Johnson: The Name of the World

Denis Johnson, The Name of the World by. Powell's Books

The Name of the World is a mesmerizing portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him.

Michael Reed is living a posthumous life. In spite of outward appearances — he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life — he's a dead man walking.

Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, "I'm speaking as I'd speak of a change in the earth's climate, or the recent war."

Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like somebody who cares what happens to him." Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, "by cynicism, occasional brilliance, and small, polite terror," he manages, against all his expectations, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth.

Elegant and incisively observed, The Name of the World is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known. Here is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today.

Course Campus novel

COURSE DESCRIPTION

The campus novel (a novel set on the campus of a college or university,
usually written by a novelist who is or has been an academic) will serve as the subject
of our intensive exploration of narrative technique.
TEXTS
Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. Penguin Classics, 2002.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. Vintage, 1989.
Prose, Francine. Blue Angel. Harper Perennial, 2006.
Reed, Ishmael. Japanese by Spring. Penguin, 1996.
Smiley, Jane. Moo. Ivy Books, 1998.
Smith, Zadie. On Beauty. Penguin, 2006.

Gibilaro: Serious Business

UCL Book Reviews

‘Serious Business’, by Larry Gibilaro, Professor of Chemical Engineering at UCL for 20 years, features a physics lecturer at a ‘University of London College’ as the central character. It explores the interaction between academia and industry, as the lecturer and a biochemist seek to unlock the truth behind a new chemotherapy drug. It is a ‘campus novel’ written with an academic slant, offering non-academics a glimpse into a professional academic’s life. The action takes place in locations across Bloomsbury and Soho, providing much that is familiar to UCL students and staff, past and present. Purchase.

To Save a Life

TO SAVE A LIFE (Samuel Goldwyn)
The Ludovico Technique: A Film Blog: Movie Weekend #3: January 22, 2010

Look, it's a high-school film about white jock-guilt. I'm not sure how many theaters it's opening at tomorrow, but it's playing near me. I'm not going.

Juno

Superheroes flexed cinematic muscle | NewsOK.com

6. "Juno” (2007) — Jason Reitman ("Thank You for Smoking”) directed Diablo Cody’s screenplay about a wisecracking teenager who becomes pregnant. Juno (Ellen Page) has a quirky sensibility about the entire ordeal, which takes a typical high school film and turns it inside out. Michael Cera ("Arrested Development”) plays Bleeker, the geeky teen with a good heart who fathers the child in his one sexual encounter with Juno. The cast is great throughout: Jennifer Garner is the prospective adoptive mother who longs for a child; Jason Bateman is the prospective adoptive father who longs for his youth. J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney are excellent in supporting roles as Juno’s father and stepmother.

Lethem: About As She Climbed Across the Table

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem | Book review.

About As She Climbed Across the Table

Many of Jonathan Lethem's novels have looked like experiments in creating striking generic hybrids: Gun, With Occasional Music is a pastiche of Raymond Chandler set in a dystopian future; Girl in Landscape a western set in space; As She Climbed Across the Table a tragicomic campus novel with a science fiction twist. Lethem has always rejected the "genre bender" label, however, and perhaps trying to fit his books into too many categories is simply a way of admitting that they defy categorisation.

Campus Novel Project

Liit Collaborative IIT Novel Writing Project
IIT Today November 05, 2009

November is National Novel Writing Month, and Liit, the student-run literature magazine of IIT, is embarking on an ambitious collaborative novel writing project.

Working on a novel? Haven't started? Why not work with the entire campus on it and share the burden? Participate in the IIT Campus Novel and help create the university's first collaborative novel. Contribute something you've already written, add to others' contributions, or just help edit and weave the novel together. There's room for everyone to participate, regardless of writing experience.

Emily Fox Gordon: It Will Come to Me

Emily Fox Gordon, It Will Come to Me. Washington Post. Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Write what you know, novelists are told, which presumably explains why there are so many novels about writers. And, given that so many writers work at universities, why there are so many novels set in universities. Emily Fox Gordon, the author of two memoirs (and a writer who works at a university), has written a first novel about a writer and a university. On the surface, this may seem old hat, but the author manages to confound our expectations, or at least some of them.

Rocket Science

Rocket Science (2007)
Review from imdb:

There are plenty of movies about high school, and they're full of comeuppance, humor targeted for that age, discovery of sex, et cetera, but there is very very rarely a movie like Rocket Science, a movie about that particular time in your life when you were just growing into yourself and you didn't even know it, and you hardly look back at that time because of the unawareness of self at that point and, hopefully, the growth since then. This is an important little film that, though it isn't receiving the attention I feel it would and should get with a wider and longer release, time will be kind to, with great hope.

see treiler: youtube

David Mazzucchelli: Asterios Polyp

Book Review - 'Asterios Polyp,' Written and Illustrated by David Mazzucchelli - Review - NYTimes.com. 2009.07.26

The book is a satirical comedy of remarriage, a treatise on aesthetics and design and ontology, a late-life Künstlerroman, a Novel of Ideas with two capital letters, and just about the most schematic work of fiction this side of that other big book that constantly alludes to the ­“Odyssey.” Asterios Polyp himself is adorably dislikable, an egocentric, condescending, irritable “paper architect” and academic who sees everything in terms of dualities.

Scott McCloud | Journal » Archive » Some Thoughts on Asterios Polyp

James Wood: The Book Against God

Amardeep Singh: The real issues in James Wood's novel, 'The Book Against God'.

James Wood is best known as a book critic. Here is a recent LRB piece that caused a bit of a stir amongst literary bloggers a couple of months ago; and here is a review of a book on the history of the King James Bible from the New Yorker last year. 'The Book Against God' is Wood's first novel. A collection of reviews of the book, most of them lukewarm or positive, can be found here.

The plot: a graduate student in Philosophy at University College London, desultorily writing a dissertation, steadily reveals himself to be a believer in God despite strenuously (and sometimes embarrassingly) imposing his atheism on friends, girlfiend, and family. Actually he is not writing the diss. at all, but instead composing a collection of quotes and arguments pointing at the absence of God in the world, a "Book Against God." In fact, however, Wood wants to show that Tom Bunting's attachment to his father (a Vicar at the church of a small
northern English town) carries within it the seeds of a kind of belief.I can see why the novel was dismissed by some critics -- it has flaws.
But I still enjoyed it for its many arguments and insights.

Isherwood: A Single Man

The Dewey Divas and the Dudes about A Single man (Isherwood).

Isherwood* is a very moving novel about a single day in the life of George, an English professor who is still grieving over the recent death of his lover in a car crash. It's Cold War 1960s California - a world in which being gay is feared as much as being a communist (has anything changed much in that state?) We follow George as he wakes up, makes breakfast, goes to the gym, drives the freeway to work, teaches a class, has dinner with an old friend and ends up at a bar by a beach. The intensity, scorn and anger of George's thoughts and perceptions of the world and people around him, are the driving force behind this novel.


Isherwood balances some very funny and cynical observations on being a gay, cultured, Brit living in suburban sprawl with the simultaneous acknowledgment of how lonely and isolating it is. This is a short, intense, and very beautifully written novel, excellent at quietly portraying the endless ache of grief that can painfully resurface in someplace as banal as a supermarket. It's the simple, daily, taken-for-granted things about love that George misses the most:

He pictures the evening he might have spent, snugly at home, fixing
the food he has bought, then lying down on the couch beside his
bookcase and reading himself slowly sleepy. At first glance this is
an absolutely convincing and charming scene of domestic contentment.
Only after a few instants does George notice the omission that makes
it meaningless. What is left out of the picture is Jim, lying
opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of
them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's
presence.


Can't wait to see the film this weekend! You can watch the trailer *here *.

Novels: women and education

Novels About Women and Education.

A query regarding "novels about college/educational experiences,...especially
for women," gave rise to the following discussion on WMST-L in April 1996.
It includes many suggested works, some focusing on students, others on faculty.

Axademic novel: nostalgia in Thatcher Britain

Murphy, Arin (2000) Reconstructing the past in the academic novel : the concept of nostalgia in Thatcher Britain. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

Abstract

This thesis examines the effects of the British Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher upon the portrayal of the past and the use of nostalgia in academic novels of the period. After situating the economic status of higher education during the early Thatcher era, and examining the academic novel as a genre, attention shifts to a study of Graham Swift's Waterland , A. S. Byatt's Possession , and David Lodge's Nice Work . It is demonstrated that these authors each reacted to the Thatcher environment by addressing such questions as, "Will I still have a job?" and "Will I still be necessary?" in response to the academic and economic environments of the time. By tracing the use of nostalgia within these works, and comparing it to the official Thatcher-endorsed nostalgia, the thesis explores how the humanities' conception of history and the past are revealed as necessary in order to enable the public to forge a sustaining personal connection between the present and the past. Ultimately, it can be shown that only by uniting the economic sphere and the academic humanities can enriching progress occur in either realm, and this is the solution offered by these authors in response to the Thatcherite use of nostalgia for the nineteenth century as incentive for modern economic success.

Michael Wilding: Academic Nuts

Michael Wilding, Academia Nuts". Review

Henry Lancaster lectures in English. Like Michael Wilding himself, Henry is a practitioner as well as a scholar and teacher. Henry considers expanding his repertoire to include a campus novel. Voicing 'the now outlawed traditional campus novelists' foreplay', Henry finds the university too painful to describe: 'He tried everything. He tried the postmodern and wrote about being unable to write about it … enough pages. For a postmodern novel.' While many readers will share Henry's frustration, some will seek relief by classifying "Academia Nuts" as meta-narrative rather than as just another campus novel.

Gregg Kreutz: Acadademic Nuts.

Gregg Kreutz, Acadademic Nuts.

Arizona Daily Sun directory - Dorris Harper-White Theatre (Theatrikos)

AN ACADEMIC FANTASY
"Academia Nuts" is a story about three college professors and Tammi, a free spirit from Atlantic City. The four characters hunt for a lost manuscript by influential poet, E.R. Lennox as they skitter around the sedate New Hampshire living room of one of the teachers, Professor Peter Smedforson.
They scheme, cheat and fall in love, before hitting the surprise ending.

who is afraid of the campus novel?

Michael Wilding, 'Who is Afraid of the campus novel?' Wild and Woolley

...in America at least, the campus novel has become a way to measure the state of the nation. It has taken on the elements of classical tragedy, but it is still amusing, albeit often bleakly so.

Prashant John: Second Degree.

Prashant John, Second Degree.

Announcing the launch of Second Degree: One Crazy Year at IIM-A on 02 Jan, 2010. Kwench Library Solutions - News

So you have seen that magnificent IIM-A campus so many times. You have seen all those hot shot MBA’s strut their stuff. But did you know there is a hilarious side to all the serious academics and jargon they spew?

Follow a student’s life on campus, as he swings from one mess to the next in this hilarious new novel.

“Second Degree” is about life in that giant sprawling pressure-cooker called the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad.

Baked by the hot Gujarat sun, and under constant bombardment of examinations, assignment submissions and quizzes – life can be quite “interesting” for the unprepared within the hallowed hallways of the great institute. This is exactly what happens to Prashant, as he discovers that the glory of getting admission to IIM-A is short lived when the heat is really turned on by the faculty.

Prashant, struggles with everything from Finance and Quantitative Techniques to Interpersonal Relationships in his stint on campus. He emerges from the course richer by a few great friends, wiser by several degrees and poorer by several lakhs in terms of the education loans he needs to payback.

Follow the life of a twenty eight year old misfit as he stumbles from one mess to the next in the unforgiving and scorching pace at IIM-A!

Rashmi Bansal, author of the Mega Best Seller “Stay Hungry Stay Foolish” has written the foreword to this book and says ”…Read this racy, pacy, funny, punny, free flowing tribute to my favourite campus in the world.”

Don Dellio: White Noise

Tuning back in to Don DeLillo's 'White Noise' - latimes.com

Don DeLillo's "White Noise" (Penguin, 336 pp., $16 paper), newly reissued in a 25th anniversary edition with superb jacket art by Michael Cho, is many different types of novel: a campus novel; the soap opera of a hilariously dysfunctional family; a disaster story; a murder story; a meditation on America's nervousness around (and obsession with) fear and dying; and a satire on trashy cultural values that is nonetheless filled with heart-stopping, and realistically rendered, moments of human radiance and recognition.

schooling in rock and pop music

Representations of schooling in rock and pop music
An Essay by Dr. Kevin J. Brehony. The Homeroom.

High School Confidential, Jerry Lee Lewis
School Days, Chuck Berry
Sweet Little Sixteen, Chuck Berry
Endless Summer Beach Boys
Surfin' USA, Beach Boys
Be True to Your School, Beach Boys
Cypress Avenue, Van Morrison
Its Getting Better, Beatles
No Surrender, Springsteen
Going Back, Byrds
The Wall Pink, Pink Floyd
Eton Rifles? Jam
I don't like Mondays, Boomtown Rats
Teacher's Pet, [artist?]
Don't stand too close to me, Sting
Schools Out, Alice Cooper
Remember the Days in the old school yard, Cat Stevens
D in Love, Cliff Richard
Wonderful World, Sam Cooke
Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, The Yardbirds.