wanted to film those incredible oratory moments that are so
frequent in a classroom, where relevance or strength of position
doesn’t matter much and what counts above all is to have the last
word. This is a game at which adolescents excel, a sort of no-exit
rhetoric into which the teachers are often pulled in as well.

We explained the situation to the two or three students featured in
the scene… But they did not know how we got to this stage. As for
the others, they discovered what was going on bit by bit during the
take. François guided the scene like a classroom course, and I
intervened during the take, honing in on the scene, asking one
person to be more precise, asking another to respond to a retort,
etc. Each time it was amazing to see them take off again instantly,
with the same energy they had before I interrupted them, while
perfectly integrating my suggestions.

I watched The Class with another teacher (a former chapter leader from a former high school). I think it helped to be able to poke each other when we recognized something. And we did. The teacher did some nice things, got some discussion going, teased gently. I thought he crossed lines as well, made mistakes, embarrassed a kid unnecessarily. And then the circular reasoning in the teachers’ discussions, the awkward pauses. It felt like school.

It was fun to watch. Teachers may find some extras in it (maybe not) but I think everyone will enjoy this one. (Reviews: Cinematical; Le Monde (Fr))

The Class (Entre les Murs). French with subtitles. 129 minutes. Opened in NY and LA through today (Christmas), will have a wider opening early 2009.

Entre les Murs

Cannes 2008 diary: 'The Class' (’Entre les Murs‘) with Time Out Film - Time Out London

Cannes 2008 diary: 'The Class' (’Entre les Murs‘)
Geoff Andrew loves the new film from Laurent Cantet, the French director of the masterful 2001 film 'Time Out'


Directed and co-written by Laurent Cantet (‘Human Resources’, ‘Time Out’), the film is set in a school in the Parisian suburbs; indeed, with the exception of a handful of brief scenes shot in the staff room, the corridors, and the playground, the entire movie is set in one classroom, where François (François Zegaudau), a French teacher of some four years standing, attempts to instill some sort of discipline and enthusiasm for learning into a motley, multicultural group of 13- and 14-year-olds.

The movie initially comes on like a documentary, with Begaudau – a teacher who has written several novels – interacting with the sassy, loquacious and frequently very imaginative real-life students at a school in the 20th arrondissement. Gradually, however, a narrative thread beings to emerge from the sometimes heated, sometimes cordial, always fertile dialogue between the teacher and his pupils, as one of the latter – a Malian boy called Souleymane – begins to stand out as unprepared to take part in quite the same way as his peers. As problems start to arise, Cantet and Begaudau tease out and explore a range of relevant issues to do with contemporary education.

Everything rings absolutely true in this film, and everything is utterly engrossing from start to finish, despite the apparent lack of a straightforward narrative during the first hour. At the end, *in a delightfully unexpected allusion to Plato’s ‘Republic’, the filmmakers drop a hint as to what they’ve been up to; there are no easy answers proffered to the various questions raised about education, schools and society, but the film makes for admirably lucid, subtle and thought-provoking drama throughout. And the kids are terrific.*

*Author:* Geoff Andrew

Snijders leraar-schrijver

‘Bordeaux met ijs’ gepresenteerd, de tweede dikke bundel met een door hem zelf ontwikkeld genre: het ZKV, dat staat voor ‘Zeer Kort Verhaal’. A.L. Snijders is een pseudoniem van schrijver en columnist Peter Müller. Lees en hoor meer over A.L. Snijders , op http://boeken.vpro.nl/avondlog/ en ‘De Wereld draait door’ van 17 december 2008.

A.L. Snijders

Kees Fens in de Volkskrant over de schrijver A.L. Snijders, en specifiek over een verhaal over zijn leraar:

Snijders zit op het Spinozalyceum in Amsterdam, in een verstikkende buurt’, in de troostloze jaren vijftig, met veel angst voor repities, zijn leraar Latijn heet Willems):

“Maar Willems boorde gaten in die pudding van angst. Hij vertelde ons dat we ons bij de mens moesten houden (hij was humanist), dat het christendom een verderfelijke ideologie was en dat we naar Schubert moesten luisteren. Aan zo’n leraar heb je wat, meer is er eigenlijk niet te vertellen.” Zo hoort het.


Kees Fens, Gaten in die pudding van angst. Volkskrant. 22.2.2008.


Snijders (1937) was tot zijn pensioen leraar Nederlands aan een politieschool.
A.L. Snijders, Heimelijke vreugde 1. Thomas Rap. 2008.

Wiener De Miskende Mens

De miskende mens Wiener | NRC Boeken

L.H. Wiener: Allemaal licht en warmte. Contact.

Allemaal licht en warmte gaat over een wanhopig drinkende leraar Engels te Haarlem die onverkochte boeken schrijft en die door iedereen verlaten wordt. Waarschijnlijk lijken de personages sprekend op de schrijver en zijn de verhalen autobiografisch. Zijn moeder gaat dood, zijn vriend gaat dood, zijn kraai vliegt uit, zijn vriendin maakt het uit. De schrijvende leraar laat zich kennen als een verongelijkte mensenhater die zichzelf zielig en belangrijk vindt.

Wiener Eindelijk volstrekt alleen

Eindelijk volstrekt alleen
Wiener, L.H.

Autobiografisch getint relaas van de wording van een schrijver.

Werkelijkheid en fictie zijn in het werk van deze Nederlandse schrijver (1945) nauwelijks te scheiden. Eenzaamheid, in eerder werk opgezocht of opgedrongen gekregen, wordt hier tot een definitieve levensstaat gemaakt. Dit boek is een afrekening met zijn omgeving om definitief afstand te kunnen nemen. Wieners belangrijkste bevrijding is die van zijn literaire alter ego Victor van Gigch, *leraar Engels aan een middelbare school in Haarlem*. Allerlei onderwerpen, in verschillende genres vormgegeven, passeren de revue: vrouwen, s*chool en onderwijs*, uitgevers, literatoren, literair recensenten die achteloos aan zijn werk voorbijgingen (bijvoorbeeld zijn oud-leerling Jeroen Vullings, chef literatuur van Vrij Nederland). Verstopt in de zakelijke, soms venijnige afrekeningen ook verwijzingen naar zijn fysieke perikelen, en daarmee naar het afscheid van het leven. Dit autobiografische boek is onderhoudend, bondig en onderkoeld geschreven met rake metaforen: 'hoe zondiger de levenswandel, hoe langer men moet lopen'. Wiener zegt ergens in dit boek: 'Schrijvers schrijven hun eigen werkelijkheid en hun eigen geschiedenis (..)'. Daarvan is dit boek een mooi voorbeeld. Kleine druk.

Recensent NBD|Biblion : Gerard Oevering

Wiener Interview

Interview:
Het Andere Boek

"Wat mijn zelfbeeld betreft, denk ik dat ik redelijk goed wegkom met mezelf. Als ik een gedachte heb als 'jongen, je bent een lafaard, je bent veertig jaar lang leraar geweest, terwijl je je beter al die tijd fulltime aan je schrijverschap zou hebben gewijd', dan besef ik tegelijkertijd dat zulks onzin is. Ik zou geen betere schrijver zijn geweest wanneer ik nooit les had gegeven. Ik ben er mij met andere woorden van bewust dat ik mezelf niets te verwijten heb. Temeer omdat ik het waarschijnlijk acht dat ik, mocht ik geen vaste betrekking hebben aangehouden, jarenlang als een bohemien in de kroeg zou hebben gewoond en er nu allang niet meer zou zijn."

'Het waren de leerlingen die hem gaande hielden, die hem kracht gaven, die hem opbeurden', luidt het in Nestor. Vreest u soms, wars van alle misantropie, dat uw recente pensionering en het daaruit volgende feit dat u nu 'eindelijk volstrekt alleen' nog schrijver bent een onverhoopte vorm van eenzaamheid mee zal brengen?

"Dat moet ik nog afwachten. Als ik na het binnenkomen van het klaslokaal de deur achter me dichttrok, sloot ik mij samen met mijn klas af van de boze buitenwereld. En een zinnetje dat ik dan vaak gebruikte, was 'Je mag niet tegen me jokken. Buiten móéten we jokken, meejokken met de leugenaars, maar hier doen we dat niet.' Zo creëerde ik een eigen, betere wereld, zowel voor mezelf als voor de leerlingen. En zo zou je zeker ook kunnen zeggen dat ik een andere man was in mijn lokaal dan erbuiten. Als leraar was ik aardig."

In het klaslokaal was u zichzelf?

"Een zeer goede vraag, want dat weet ik dus niet. In ieder geval was ik in sociaal opzicht als leraar op mijn best. Ik kon die rol als leraar als het ware van nature spelen, zeg maar, paradoxaal als het dan klinkt. Die rol ging mij goed af.

(...)
"Overigens heb ik ook nooit toegestaan dat van mijn leraarschap een censurerende werking op mijn literaire werk uitging: zuipen, bordeelbezoek, het staat er allemaal in, en daar heb ik gelukkig ook nooit last mee gehad, al dan niet omdat ik er als uitgesproken autobiografisch schrijver toch altijd op ben blijven hameren dat ik, net als alle schrijvers trouwens, sowieso fictie schrijf. Je moet altijd zeggen dat je fictie schrijft, dan ben je in één klap van het gezeik af."

Wiener De verereing van Quirina

Boekverslag De verering van Quirina T. door L.H. Wiener | scholieren.com

*Titelverklaring*
“Quirina T.(aselaar) ” is de naam van het meisje dat als leerlinge in de klas zit bij Victor van Gigch. Hij is leraar Engels in Haarlem en hij wordt verliefd op het meisje, dat hem ook seksueel probeert uit te dagen. Het brengt hem in relatie met vrouwen die eerder indruk op hem hebben gemaakt, zoals de moeder van zijn vriendje Niels, Catharina van Nyenbeek , op wie de veertienjarige Victor straal verliefd was geworden. “Hij geeft in de roman ook een keer aan dat hij haar “vereerde”. Dat doet dus denken aan een soort godin.

(...)

Heel veel gegevens van Wiener zijn terug te vinden in Victor. Zo is er bijvoorbeeld het leraarschap van Wiener/Van Gigch in Haarlem. Wiener haalt uit naar de Tweede fase, de nieuwe vorm van onderwijs. Hij wil daar eigenlijk helemaal niet mee te maken hebben en kiest in zijn baan ervoor om tenslotte alleen maar onderbouwklassen les te geven.


(...)
De schrijver L.H. Wiener deelde mij daarover het volgende mee: /“Deze scène staat in het Engels, evenals andere al te emotionele herinneringen, omdat Victor er zijn ‘moeders taal’ niet mee wil bezoedelen. Victor is leraar Engels en ‘vlucht’ in die taal als het hem teveel wordt. Dat fenomeen doet zich ook in mijn boek Nestor.

zondag 25 januari 2009

Elegy - The Dying Animal

Elegy. Website.

Movie Review - Elegy - Extracurricular Lessons for Student and Teacher - NYTimes.com

Extracurricular Lessons for Student and Teacher

In the novel Kepesh is pathetic and self-loathing, but perversely enthralling because Mr. Roth’s prose is. Kepesh detests his decaying (dying) body and worships Consuela’s ripe (blooming) one. In the film, directed by Isabel Coixet and written by Nicholas Meyer (he adapted Mr. Roth’s “Human Stain” to the screen), Kepesh is cool and watchful and Mr. Kingsley plays him without a trace of plausible weakness.

Roth The Dying Animal

Review: The Dying Animal by Philip Roth | Books | The Guardian

Barely a year after The Human Stain, the triumphant closing of his trilogy of post-war America, Roth is back with a coda, a short book in which he resurrects an earlier character: David Kepesh, the man who wanted to turn into a breast and whose life history we heard in The Professor of Desire (1977). We last saw Kepesh, the son of Catskill Mountain resort operators, established in academia with one disastrous marriage behind him. In a moment of supreme self-knowledge, looking at the body of the woman he loves, he recognises that his desire for her won't be sustained - that passion will turn to duty, and that he is both powerless to prevent this sexual boredom in himself and unwilling to contemplate the hypocrisy of adulterous married life.

Kepesh is now in his 60s, still an academic but nominally a celebrity, at least in New York, for his role as a cultural critic on public-service TV and radio. His creed remains his own declaration of sexual independence, pointing out to his estranged, disapproving son that America itself is founded on freedoms, so why constrain yourself? "Because only when you fuck is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely if momentarily revenged. Only then are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself."



The Dying Animal (Movie Tie-in Edition/Elegy) by Philip Roth - Trade Paperback - Random House. Guide.

The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of Philip Roth’s *The Dying Animal*.

Chetan Bhagat campus


Techie Lit: India's New Breed of Fiction
Interview with Chetan Bhagat

The success of his first book, Five Point Someone, a campus novel following three best friends at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, took him by surprise. "I didn't have the baggage of other Indian authors," he says. "I just wanted to write a fun book."
And so he did — the characters get drunk, fall in love and steal exam papers — but Five Point Someone also taps into the pressures facing students at India's élite educational institutions. One character's brilliant research proposal gets shelved because he's considered an underachiever, with a "five-point-something" grade average. Another nearly breaks down under the pressure from his mother to find a job that will pay for his father's medical bills and sister's dowry.


Benjamin Markovits

3:AM Magazine » A General Love Of Books: An Interview With Benjamin Markovits

*3:AM:* All four of your novels have had an academic aspect, whether it is writing about teachers, from the point of view of academics, or bringing to life set-text Byron and his nearest and dearest. Could you imagine yourself creating something without academia so woven into it, and why do you think academic subjects are so creatively suggestive for you?

*BM:* Good question, by which I mean, I find the answer embarrassing. The truth is, I’m the child of academics and grew up, like many people, knowing nothing better than the world of school. It’s helpful to know a world well if you want to write about it, so I write about teachers, professors and students. I’d distinguish between the /The Syme Papers/which is properly a campus novel, and the other books, though. Even high school seems to me to belong to a different kind of thing than university: everybody goes to high school, after all. And the Byron novels don’t strike me as very academic. They have more to do with a general love of books, and the kind of people who view their lives through books.

Lodge Deaf Sentence

Review: Deaf Sentence by David Lodge | Books | The Observer

Desmond is enthused to learn of a new book about his condition, Being Deaf, until a trip to Waterstone's reveals this to be Jim Crace's novel Being Dead. We find ourselves earwigging on one such skewed conversation as the novel opens. A tall, bespectacled, grey-haired man is 'nodding sagely' at a young blonde. Desmond cannot understand a word, but pretends to agree wholeheartedly. He later learns he's offered to help a graduate student with her dissertation. Desmond is a professor of linguistics, a fact that only serves to heighten the bathos of his condition.

Deaf Sentence is Lodge's first return to the campus novel since 2001's zeitgeisty Thinks, an audacious fictive take on cognitive science. Now we are back in familiar territory, in a place approximating Rummidge (the name is never given). 'Post-campus' might be a better definition of the genre, for Desmond has recently stopped working. The quiescence of retirement is mirrored by the prose; both the novel and its subject potter agreeably.


http://johnboyne.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/may-reading/

I’ve long been a fan of David Lodge’s fiction and *DEAF SENTENCE *was a wry, thoughtful novel about an ageing professor, Desmond Bates, who (like Lodge himself) has suffered increasing deafness in old age and must confront the demands of an elderly father, arrogant wife and possibly psychopathic postgraduate student while not being able to hear any of them very well. The premise sounds like a typically funny Lodge campus novel but it’s darker than you might expect and all the better for that. With the exception of a slightly unresolved plot strand (the student) it’s an inventive piece of work with some wonderful set-pieces (the sauna scene in particular).

Campus Novel India

Campus novel India
The Week

There have been many bestsellers this year, including Anuja Chauhan's The Zoya Factor which blends India's two obsessions, cricket and romance and Karan Bajaj's Keep Off The Grass, a campus novel that has been bought by the producers of The Dark Knight for a film. The rather disappointing, but much-hyped Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's You Are Here did well and even the bare-it-all Anita Jain's Marrying Anita sold in large numbers.

Thrillers, chick-lit, campus novels and children's fiction and non-fiction are now being experimented within India. They are available at an unbeatable price of a little over a multiplex movie ticket. "It has been a year of big books," says a spokesperson for Om Book Shop, Delhi. "It has been a particularly good year for Indian authors." Mohammed Hanif with his A Case of the Exploding Mangoes and established authors like Jhumpa Lahiri created an alternate world and characters that live on.


Campus Novel - Big League

Campus novels join the big league
17 Nov 2007, 0124 hrs IST, Sushmita Mohapatra & Savitha V, TNN

BANGALORE: In a market where a book is considered a bestseller if it sells 3,000 copies, Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone — a novel set on the

IIT campus and based on student life — broke records when it sold over 50,000 copies. It might also have earned itself a place in the history books as the trigger for a trend that might have shaken up the Indian publishing industry.

That trend is the campus novel. Books like Bombay Girls, Bombay Rains; Keep Off the Grass; Anything For You Ma’m; Everything You Desire and Joker In The Pack are now trying to replicate the success of Five Point Someone.

“Demographics also boost the popularity of such campus books, with half the country below the age of 25,” says Crossword Bookstores head, operations and marketing, Aniyan Nair. Six out of 10 such titles have done an average of 3,000-4,000 copies, making the genre well worth betting on for publishers.

Economic Times

Stella

Stella - Sylvie Verheyden (pathe)


Frans drama waarin de elfjarige Stella uit Parijs in de jaren zeventig door haar vriendschap met de Joods-Argentijnse Gladys een nieuwe wereld ontdekt*

Parijs, eind jaren zeventig. De 11-jarige Stella groeit op, boven en ín het café van haar ouders, waar de stamgasten haar enige vrienden vormen. Wanneer ze, min of meer per ongeluk, op een chique middelbare school in een betere wijk belandt, ontdekt ze dat de wereld meer te bieden heeft dan gokken, eindeloze voetbalanalyses en cocktails brouwen. Ze raakt bevriend met Gladys, de dochter van Joods-Argentijnse ballingen, die haar introduceert in een hele andere wereld: die van boeken, muziek en verrassende, ongekende mogelijkheden.

Genuanceerd, liefdevol, haast tastbaar coming-of-age drama, geïnspireerd door Sylvie Verheydens eigen jeugd. Werd tijdens het Film Festival van Venetië terecht met een staande ovatie ontvangen

Stella

*Festivalwinnaar Stella vanaf vandaag in de bioscoop*
Op de voorbij editie van het Filmfestival Gent kende de internationale jury de Sabam Prijs voor Beste Scenario toe aan Stella van de Franse cineaste Sylvie Verheyde. Een eervolle vermelding ging naar actrice Karole Rocher, die de moeder van Stella speelt. Vanaf vandaag is de film te zien in de bioscoop! Bekijk de trailer en een interview met regisseuse Sylvie Verheyde.

In pure gebroeders Dardennes stijl kijkt de Franse cineaste Sylvie Verheyde in /Stella/ terug op haar eigen schooljeugd. Net als haar personage ging ze op haar eerste dag in het middelbaar met een voetbal naar school en keerde ze met een blauw oog terug naar huis. Stella Vlaminck (What’s in a name) die opgroeit in een café in Parijs is het kneusje van de klas maar dank zij de invloed van Gladys, dochter van Argentijnse immigranten, wordt ze zich bewust van haar eigenwaarde. Maar of volwassenen daar respect voor hebben?

Verheyde vertelt op een levendige en tegelijk suggestieve manier en speelt stad en platteland, waar Stella op vakantie gaat, tegen elkaar uit. In Parijs kijkt men op haar neer en op de boerenbuiten is ze de “parisienne”. De film doet denken aan Canneswinnaar /Entre les murs/, maar hier vormt de klemtoon die op het Franse muzikale decor uit de jaren zeventig ligt een surplus. De vertolking van Léora Barbara in de titelrol is grandioos. Je wordt er stil van. Niet te missen zelfs voor wie niet in het onderwijs staat.

/Stella/ is vanaf 14 januari te zien in Brussel (Vendôme & Arenberg), Brugge (Lumière) en Gent /Sphinx. /Bron: Filmfestival

zaterdag 24 januari 2009

Accounts Academic Life

Telling it How it is: Accounts of Academic Life
Loraine Blaxter, Christina Hughes & Malcomn Tight

Higher Education Quarterly
Volume 52 Page 300 - July 1998
Volume 52 Issue 3


Several kinds of account of what academic life is like are available. This article reviews three of these – academic novels, the professional media and 'how to' guides produced for academics – and makes some comparisons with the picture presented by academic research on higher education. These genres convey multiple, partial, diverse and competing accounts. Understanding their messages is interesting, useful and important to those interested in academic life.


Academic related fun

Academic-related fun

Can't get enough of university life? How about reading about it?
Go to:
Books that take place within an academic environment

Eros

surabaya



Regarding Socrates, John Addington Symonds in his /A Problem in Greek Ethics/ states that he "...avows a fervent admiration for beauty in the persons of young men. At the same time he declares himself upon the side of temperate and generous affection, and strives to utilize the erotic enthusiasm as a motive power in the direction of philosophy." According to Linda Rapp, Ficino, by platonic love, meant "...a relationship that included both the physical and the spiritual. Thus, Ficino's view is that love is the desire for beauty, which is the image of the divine."

Because of the common modern definition, platonic love can be seen as paradoxical in light of these philosophers' life experiences and teachings. Plato and his peers did not teach that a man's relationship with a youth should lack an erotic dimension, but rather that the longing for the beauty of the boy is a foundation of the friendship and love between those two. However, having acknowledged that the man's erotic desire for the youth magnetizes and energizes the relationship, they countered that it is wiser for this eros to not be sexually expressed, but instead be redirected into the intellectual and emotional spheres.

Teacher stuff

Great teacher novels? - A to Z Teacher Stuff Forums

Hi everyone!
I am leaving for vacation soon and wanted to stock up on some books to take to the beach
I am in the middle of rereading Educating Esme right now and LOVE it! Anyone have any other book suggestions similar to that? I am a teacher ed. student right now so reading these great teaching stories gets me more and more excited to start teaching!
I saw one at Barnes and Noble titled Teach like Your Hair is On Fire (I think). It looked like it had pretty good reviews...anyone read it?
I'll be heading to the library this week so give me all the suggestions you have!! Thanks!
zie verde suggesties

The teacher of literature

Chekhov, Anton P.: The Teacher of Literature

The story begins with a group of young people on a riding party at the Shelestov estate. One of the guests is Nikitin, a young-looking man in his mid-20’s, who teachers literature at the local school, and loves Masha, the 18-year-old younger daughter of their host. Later, over dinner Varya, the older daughter, argues with Nikitin over some points of literature, and another guest scolds him for having never read the German writer, Lessing. But Nikitin glides through the evening on a cloud of love. A day later he returns and proposes to Masha.

In the second part of the story, the wedding occurs. Nikitin and Masha are deliriously happy--"’I am immensely happy with you, my joy,’ he used to say, playing with her fingers or plaiting and unplaiting her hair." But soon one of Nikitin’s friends and fellow teachers develops erysipelas and dies. After that, everything returns to normal, so much so that Nikitin has nothing to write in his diary.

Life seems to be closing in on him. He feels like trying to get away from his wife, "Where am I, my God? I am surrounded by vulgarity and vulgarity. Wearisome, insignificant peopl.. (...).

Does it matter that Nikitin is a teacher of literature? Are literary people or teachers particularly vulnerable to angst? Chekhov is an equal opportunity employer where restless hearts and failed expectations are concerned. In his stories and plays we discover that doctors, landowners, military men, and revolutionaries may all suffer from the same disease. Failing to find meaning in one’s life appears to be a common malady that cuts across occupation and social class.

Narrative Diversity

Narrative, diversity, and teacher education$
JoAnn Philliona, F. Michael Connelly,

Teaching and Teacher Education
20 (2004) 457–471

Abstract
This paper explores a narrative approach to diversity in teacher education. One story is presented, initially without context; as layers of context are added additional possible readings of the story are suggested. A second story is contrasted with the first by using a three-dimensional space—temporal, interactional and in-place—to provide context for the stories. Using the framework the stories are analyzed and a distinction is made between ‘teacher knowledge’ and ‘knowledge for teachers’. The resulting implications for teaching about diversity in preservice teacher education are explored.

School of Rock

Introduction: popular music and film
Guest editors: Amanda Howell.
Review


Smith's essay, which focuses on the "fish out of water" comedy /School of Rock/,/ /demonstrates the persistence of rock's ideological project in a film whose comedy turns on the "nostalgic, even anachronistic" figure of substitute teacher and middle-aged slacker Dewey Finn--who carves out a place for rock at the elite Horace Green Elementary and promotes a 1970s rock'n'roll vision of youth and culture to a class of ten-year-olds. Messenger discusses the different approaches to the combination of music and cinema taken by Elvis Presley and the Beatles in the early years of their careers; comparing the formal qualities of their films, he shows how differing notions of the youth market shape their representations, narratives, and address. In the case of Fore's account of PRC depictions of youth and music subcultures and Woodgate's discussion of /Sonnenallee/, there is a shared concern for the way that a particular youth cultural moment relates to the identity formation of a nation. Both authors deal with authoritarian regimes where youth cultures are equated with dissident cultures; thus youth's choices and uses of popular music facilitate critical relations with national identity.

Teacher in the Hood.

Robert C. Bulman, Teachers in the 'Hood: Hollywood's Middle-Class Fantasy


The Urban Review. Volume 34, Number 3 / September, 2002


Abstract The urban-high-school genre film has become one of Hollywood's most trusted formulas. In these films a classroom filled with socially troubled and low-achieving students is dramatically transformed by the singular efforts of a teacher or principal, an outsider who is new to the school and often new to teaching entirely. All of this is accomplished to the consternation of the inept administrative staff and other teachers, who never believed that these students had such potential. Invariably, the outsider succeeds where veteran professional teachers and administrators have repeatedly failed. I argue that the urban-high-school genre of film reinforces the ldquoculture of povertyrdquo thesis and represents the fantasies that suburban middle-class America has about life in urban high schools and the ease with which the problems in urban high schools could be rectified—if only the right type of person (a middle-class outsider) would apply the right methods (an unconventional pedagogy with a curriculum of middle-class norms and values). The teacher- or principal-hero represents middle-class hopes that the students in urban schools can be rescued from their troubled lives not through significant social change or school reform, but by the individual application of common sense, good behavior, a positive outlook, and better choices.

high school - film - American culture - individualism - culture of poverty


Review:

Lakshmi Srinivas - Hollywood Goes to High School (review) - Social Forces 84:3

teacher ...

A Don's Life by Mary Beard - Times Online - WBLG: Want a motto? Do it in Latin.



And on the parallel topic (if that's allowed!), I was watching 'Educating Rita' the other night, and thinking about how often the pupil-teacher theme comes up in culture at large. Even as I write this, Rosie on Coronation Street is sleeping with her teacher, and why did anyone think Alan Bennett's 'The History Boys' was so popular? See also 'Phantom of the Opera'. Any more, anyone?

Edutainment

*Author: *Paris, Matthew J.
*Source: *ERIC Clearinghouse for Social Studies/Social Science Education Bloomington IN.


Integrating Film and Television into Social Studies Instruction.
ERIC Digest.


By their own accounts and those of their critics, the current generation of students is a video generation. They learned to read with Big Bird on "Sesame Street" and their view of the world has been largely formed and shaped through visual culture. This familiarity can make film and video a powerful pedagogical tool. Visual media also address different learning modalities, making material more accessible to visual and aural learners. Add to this the rich array of diverse videos and documentaries available and it's easy to see why these formats represent the second most popular source used in social studies classes.

However, the very qualities that make film and video so popular present problems as well. For students raised on a steady diet of media consumption, film and documentary footage used in the classroom often becomes "edutainment." This does more than simply distort historical and social issues. It reinforces the passive viewing and unquestioning acceptance of received material that accompanies growing up in a video environment.

Teacher research narrative

The Inevitability and Importance of Genres in Narrative Research on
Teaching Practice

Jerry Rosiek and Becky Atkinson

Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 13, No. 4, 499-521 (2007)


The authors examine the field of contemporary teacher knowledge^ research. Specifically, they examine the use of narrative representations^ by researchers in this field. They make a general argument for^ the development of distinct narrative genres in teacher knowledge^ research because considerations of distinct genre styles can^ help researchers refine their craft and can inform the development^ of appropriate standards by which different forms of narrative^ research might be judged. Building on this argument, they offer^ an outline of the features of some genres that seem to be currently^ emerging in teacher knowledge writings. The article closes with^ an examination of the implications the emergence of narratives^ genres would have for teacher education research.^

*Key Words:* modes of representation • narrative • teacher education • teacher knowledge

Guido Everts

Summery of my dissertation called "Clio's christianizing", in English and Dutch
Blog Guido Everts



Het vertellen van verhalen heeft geen vaste plaats in het hedendaagse onderwijs. Dit gegeven is tot uitgangspunt gekozen voor dit onderzoek.Verhalen inspireren kinderen en betrekken hen bij het onderwerp waarover verteld wordt. De vraag waarom dit vertelelement in ons reguliere onderwijs geen centrale plaats (meer) heeft heeft tot een historische zoektocht geleid. We hebben daartoe deze vraag aan de Europese onderwijsgeschiedenis voorgelegd. We zagen daarbij, en daarin ligt mede de motivatie voor dit onderzoek, dat zij als zodanig nog niet eerder was gesteld. In een tijd waarin naar zinvolle samenhangen uitgekeken wordt lijkt een zoektocht naar de plaats van het verhaal in het onderwijs relevant.

In de huidige historische pedagogiek zijn verwijzingen zeldzaam naar literatuurkritiek en literaire pedagogiek. Op het gebied van vertelling en literatuur blijken verwijzingen naar de geschiedenis van de onderwijspraktijk zelfs zo dun gezaaid dat we er liever voor kozen de commentaren op die praktijk, die wel voorhanden bleken, te onderzoeken. Grote filosofische en pedagogische denkers als Plato, Aristoteles, Augustinus, Erasmus, Vives, Luther, Comenius en Rousseau hebben zich aan het onderwerp gewijd. De onderzoeksvraag die we, met de noodzaak van een afperking van het veld van onderzoek in het achterhoofd, op basis van dit gegeven stelden luidde: ‘wat is de strekking van de pedagogisch georiënteerde commentaren op de vorm, de inhoud en het gebruik van verhalen in het onderwijs sinds Plato en tot en met Luther?’

The stroy of...

The story of Belle, Minnie, Louise and the Sovjets: throwing light on the dark side of an institution

Author(s): Roets G, Van Hove G
Source: DISABILITY & SOCIETY Volume: 18 Issue: 5 Pages: 599-624 Published: AUG 2003


Abstract: Our post-modernist story is composed as a narrative analysis of the lived experiences of Belle and Louise-two women with 'learning difficulties' - and our ethnographic field notes while doing narrative inquiry. The narratives mirror a shared construction of meaning and broaden our understanding-throwing light on the dark side of an institution. The narrative analysis points out a clear illustration of power dynamics and discourses in their lives, and shows how the women boast of resilience and offer (hidden) resistance. This paper particularly illuminates the individual, personal and even private celebration of activism and self-empowerment of Belle and Louise. Their vivid stories take us on an enthralling journey, getting to know their world through their eyes.

Blog Freedom Writers

Blog over Freedom Writers

FREEDOM WRITERS film vertelt het waargebeurde verhaal van Erin Gruwell. Zij komt als idealistische, jonge lerares op een school in Los Angeles te werken. In haar klas heersen interraciale spanningen en leden van verschillende bendes leven op voet van oorlog met elkaar. Haar leerlingen zijn ongemotiveerd en hebben het gevoel alleen te staan met hun problemen.


Naar aanleiding van een racistische tekening die in de klas circuleert, behandelt Gruwell het onderwerp discriminatie. Ze gebruikt onder andere het dagboek van Anne Frank om de achtergronden en gevolgen van uitsluiting van bevolkingsgroepen te laten zien. Gruwell inspireert haar leerlingen om het dagboek van Anne Frank te lezen en een eigen dagboek bij te houden. Als ze elkaars verhalen lezen, beseffen de leerlingen dat ze veel meer met elkaar gemeen hebben dan ze dachten.

Het dagboekproject leert ze ook om hun eigen talenten in zetten. Dit geeft ze het zelfvertrouwen om hun school af te maken en verder aan hun toekomst te bouwen.

Teacher Metaphor

Becoming a Teacher as a Hero's Journey: Using Metaphor in Preservice Teacher Education
Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2005 by Goldstein, Lisa S

Teacher as Hero

Kenneth Futernick / THE TEACHER AS HERO: THE EXPLOITATION OF NICENESS
PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 1992

The teacher Jaime Escalante, about whom the move /Stand And Deliver/ was made, has frequently been asked to explain his extraordinary dedication to students. People often ask him why he is willing to spend his lunch periods, several hours each night, and many weekends tutoring his students. He responds modestly saying that what he does is just part of the job. Critics of Escalante, many of whom are teachers, do not criticize his dedication, but rather his insistence that as a teacher he is /obligated/ to do what he does.

What they resent is the implication that teachers who are not as generous with their time are shirking their duty. Given the number of hours Mr. Escalante spends with his students it is hard to imagine that he has time left for anything else. One problem with the view that teachers must do all they can is that teaching is not the only obligation a teacher has. If a teacher has no obligations beyond the classroom, or is not willing to spend time leisurely, one has to wonder how effective such a teacher might be. Suttle helps make my point when he says, “the level of a duty is dependent on whether or what other obligations are dictated by the circumstance.” The obligations and interests most teachers have outside the classroom prevent them from committing as much time to school as Mr. Escalante.


Een antwoord op een essay



THE MORALITY OF NICENESS: WHY EDUCATORS
HAVE A DUTY TO GO BEYOND THEIR OBLIGATIONS
Bruce B. Suttle
Parkland College

The Education of Charlie Banks

The Phoenix > Reviews > Not so sentimental Education

/The Education of Charlie Banks/ can prove an education for the close-minded critic. One, like myself, with certain preconceptions, such as the certainty that the directorial debut of a pop star like Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst will be a vanity project riddled with sentimentality, clichés, and pretensions. Or that the typical adolescent coming-of-age story tends to suffer from both self-indulgence and triteness. Or that a voiceover narrator invariably signals the defeat of a filmmaker’s imagination.

vrijdag 23 januari 2009

The myth of the great techer

The Myth of the Great Teacher | PopPolitics.com



In a New York Times Op-Ed, Tom Moore, a 10th-grade history teacher in the Bronx, responds insightfully to recent cinematic images of teaching — specifically teaching in underprivileged schools. Ultimately, he sees most films as missing the pedagogical point:
The great misconception of these films is not that actual schools are more chaotic and decrepit — many schools in poor neighborhoods are clean and orderly yet still don’t have enough teachers or money for supplies. No, the most dangerous message such films promote is that what schools really need are heroes. This is the Myth of the Great Teacher.
Films like ‘Freedom Writers‘ portray teachers more as missionaries than professionals, eager to give up their lives and comfort for the benefit of others, without need of compensation. Ms. Gruwell sacrifices money, time and even her marriage for her job.