Community Crisis

Jann M. Contento and Jeffrey Ross, Community College Crisis: The Philip Dolly Affair

A Crisis in Community College Leadership: The Phillip Dolly Affair is literary in development but grounded in “chaotic” community college daily experience. The novel is comic, satiric, quasi-politically correct, edgy, and richly descriptive of community college life, leadership foibles, and cultural themes. This hyperbolic text is entertaining, edifying, and fun. Little community college fiction—comic or otherwise—exists—the authors are fearless in their humorous—and sometimes biting-- analysis of community college culture.... The “stereotype-busting” authors reacquaint readers with the [faded] ideals of the 1960’s social renaissance. While community colleges are currently receiving heightened attention, this novel provides a behind-the-scenes analysis of many “whispered truths,” those simmering but unspoken workplace issues, behaviors, and machinations nearly every worker [Everyman] in America will recognize.

Reem Bassiouney, Professor Hanna.

On the eve of her fortieth birthday Egyptian academic, Professor Hanaa, finds herself alone and unloved. For twenty years she has battled with an impossible love for an unattainable colleague, and has become outcast in a society where family and friends mean everything. Her life is organised into endless routines, and her emotions are hidden behind a facade of stern, but joyless professionalism. The facade begins to crumble, however, when her birthday brings with it the realisation that she is about to turn into an embittered, forty-year-old spinster. Never one to admit defeat, Hanaa determines she will lose her virginity before her birthday, and sets her sights on Khalid, her teaching assistant. An earnest, hardworking and devout young man, Khalid is an unlikely accomplice; however Hanaa's powers of persuasion know no bounds. What ensues is a lively, witty, often sly commentary on gender and power relationships in both academia and the Arab world-a 'campus' novel of a wholly different bent. Belletrisa

Reem Bassiouney’s interview with BBC World about her novel Professor Hanaa

Frank Parkin obituary Sociologist who also wrote campus satires

In 1987 Parkin published a campus novel, The Mind and Body Shop, satirising the corporatisation and commercialisation of academic life. The success of the first novel was not repeated; it was as if the reality had already outstripped the fiction.

The Guardian

Harbach The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

A campus novel that spends more time in the locker room than the library
Chad Harbach’s much anticipated, decade-in-the-making debut doesn’t disappoint. The Art of Fielding is a campus novel, but one that spends more time in the locker room than the library. Henry Skrimshander might look like a scrawny kid from South Dakota, but within months of his arrival at Westish College, he’s known as one of the best players on the varsity baseball team. Recruited for his improbably good arm and virtuosic sense of fielding, it’s soon clear that Henry is meant for the big leagues. But not all dreams come true, and on the field, anybody can choke. As what once appeared to be an inevitably bright future fades, Henry — like his mentor, Mike Schwartz — is forced to rethink his prospects and grapple with a life after college that suddenly looks a lot different than he’d envisioned.

Emusic

Karin Amatmoekrim: Het Gym

Het gym

NRC/Handelsblad: ‘Het gym is een lichtvoetige en geestige roman. Het aangenaam luchtige zit vooral in de heldere, spreektalige zinnen en in de trefzekere dialogen. Als Sandra, op aandringen van haar vriendinnen, auditie doet voor het schooltoneel, omdat dat ‘ab-so-luut onmisbaar’ zou zijn voor haar ontwikkeling, krijgt ze een rol toegewezen in een eigentijdse versie van Faust. Dan roept ze verschrikt uit; ‘Tering, ik ben god.’
Haar grote voorbeeld op school is de leraar Nederlands. Hij maakt geen onderscheid tussen rang of stand en trekt niemand voor. Als hij tegen haar zegt dat ze schrijftalent heeft, voelt ze zich voor het eerst in haar leven machtig

. Amatmoekrim

Kyoto Animation Announces "Hyouka" TV Anime

The 2001 novel, pictured below, is the first in the koten-bu series, and won an honorable mention in the Kadokawa campus novel contest, mystery horror genre. It centers on Houtarou Oreki, a high schooler who is resistant to getting involved with anything. This changes when he joins the koten-bu club, and is tasked with solving everyday mysteries. What's up with the classroom you can't enter? What about the mysterious book that's always checked out of the library? These puzzles and more—including an incident from 33 years ago involving a female club member's uncle—await in Yonezawa's tale.

Anime-news

Dead Poet Society

My favourite film: Dead Poets Society | Film | guardian.co.uk

There are some films that, if you watch them for the first time at the right age, have the capacity to inspire and embolden you: Dead Poets Society is one such film. It is not a film that it is cool to admit loving. It is uncynical, idealistic and hopeful – not qualities one necessarily associates with film snobs, but what it lacks in critical kudos it has recouped in audience appreciation. It has been voted the greatest school film and it is often cited by viewers as one of the most inspirational films of all time. It certainly inspired me at a time when I most needed it.

Michael W. Klein, Something for Nothing. MIT.

Something for Nothing

Small World. Blue Angel. Wonder Boys. Straight Man. It makes intuitive sense that many academic novels focus on professors of English or other humanities disciplines – “write what you know,” as the saying goes. But the upshot of all those writers writing about writers is that there are a lot fewer writers writing about, say, scientists. Or mathematicians. Or economists.To Michael W. Klein, this dearth looked like an opportunity.

Inside Higher Ed

David Gilmour - The Film Club

The Film Club

David Gilmour is a father as well as a novelist and former film critic. He has written a memoir, “The Film Club,” about his decision to allow his 15-year-old son, Jesse, to drop out of school on the condition that he watch three movies a week of Gilmour’s choosing. Because it smacked of a plot gimmick from one of the movies Gilmour used to review, I feared the book would be similarly cute and tidy. But it’s a heartfelt portrait of how hard it is to grow up, how hard it is to watch someone grow up and how in the midst of a family’s confusion and ire, there is sometimes nothing so welcome as a movie. NYTimes.com

Chad Harbach, Inside the Whale

Inside the Whale: campus novel

Near the end of Moby-Dick is an indelible description of two boats lost to the White Whale: “The odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.” Reality rears its ugly, barnacle-encrusted head, and the mind retreats to cheerful thoughts of the ladle, the pewter cups, and the fireside. This tension lies at the heart of Chad Harbach’s Melville-obsessed debut novel, which is also a baseball novel, a campus novel, and a Jonathan Franzen-blurbed publishing event. Fielding’s epigraph is a snippet from fictitious Westish College’s fight song, the sort of thing belted out by punch-ruddied lads of the Old School. The book emanates from a wish peculiar to happy college students: “All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change.”

The Weekly Standard

N. Sampath Kumar - Campus Cola

Campus Cola

is a medical college campus novel with the classic plotlines of adjusting to a new institution..." asiange

Campus Cola -

At forty-three, Hucky’s life is torn apart. He’s jilted (his young lover doesn’t fancy him anymore), jobless (his boss wants him to take a break and recharge), totally messed up, and is battling the blues. Since nostalgia is therapeutic, he decides to pen a book on his fun-drenched salad days at Defcoms, a Bangalore-based medical college that churns out doctors for the armed forces. He recalls a journey pulsating with adventure, ragging, grueling regimen, romance, road trips rustication, dares, foreigner babes, power politics, drug addiction, gang warfare, academic gloominess, comical events, draconian rules, a Zen master, philosophy, God-consciousness and rebellion. What’s more, the delightful campus romp is energised by an eccentric genius, an avid bettor, two brawny dudes, a war cry shouter, a planner of wild schemes (all part of the ‘Maniacs’ gang), and a few mushy lovers who make life unbelievably colourful. Seen through the right prism of seven maverick minds, it’s as psychedelic a journey as the LSD trips Hucky loves. Just when he’ getting numbed again by melancholy, Hucky and Paddy, a nephew he’s shacking up with, drink a death cocktail, meet God, and find their lives racing towards a magical, delightful new beginning.

Gopal Books Publishers

Chetan Bhagat - The Preachy Professor

Chetan Bhagat - The Preachy Professor

Reading a Chetan Bhagat novel used to be considered a non-reader’s approach to reading in my circles. Well, he did start the Light & Hearty Campus Novel revolution with Five Point Someone. Now, with the campus novel market flooding with books selling for profanity or casual humor or just relevance to a reality you’re aware of, you’d think Chetan Bhagat’s novel would lose the charm? No, Sir. Every new book seems like a level-up with this guy. Nothing could I respect more. read

Jonhson

Denis Johnson

...whereas The Name of the World is about mid-life bourgeois ennui and is, among other things, a campus novel.
FasterTimes

Pola Oloixarac - Het hoorcollege

Pola Oloixarac - Het hoorcollege. Meulenhoff

Rosa Ostreech is de koningin van de faculteit der filosofie - vindt ze zelf. Ze is slimmer dan je zou denken, mooier dan zou mogen en arroganter dan draaglijk is. Wat haar betreft houden de theorieën die zij en de andere studenten krijgen voorgeschoteld de vooruitgang tegen, zeker in deze multimediale tijden. Maar dan valt ze voor een oudere uitgebluste professor, wiens levenswerk ze wil herschrijven. Zijn ideeën kloppen in haar ogen nét niet, en Rosa gaat er vol passie mee aan de slag in de hoop zijn aandacht te krijgen.

The Best Professors From Movies

Have you ever been watching a movie and wished that one of the college professors you enjoyed could be yours? Here's who we'd like to see in our classrooms.

Huffingtonpost

Wiener - Erza en Claire. Een Liefde

L.H. Wiener - Ezra en Claire, Een liefde

Nestor is het verhaal van de veertienjarige ‘vogelman’ Ezra Berger, verteld door de zevenenvijftig jarige leraar Victor van Gigch, die als schrijver publiceert onder het pseudoniem L.H. Wiener. Drie namen voor drie karakters, die ondanks hun individuele beleving van de werkelijkheid met het verstrijken der tijd steeds hechter vergroeien tot één persoon.

Literair Nederland

The Marriage Plot - Eugenides

The Marriage Plot By Jeffrey Eugenides (Fourth Estate)

Jeffrey Eugenides's third full-length fiction begins life as a gleefully knowing campus novel, set at Rhode Island's Brown University in the early 1980s. It represents the wholesale re-creation of a cultural moment, one whose distance from the present is just enough to give the narrative the faded character of a shoebox of old Polaroids. The story it tells, of a beautiful young woman and her two suitors, consciously echoes its Victorian-era forebears.

Nihilism meets Jane Austen | The Australian

The Marriage Plot - Eugenides

The Marriage Plot
By Jeffrey Eugenides
Fourth Estate,

Jeffrey Eugenides's third full-length fiction begins life as a gleefully knowing campus novel, set at Rhode Island's Brown University in the early 1980s. It represents the wholesale re-creation of a cultural moment, one whose distance from the present is just enough to give the narrative the faded character of a shoebox of old Polaroids. The story it tells, of a beautiful young woman and her two suitors, consciously echoes its Victorian-era forebears.


Nihilism meets Jane Austen | The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/nihilism-meets-jane-austen/story-e6frg8nf-1226163154352

The Best Campus Fiction

Dear Book Lover: - WSJ.com
Do you have any favorite novels about what it's like to be a college student, or even a teacher?

Murray Skippy

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray | Book review | Books | The Guardian

He's a boarder at Seabrook College, an expensive Catholic school in Dublin, and is at that unfortunate age where "suddenly everyone was tall and gangling and talking about drinking and sperm. Walking among them is like ­being in a BO-smelling forest."

Book review | Books | The Guardian

Castle - Professor

Terry Castle Professor –Stories of Higher Learning

...this new collection also contains ‘The Professor’, a long essay describing Castle’s calamitous but character-forming romantic entanglement as a student with an English professor many years her senior.

Worldpress.

End of the Campus Novel?

Still the End of the Campus Novel?

Inspired by an article in the Guardian by David Lodge about Pnin by Nabokov I wrote a brief piece some five years ago on “The End of the Campus Novel?“. With the possible exception of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, have there been any decent campus novels since then? If not, why not? Isn’t the whole post-Browne fees scenario ripe for comic treatment? Or is it just that universities aren’t funny or interesting enough any more?

registrarism

Offermans: Dood van een leraar

Cyrille Offermans, Dood van een leraar

Freek Moerdijk is afgestudeerd filosoof. Op zoek naar passend werk belandt hij bij een cultureel radioprogramma en een literaire uitgeverij, waarna hij, achtentwintig jaar oud, toch kiest voor het leraarschap. Hij houdt het niet lang vol en verdwijnt.

Cyrille Ofermans schetst in zijn geslaagde mix van onderwijs en ontwikkelingsroman een even scherpzinnig als verontrustend beeld van de spanningen die het ‘denkend leven’ van de puberende scholier, de twijfelende student, de werkzoekende filosoof en de geëngageerde leraar aan het begin van de eenentwintigste eeuw zo uitdagend en slopend maken.

De auteur wil zich niet scharen aan de zijde van zelfingenomen veteranen die zich beklagen over de jeugd die niet wil deugen en aan wie mooie boeken niet besteed zijn.Dat laatste is misschien wel waar, maar mag niet verwonderen: de leraren zijn geen haar beter, zij lezen ook niet.Voor de jeugdige Moerdijk, een veellezer van huis uit, is dit niet de enige onthutsende ervaring. De school als gesloten instelling,het gebrek aan visie en pedagogisch elan bij de leiding, de blindheid voor reële problemen, de stress waaraan leerlingen én docenten zijn blootgesteld –Offermans schetst het op steeds boeiende, soms ronduit komische wijze en nooit als klaagzang.

En als de verteller, een collega zonder bijzondere band met de leraar,wordt gevraagd als enige een toespraak te houden tijdens de rouwbijeenkomst na Freek Moerdijks overlijden,heeft hij drie opties – toezeggen en een onpersoonlijke, standaard toespraak afleveren, toezeggen en de kans pakken de waarheid te spreken, of met een goede smoes afzeggen. Het wordt een moeizame klus, iedere besluit heeft niet te onderschatten consequenties.

Uitgeverij Cossee