EducationRepresentation

The Philip Dolly Affair

2012-02-05T07:15:00.000-08:00

New kind of review: Two friends discuss our new community college campus novel. Youtube

Slumdog Literacy

2012-01-25T06:12:00.000-08:00

Movie analysis: The heros journey in Slumdog Millionaire - by Melissa Miles McCarter - Helium

Slumdog Millionaire demonstrates the interactions between postmodernism, post-colonialism and discursive practices that reveal how orality and literacy function within certain communities. Specifically, language functions within the movie to illuminate postmodern notions of community. According to Diane Davis, communitarian literacy is not about exclusions, even though in many cultures, literacy can be seen as a way to stratify people and organize them in specific dynamics which prevent true connection beyond notions of identity, class, or other social categories. This stratification can be seen in Slumdog Millionaire in the social pressures that the young characters face, whether it is trying to survive the slums they grew up in, escape the control of gangsters or function within a corporate dominated worldall situations determined by the social conditions of first colonialism and then postcolonialism.

Helium.

John McGregor

2012-01-22T07:05:00.000-08:00

Jon McGregor, This Isn't the Sort of Thing

The stories in This Isn't the Sort of Thing…, by contrast, are often very funny. But it's nervous laughter: McGregor never lets us relax entirely. In "Wires", we are comfortably settled in what feels like the start of a campus novel when things start to get very weird indeed. Likewise, he pulls the rug out from underneath us at the end of "We Were Just Driving Around", and performs a brilliantly black tail‑twist at the end of "The Last Ditch".

The Guardian

Detachment

2012-01-18T01:49:00.000-08:00

Detachment

It is a shame that Detachment is not going to be a popular film. But with the twin forces of genre and tone lined up against it, this thoughtful film is destined for the sidelines. Drama is not popular these days. It seems like ever since 9/11, the studios have decided that future entertainment is comedy and fantasy. Really, the word says it all: entertainment is not depressing; entertainment is not critical.Detachment is a scathing look at the progress we’ve haven’t made with No Child Left Behind. An old and tired Adrien Brody joins Lucy Liu on the edge of a breakdown, pill-popping James Caan and sobbing Marcia Gay Harden for three weeks at a fringe school that is catch all for teenage misfits and trouble makers. In a wonderfully soupy timeline, Brody tries to provide some semblance of hope to kids who’d rather be angry and the world and each other than risk failure by genuinely caring. Director Tony Kaye uses chalkboard imaginations, black and white documentary footage, an unspecified interview room and grainy, urban visuals to show how easy it is for teachers to break under the pressure when the world casts blame and assigns praise based on test scores. These teachers are the hulls of idealists with only so much fight left.Detachment is a critique not many will want to hear. There is no bright spot at the end of the tunnel, the film offers no solution. It is simply a window into the endless, thankless toil of the human beings struggling to mold the citizens of tomorrow. Human beings who have to maintain emotional distance because to care too much is to put their own mental health at risk. It’s a window we all need to look through, if we’re actually going to make any progress to provide a real education. Nypress

Community Crisis

2011-12-29T00:38:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-20T04:23:00.001-08:00

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

2011-12-14T13:58:00.000-08:00

Frank Parkin obituarySociologist 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

2011-12-10T04:43:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-04T13:05:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-30T10:22:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-21T09:15:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-06T12:36:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-30T16:03:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-30T15:32:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-30T07:01:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-26T13:26:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-26T13:23:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-21T13:44:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-14T07:40:00.000-07:00

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 Best Campus Fiction

2011-09-07T00:32:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-08T00:16:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-29T01:03:00.000-07:00

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?

2011-04-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

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

Edmundson: The Fine Wisdom

2010-12-26T11:08:00.000-08:00

The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll

In what he describes as a “graduation gift” to students facing the chasm of postcollege life, Mark Edmundson’s engaging though rather slight memoir of his twenties searches for deep significance in the wanderings of youth. In 1974, Edmundson leaves Bennington College in Vermont looking for “it,” what he “was tooled for and set to do and to be.” That search for purpose leads him first to a bankrupt, graffiti-scrawled New York City, where in between “living like an aristocratic bum,” he drives a cab and sets up equipment at Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd shows. Later he ventures into the wilds of Colorado with Outward Bound and works as a bouncer at a college-town discotheque, before discovering teaching, his true vocation.
Edmundson—an English professor at the University of Virginia, and author of, among other things, the essential Harper’s essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education”—brings a welcome earnestness to the project, referring to everything from Jacques Lacan to the Rolling Stones. He admirably attempts to write with the yawping gusto of a young fan, but often the teacher in him gets the better of the storyteller, saddling too many tales with a generic moral. His cabbie days show that the rich “have material anxieties in spades,” for instance, while his trip to the Rockies reveals “a vision of nature as a repository of humane and humanizing virtues.” His discovery of university life, finally, leads to this sweeping pronouncement: “Maybe compassion and glory are the potent twin aspirations of the soul.” That may be true—or at least worth considering—but the book’s greatest moments come when Edmundson is at his least professorial, reflecting with a charming, wide-eyed sincerity at the days he spent stalking Woody Allen through the streets of Manhattan, swerving his taxi amid the drunks in Times Square, or perched high on a stack of amps as Jefferson Starship stirred the masses in Central Park.

Time Out New York

Edmundson: Teacher

2010-12-26T10:56:00.000-08:00

Edmundson: Teacher. The One Who Made the Difference.

“Anyone who opens "Teacher" expecting a sepia-toned tale of inspiration and uplift, a highbrow version of "Dead Poets Society" or "Tuesdays With Morrie," will be disappointed. Despite its treacly subtitle ("The One Who Made the Difference"), Mark Edmundson's memoir is an unsentimental account of his intellectual awakening in 1969, the year a freshly minted Harvard graduate named Franklin Lears came to anarchic Medford High School in Massachusetts to teach philosophy” (A Review of "Teacher," by Mark Edmundson. LA Times Book Review, August 4, 2002).

Robert Boynton (LA Times Book Review, August 4, 2002)

Tuesdays with Morrie

2010-12-26T10:54:00.000-08:00

Tuesdays with Morrie is a 1997 non-fiction novel by American writer Mitch Albom. The story was later adapted by Thomas Rickman into a TV movie of the same name directed by Mick Jackson, which aired on 5 December 1999 and starred Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria. The book topped the New York Times Non-Fiction Bestsellers of 2000.
It tells the true story of sociologist Morrie Schwartz and his relationship with his students. One student in particular (Mitch Albom) plays an important part. After saying that he will keep in touch with Morrie on his graduation, Mitch hears nothing of his old professor until one night on T.V. he sees Morrie being interviewed. Morrie has ALS, a terminal disease. Mitch begins to visit his professor and soon realizes that, though he has grown remarkably, he still has a lot to learn about values. Both the film and the book chronicle the lessons about life that Mitch learns from his professor.

Russell McCormmach, Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist.

2010-10-17T01:16:00.000-07:00

Russell McCormmach, Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist.

It is the end of an historical epoch, but to an old professor of physics, Victor Jakob, sitting in his unlighted study, eating dubious bread with jam made from turnips, it is the end of a way of thinking in his own subject. Younger men have challenged the classical world picture of physics and are looking forward to observational tests of Einstein’s new theory of relativity as well as the creation of a quantum mechanics of the atom. It is a time of both apprehension and hope.
In this remarkable book, the reader literally inhabits the mind of a scientist while Professor Jakob meditates on the discoveries of the past fifty years and reviews his own life and career--his scientific ambitions and his record of small successes.

Russell McCormmach, Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist. Harvard University Press

Marias

2010-10-15T13:52:00.001-07:00

The Next Mariases + Something for the Bibliophiles Out There | Conversational Reading
Also, All Souls has much more of an introvert feeling. In Your Face Tomorrow, Deza was something along the lines of a man of action (befitting the noirish plot), but here his narrative voice is far less so, befitting what is essentially a campus novel. One example:
During my two years of scouting out and hunting down such books with my gloved hands, I obtained many apparently unobtainable marvels at quite ridiculous prices, such as the seventeen volumes of The Thousand Nights and a Night by Sir Richard Francis Burton (better known to booksellers as Captain Burton), which began to appear more than a century ago in a limited edition of a thousand numbered copies of each volume, available only to subscribers of the Burton Club on the understanding (which they honoured) that it would never be enlarged or reprinted: in fact that exuberant Victorian text has never again been reprinted in its entirety, but only in selections or in bowdlerised editions, which, whilst apparently complete, were in fact expurgated of everything considered at the time (or by Lady Burton to be obscene.
That’s from an entire chapter on the used bookstores of Oxford.
ConversationReading

Emile

2010-10-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

Plot Synopsis by Andrea LeVasseur
Independent Canadian filmmaker Carl Bessai directs Emile, the final entry in his identity trilogy that started with Johnny and Lola. Ian McKellen plays Emile, a retired university professor who travels from England to his hometown in Canada in order to accept an educational honor. Visiting the family farm in Saskatchewan, he recalls his childhood relationships with brothers Freddy (Tygh Runyan) and Carl (Chris William Martin). He stays with his grown-up niece, Nadia (Deborah Kara Unger), who still hasn't forgiven him for his misdeeds of the past. Trying to make up for abandoning her, Emile develops an emotional bond with her daughter, Maria (Theo Crane). Emile premiered at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival.
AllMovie

Campus novel: form par excellence

2010-10-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

Although McGurl may be right to suggest that the campus novel is the form par excellence of the postwar American novel, these books all had to, at some point, graduate into the real world, and they did so because someone thought they were marketable commodities.
Upost-Article.com
Whether We Should Read the Writing Program as Exceptionally American

Campus Novels Suggestions

2010-10-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

Every year late August means students and faculty everywhere return to campus. If you're not fortunate enough to be one of them, you can still get that collegiate feeling by settling into a comfy chair with a great campus novel. There are certain to be many beyond this list, but those below all have one thing in common: they evoke a sense of being at a particular kind of college at a particular point in time.
Huffington Post

YouTube

2010-04-16T01:21:00.000-07:00

School? Film School?
YouTube - School? Film School?

Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000

2010-04-16T01:18:00.001-07:00

Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000
Een fragment met een leraar geschiedenis aan het woord.

Film & History

2010-03-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

Project MUSE - Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies - Feature Editors’ Introduction

Alan Marcus & Ron Briley, 'Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies', Volume 39.1 (2009).

Schools, teachers, students, and administrators are common subjects in film and television, and viewers share many school experiences—from sitting at desks in rows, trudging through homework, squinting at multiple-choice exams, and lugging textbooks to resisting exhortations from teachers and swooning at their compliments. But the messages about the quality of schools, the challenges of teaching, and the purposes of education vary widely. For most adult viewers, in fact, school is a distant memory, easily upstaged by depictions of it on the screen—depictions that soon shape their perceptions, beliefs, biases, and values toward education in general and toward school life in particular.

The American College Novel

2010-02-28T04:48:00.000-08:00

John E. Kramer, Jr. with the assistance of Ron Hamm & Von Pittma, The American College Novel An Annotated Bibliography. The Scarecrow Press.

This second edition of The American College Novel cites and describes 648 novels that are set at American colleges and universities, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe (Bowdoin College, 1828) to William Hart's Never Fade Away (University of California, 2002). This revised and updated edition contains 225 new entries, most new novels published since 1981. The annotations provide information about the novels' plots, settings, and central characters, as well as brief biographies of the authors. The bibliography is divided into two sections: student-centered and staff-centered novels, both cited in chronological order by publication year. A "starter list" of 50 American college novels is included, to help the novice reader distinguish classics within the genre, as well as indexes by author, title, college and university, and academic discipline.

Intended for scholars as well as the layperson, this is a useful reference work for studying the portrayal of American higher education over time in popular fiction, as well as helping a casual reader locate a pleasurable read.

Review Campus Life Revealed

2010-02-28T04:41:00.000-08:00

Christian K. Anderson and John R. Thelin, ‘Review: Campus Life Revealed: Tracking down the Rich Resources of American Collegiate Fiction’. The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography by John E. Kramer. The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 2009), pp. 106-113. Source.

This cynical yet limited impression needs to be tempered with the reminder that, in fact, we also are heirs to a rich tradition of thoughtful, perceptive writing about higher education. John E. Kramer's The American College Novel (2004) itself may not be "great literature"--but it certainly is a great guide to the great and not-so-great fiction about American colleges and universities. For scholars who wish to understand the portrayal of American higher education in popular culture it is a prodigious, indispensable resource. This second edition, an update to his 1981 book, reviews 648 academic novels published through 2002, adding 223 novels to the 425 he annotated in the first edition. The book's annotations are divided almost evenly by student- and staff-centered novels (319 of the former, 329 of the latter). Kramer's purpose in compiling this annotated collection is twofold: for those who enjoy reading college novels for pleasure and for scholars who use college novels as a tool for understanding how higher education is perceived in American culture and as part of the serious, systematic analysis of higher education. This essay primarily focuses on how to utilize the book for the latter purpose.

Acamedic Freedom

2010-02-28T04:37:00.000-08:00

William G. Tierney, Academic Freedom and Tenure: Between Fiction and Reality. Journal of Higher Education, v75 n2 p161 March 2004. Eric.

This article examines how tenure and academic freedom are portrayed in novels about academic life. The novel provides unique opportunities to explore philosophical questions and allows readers to examine meaning rather than truth, existence as opposed to reality. Thus, the novel suggests what is possible, which reality forecloses insofar as from a realist position reality is definite, describing what the author believed actually happened, rather than what might have happened. What do academic novels tell us about academic freedom and tenure? What messages do these novels convey to the broad public? This article attempts to answer these questions by analyzing academic novels that have been written over the last century, paying particular attention to novels written in the last twenty-five years in order to assess current portrayals of academic life. It begins with a brief discussion about how the author defines and studies the academic novel and then analyzes how academic freedom and tenure have been portrayed.

The Lovely Bones

2010-02-26T08:18:00.000-08:00

The Lovely Bones. Global comment:

Our dead narrator Susie is friendly, awkward and talented; she longs to become a photographer, attends her school film club (where she hates Lawrence Olivier’s “Othello”) and dreams about her first kiss with the new boy in her school, Ray. Jackson deliberately smears the camera with extra sugar, giving Susie’s life a “Brady Bunch”-like quality, not perfect, but damn near as close as a teenage girl is likely to get

This is a slice of middle class heaven Americana style. The house is full of books and the parents full of love. Even the Salmons’ boozy Grandmother is just a lush rather than a drunk. And when her brother Buckley chokes on a twig, Susie saves the day by doing a Steve McQueen in her dad’s Mustang, racing to the hospital. That and wearing her mum’s knitted hats are as bad as it gets for the Salmon family. As Susie says, “We weren’t those people, those unlucky people who bad things happen to them.”

Helm - In the Place of Last Things

2010-02-26T07:55:00.000-08:00

Ylife - Michael Helm looks for answers, In the Place of Last Things:

Like Ulysses in Dante’s Inferno, Russ sets out for the world beyond the sun, travelling southwest from Saskatchewan to Mexico. As he drives further into the continent’s interior and deeper into his own pysche, he begins to unravel Western traditions of thought. Helm also experiments with Western genre by blending elements of the noir detective story, road tale, rural narrative and campus novel, “to bring these together with the execution of a single brushstroke, to create an organism that might not have been seen before but is nonetheless cohesive.

If

2010-02-26T07:41:00.000-08:00

Watch If… Movie Online « karl808963

As it stands, “If…” isn’t only a grand Malcolm McDowell film, it’s also a gigantic movie about the 60s in both Western society and more specifically Britain in its post-imperial hangover (one of the last British imperial dramas before the Falklands, the conflict in and evacuation of Aden–present-day Yemen–reached completion in 1967, probably while “If…” was filming) . The title itself apparently comes from the distinguished Kipling poem which embodied the highest ideals of imperial Britain. College House, the school attended by Mick Travis–McDowell–and his two friends, is dominated by prefects, or “whips,” seniors who control the student body in the name of the weak-willed headmasters and teachers, who recount the 60s radical understanding of liberal democracy. The coercive actions–cold showers, beatings–administered by the whips to Travis and his fellow rebels prefigure the punishment that would be delivered by the Chicago police, Parisian CRS, and Red Army to student demonstrators and the Czech people in May and August 1968 (in both capitalist and communist regimes the punishments are justified in the name of “society” or “the people”)

An Education

2010-02-24T03:57:00.000-08:00

An Education. Website.

Plot. Metacritic

In the post-war, pre-Beatles London suburbs, a bright schoolgirl is torn between studying for a place at Oxford and the more exciting alternative offered to her by a charismatic older man.

Wikipedia:

An Education is a 2009 British coming-of-age drama film based on an autobiographical memoir of the same title written by the British journalist Lynn Barber. The film was directed by Lone Scherfig, with screenplay written by Nick Hornby.

Coen Van Zwol, An Education. NRC. 10.2.2010

Het schoolmeisje en de oude charmeur. Je weet hoe het afloopt, die dreiging hangt steeds in de lucht. Toch is An Education zo’n rijke karakterstudie dat je erin wilt geloven en dat het demasqué droevig stemt.

Peter Bradshaw, An Education. The Guardian. 29.10.2009.

A very unsentimental education it was, too. Nick Hornby has adroitly adapted and given a dramatic shape to the bestselling memoir by Lynn Barber, telling the true story of how, in the early 1960s, she was seduced as a 16-year-old schoolgirl by an older man. This sociopathic charmer's seduction crucially extended to her poor old mum and dad, dazzling them into being complicit in the arrangement; along with their daughter, they went into a clenched denial about what was happening.

Sanshiro - Soseki

2010-02-17T14:43:00.000-08:00

Soseki - Strange bird Sanshiro
The Japan Times Online

A Japanese campus novel:

Soseki's view is a detached one, clinical, sometimes cynical, with hints of satire. His main characters illuminate and darken each other, their light and shadow — Soseki is a sublime sketcher of people — creating a three-dimensional support cast. "Sanshiro" embodies all of the doubt, excitement and paranoia of the Meiji Era. This is a campus novel 50 years ahead of its time, a coming-of-age story and a study of love in a changing world, commenting on the shifting social mores and morals of 20th-century Japan. With "Sanshiro" and the comedy of manners "I Am a Cat," Soseki may be Japan's Jane Austen.

Haruki Murakami's introduction is thoughtful and places "Sanshiro" as an early inspiration for his "Norwegian Wood." The translator's notes provide interesting background to the politics behind Lafcadio Hearn's departure from Tokyo Imperial University and Soseki's subsequent hiring. Rubin's new translation of this modern classic is fresh and invigorating, totally reworking his earlier 1977 translation and establishing him as the pre-eminent Japanese- to-English translator.

The Grasshopper King - Jordan Ellenberg

2010-02-17T14:36:00.000-08:00

The Grasshopper King
Novel by Jordan Ellenberg
Coffee House Press.

A profoundly absurd campus satire about immortality, obsession, obscurity, and true love.
In this debut novel about treachery, death, academia, marriage, mythology, history, and truly horrible poetry, Jordan Ellenberg creates a world complete with its own geography, obscene folklore, endless games of checkers, and wonderfully endearing characters. Welcome to Chandler State University-the one thing keeping the dusty, Western town of Chandler on the map. Now that its basketball program has fallen apart, CSU's only claim to fame is its Gravinics Department, dedicated to the study of the most obscure and difficult language on earth and the unlucky writers who had to use it. Chief among these is the bizarre and infamous poet Henderson, who is either a no-talent hack or the secret key to world history. Samuel Grapearbor, a congenitally disaffected undergraduate, and Stanley Higgs, a professor who hasn't spoken a word in fifteen years, circle helplessly around Henderson like satellites around a disagreeable planet; this novel, called "genuinely funny" by Kirkus Reviews, is the story of their attempts to escape his strange gravity.

Professors or Proletarians?

2010-02-17T14:27:00.000-08:00

Professors or Proletarians? A Test for Downtrodden Academics - NYTimes.com

Where could one go to forget the sad lives of poor migrant professors and downtrodden grad students trudging from college to college with no office and no money?

Luckily, the BBC's production of David Lodge's campus novel, ''Nice Work'' (1989), was running on an endless loop at the hotel. In the movie, the feminist part-time professor, Robyn Penrose, and the factory manager, Vic Wilcox, shadow each other in their careers, learning to admire and pity each other. Somehow, though, the movie wasn't quite working its magic.

A question kept getting in the way: Why had the Modern Language Association decided to show ''Nice Work''? Was it to cheer up the miserable graduate students and Ph.D.'s on the job market? To prove that a person trained to be an English professor, like Mr. Lodge, could just as easily become a novelist or filmmaker? To illustrate how similar business and academic life really are? To give everyone a merry little tune to hum: ''Nice work if you can get it''? (The only problem was how to finish the lyric. There are two endings to the phrase in the song. One goes ''Nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try.'' The other is ''Nice work if you can get it and if you get it, won't you tell me how?'')

The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton - Michael Collins

2010-02-17T14:09:00.000-08:00

The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton by Michael Collins Orion Books

A tale of murder and literary ambition set on an American university campus from a master of the dark side of human nature

Lijstjes Campus Novel

2010-02-17T13:39:00.000-08:00

StephanieVandrickReads: Campus Novels

Campus Novels

Campus novels are strangely compelling. As an academic myself, I particularly enjoy them, but I think anyone who has ever been a student, or worked on a campus, finds them intriguing. Here I list (in order of publication dates) some of the best such novels I have read over the years. (As I am making the list, I am reminded of how many of these books are satirical. I wonder what that says about campuses and academe?)

1. The Professor's House (1925), by Willa Cather. A lovely if sometimes sad book by the wonderful, pioneering Cather.
2. Groves of Academe (1952), by Mary McCarthy. As sharp in tone as McCarthy's work usually is, and great fun to read.
3. Pictures from an Institution (1952), by Randall Jarrell. His fictional college is based on Sarah Lawrence College, where he taught. Scathing in places.
4. Lucky Jim (1954), by Kingsley Amis. Probably the most famous campus novel ever. Satirical and hilarious.
5. The War Between the Tates (1974), by Alison Lurie (1974). As much about the couple's relationship as about the campus, but it is all connected. Also hilariously, if appallingly, candid.
6. Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1988), all by David Lodge. All very funny and great fun to read. Lodge also gets some great potshots in on both sides of the Atlantic, writing about academe in the U.S. and England, especially in Changing Places.
7. Moo (1995), by Jane Smiley. About a midwestern agricultural (thus the title) university. Very funny in parts, if a bit too detailed and sometimes a bit over the top.
8. Straight Man (1997), by Richard Russo. Funny, but also explores the human dilemma. By one of my favorite authors.
9. On Beauty (2005), by Zadie Smith. A British professor, with his multicultural family, comes to the U.S. to teach at an Ivy League university; there they both connect and clash with another professor's family. The British Smith, who spent a year teaching in the U.S. herself, has some very sharp but sometimes affectionate observations to make about race, class, multiculturalism, youth, romance, marriage, pride, and more. She has said that E. M. Forster's novel Howard's End provided a inspiration and a framework to this novel. A "big" novel with many wonderful aspects to savor.

What are your favorite campus novels?

Nemmeno il destino - Daniele Gaglianone

2010-02-17T13:32:00.000-08:00

Nemmeno il destino
Regie: Daniele Gaglianone (2004)

Een film over twee schoolvrienden.
Alessandro en Ferdi zijn vrienden van de middelelbare school en wonen in een vervallen industriestad. Beiden zijn ze op zoek naar hun eigen plek in de wereld, naar een oase in het achtergelaten vuilnis van de verlaten fabrieken. Ook hun gezinssituatie is niet bepaald rooskleurig. De alleenstaande moeder van Alessandro wordt ondanks haar pogingen om een normaal bestaan te leiden, steeds meer een gevangene van een pijnlijk verleden. En Ferdi woont samen met zijn vader, een ex-arbeider die ziek is geworden van zijn fabriekswerk en nu zijn dagen slijt met drank. Misschien eerder onbewust dan bewust proberen beide vrienden te ontkomen aan het onaantrekkelijke lot dat voor hen in het verschiet ligt. Maar hun pogingen daartoe lijken uit te lopen op een tragedie.
Regisseur Gaglianone brengt al hun problemen tot uitdrukking door met camera en goed gekozen locaties de uiterst sombere sfeer tastbaar te maken.

de Filmkrant net-versie van mei 2005, nr 266

Junebug - Phil Morrison

2010-02-17T13:28:00.000-08:00

Junebug (op Canvas zaterdag 13.2).
Amerikaanse komedie (2005) van Phil Morrison

De pasgetrouwde kunstgaleriehoudster Madeleine maakt kennis met de familie van haar man George: zijn zeer negatief gestemde moeder Peg, zijn teruggetrokken vader Eugene, zijn jongere broer Johnny en diens zwangere vrouw Ashley. De Britse Madeleine voelt zich een echte buitenstaander... Subtiele, contemplatieve relatiefilm met voorbeeldige vertolkingen.

Junebug (Canvas) | Humo: The Wild Site

Junebug (2005) - Memorable quotes

Madeleine: [Madeleine is helping Johnny with his book report on Huckleberry Finn] Their relationship is Huck's gradual love affair with this slave is a major theme...
Johnny Johnsten: Wa-wa-wait, they fall in love with each other? I don't think you're talking about the right book...
[laughs nervously]

Een interessante reflectie: Surfacing Culture’s ‘Unconscious Optics: Film and seeing more of the picture. COASTLINE JOURNAL

Johnson: The Name of the World

2010-01-26T00:41:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-22T17:24:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-22T17:24:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-22T06:32:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-22T06:28:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-18T13:29:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-08T03:53:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-05T14:26:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-02T13:55:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-02T13:23:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-02T13:05:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-02T12:20:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-02T04:25:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-02T04:23:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-01-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

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?

2010-01-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-01-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-01T08:11:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Damrosch: Meetings of the Mind

2009-12-28T17:52:00.000-08:00

David Damrosch, Meetings of the Mind. PUP.

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

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

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

The Oxford Murders

2009-12-28T17:42:00.000-08:00

The Oxford Murders (film) - Wikipedia

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

Cinebel:

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

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

Voskuil; Bij Nader Inzien

2009-12-28T17:35:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

Course: Campus Novel

2009-12-28T17:30:00.000-08:00

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

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

May Sarton - Faithful are the Wounds

2009-12-20T05:25:00.000-08:00

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

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

Howard Jacbobson, - Coming From Behind

2009-12-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

Howard Jacbobson, Coming From Behind

In LRB

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

THE IMAGE OF A TEACHERAS A ROMANTIC REBEL

2009-11-28T09:54:00.000-08:00

ARISTIDES GAZETAS, THE IMAGE OF A TEACHERAS A ROMANTIC REBEL IN NARRATIVE FILM. PHD.

Six narrative films were selected for this study to investigate theimage of a teacher as a Romantic rebel. In each of these films, thecentral character is portrayed as a school teacher coming intoconflict with traditional educational pedagogies that involvestudent learning and discipline. Each film is reviewed andevaluated within the framework of the romantic-humanist theory ofeducation or the transformational orientation.

Images of Teachers

2009-11-28T09:46:00.000-08:00

Crume, Mary Adams Tanzy, 'Images of Teachers in Novels and Films for the Adolescent, 1980-1987.' Ph.D.

Crume predicates her thesis on the idea that "literature and film serve
as vehicles for portraying and transmitting a culture, its values and attitudes."
She tests the commonly held notion that teachers are maligned in fiction and
popular arts, "depicted as fools, villains," and other unflattering stereotypes.
Dealing with American novels and films produced between 1980 and 1987 she
concludes that portrayals of teachers are diverse, although fiction writers tend
to treat teachers more sympathetically than film writers. She notes that both
mediums "presented a mixed view of American schools that minimized their
academic functions and highlighted their roles as social settings and battlegrounds."
Essentially Crume finds that teachers are not consistently impugned
in either medium, although filmmakers are less sympathetic to the profession
and the people in it than novelists.

Watson - DOING HOMEWORK

2009-11-28T09:42:00.000-08:00

Watson, DOING HOMEWORK: NEGOTIATIONS OF THE DOMESTIC IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY NOVELS OF TEACHING. PHD.

In this project, I analyze seven twentieth-century novels of teaching in order to
investigate how notions of “home” and “school” are constructed, connected, and
perpetuated in popular teaching narratives. Images of teachers in much of this century’s fiction often rest on views of the school as home that are derived from stereotypes of gender, race, and nationality—stereotypes that can be both inaccurate and repressive. For this reason, I examine these texts in light of how they negotiate school space with domestic space (“domestic” both as personal or familial, and as public or national). I contend that many of these narratives offer little more than simplistic, nostalgic views of what “home/school” space can be, and even fewer question the very equation of “school as home.” In those narratives that do probe the school/home connection, the teacherprotagonists often fail to emerge as the sentimental heroes that the teachers of the more conventional novels prove to be. Nevertheless, I argue that the most promising depictions of teachers and their work are those that acknowledge and engage the rich complexities of “home” and its (sometimes problematic) relation to the classroom, for the
very tensions and conflicts that problematize the school’s classification as a domestic “safe haven” are the very tools that can facilitate growth, learning, and self-discovery. The approach for my analysis draws from feminist and cultural studies, as well as educational history. The works I discuss include the following: The Blackboard Jungle; Good Morning, Miss Dove; To Sir, With Love; Spinster; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Up the Down Staircase; and Election.

Levi Weemoedt, - De ziekte van Lodestijn

2009-11-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

Levi Weemoedt, De ziekte van Lodestijn

Voor het eerst compleet in één band: het meesterwerk van Lévi Weemoedt!Geplaagd door ruimtevrees en duizelingen wankelt de leraar Lodesteijn door het angstaanjagende heelal van zijn bestaan. De verhuizing van en krakkemikkig noodschooltje naar een modern en fonkelnieuw gebouw met zestienhonderd ramen brengt helaas geen verlichting...

Ellen de Jong.
Een interview met Lévi Weemoedt:

Het is in ons leven vreemd gesteld. Het is Lachen und Weinen, Weinen und Lachen', schrijft Weemoedt in een van zijn verhalen. Zeker in het onderwijs waar het zelfs meer huilen dan lachen was. Weemoedt gaf les maar stapte na dertien jaar op, niet zonder een mooi(afscheids) boek te hebben geschreven 'De ziekte van Lodesteijn' en 'De nadagen van Lodesteijn'.
Onderwijs en zwaarmoedigheid zijn de voornaamste bestanddelen van deze roman.
Hoofdpersoon is de 35-jarige leraar klassieke talen Lodesteijn. Hij staat tien jaar voor de klas en krijgt langzaam maar zeker het gevoel klinisch dood te zijn:
'Of hij zichzelf als leraar had overleefd en vanachter zijn eigen grafsteen toezag op wat hij voor de klas stond te gebaren.'
De staf van de christelijke scholengemeenschap meent dat 'leraren de redders waren van de mensheid en de pijlers onder de maatschappij.'
Lodesteijn heeft duidelijk een andere mening en die wordt hem niet in dank afgenomen.
Zijn collega's beschrijft hij als 'een grauw en neerdrukkend volkje waaraan uiterlijk noch innerlijk ook maar iets te bespeuren viel van het comfortabele salaris dat in de regel aan deze volvette muizen van geest wordt uitgekeerd.'
Toen ik Weemoedt belde om een afspraak voor een interview te maken zei hij: "Bel me één dag van tevoren nog even op, want ik kan wel dood zijn."
In levende lijve tegenover hem in zijn donkere studeerkamer in Assen vroeg ik hem: Wat heeft je in het onderwijs het meest gestoord?
"Ik stoorde me aan het type mens dat voor de klas stond. In mijn naïviteit geloofde ik dat er immer geïnspireerde en bevlogen mensen voor de klas zouden staan, welk vak ze ook gaven; dat verdienden die kinderen. Dat viel me reusachtig tegen. Ik had een afkeer van de docentenkamer.
De problemen zaten altijd bij de staf of bij de collega's. Daar lagen de belangrijkste wrijvingen. Merkwaardigerwijs niet bij de leerlingen. Ik ben het allemaal vergeten dus het zijn hoogst onbetrouwbare uitspraken. Maar ik vond het lesgeven wel gezellig. Dat is bijna een gemis.

Jonathan Coe - The Rotter's Club

2009-11-28T09:28:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Coe, The Rotter's Club

Hans Bouman, 'Honderden wegen liggen open, en je kiest er maar één''. Volkskrant 10.1.2001

In al zijn boeken, zes tot nu toe, volgt Jonathan Coe de tijd op de voet. In The Rotters' Club belicht hij de jaren zeventig, voor zijn generatie in Engeland een periode van schaamteloze nostalgie. Het gaat in De Rotters Club (Meulenhoff; fl 49,90) ook over het verlies van onschuld, de opkomst van rechts in Engeland, en over Birmingham, Coe's geboorteplaats, die van schrijvende stadgenoten als J.R.R. Tolkien, David Lodge en Jim Crace niet de aandacht kreeg die zij verdient.

De opzet van het tweeluik, aldus Coe, is om de personages in 1979 achter te laten en de draad van hun leven twintig jaar later, in 1999, weer op te pakken. 'Ik wil het contrast laten zien tussen de bevlogenheid van een schooljongen en de omstandigheden waarin iemand van middelbare leeftijd is terechtgekomen. Dat is bijna per definitie niet wat je als scholier had verwacht.'

Coe heeft zich bij zijn opzet niet bewust laten inspireren door de 7 Up-documentairereeks van de BBC, waarbij mensen elke zeven jaar over hun leven worden ondervraagd. 'Maar ik ben wel altijd gefascineerd geweest door het idee om personages neer te zetten in verschillende perioden van hun leven en die beschrijvingen af te wisselen. Zo kun je laten zien hoe bruut de tijd mensen heeft veranderd. Terry, de filmcriticus in The House of Sleep (1997), spreekt daarover. Hij vertelt dat hij een film wil maken met maar één personage, die over een periode van 50 jaar wordt geschoten. 7 Up doet dat in feite ook.

'Beelden van iemand op latere leeftijd, gelegd naast die van jongere leeftijd, leveren bijna altijd een gevoel van desillusie op. Niet noodzakelijk omdat de levensloop van mensen teleurstellend is, maar omdat je als je jong bent nog denkt dat alles mogelijk is. Er liggen honderden wegen voor je open maar uiteindelijk kun je er maar één kiezen. Dat is hoe dan ook een teloorgang van potentieel.

'Het is een belangrijk thema in al mijn boeken: het idee dat de weg die je hebt gekozen niet de juiste is, omdat je nog 99 andere wegen had kunnen kiezen die misschien wel aantrekkelijker waren geweest. Door die gedachte word ik zelf ook achtervolgd. Stel dat ik net zo krachtig had vastgehouden aan mijn muzikale loopbaan als ik aan mijn literaire loopbaan heb gedaan. . .'

'Vorig jaar culmineerde dit in een serie op BBC2, genaamd I Love the Seventies. Elk programma duurde ongeveer twee uur en behandelde een jaar uit dat decennium. Het was volkomen nostalgisch en apolitiek.

'Hoewel ik allang vóór die televisieserie met The Rotters' Club was begonnen, mag ik het boek graag zien als een antwoord op die kritiekloze nostalgie. Leeftijdgenoten die terugverlangen naar de jaren zeventig, verlangen eigenlijk terug naar hun eigen adolescentie, die toevallig samenviel met dat tijdperk.

'Als je met mensen van andere generaties spreekt, met name degenen die opgroeiden in de jaren zestig, dan hebben ze geen goed woord voor de jaren zeventig over. Ze zien het als een druilerige, sombere periode - de kater na het feest.'

Onderwijs is niet om te lachen

2009-11-28T09:27:00.001-08:00

Onderwijs is niet om te lachen
Indrukwekkende blog over leraren-romans (Nederlandse en Vlaamse literatuur).

Natuurlijk is een leraar in sociaal-psychologische zin een ideaal personage voor een schrijver om zijn dramatische gaven op los te laten (‘dramatisch’ in de zin van het beschrijven van het inwendige leven en het handelen van het personage in een sociale omgeving waarin hij een voorbeeldfunctie heeft, en hij overeind moet blijven waar zoveel ogen op hem gericht zijn). Verder biedt de sociale omgeving van een school, het schoolklimaat met alle tegenstellingen (management-docententeam; docent-leerling; docenten onderling; school-ouders en alle belangenafwegingen vandien) een uitstekende voedingsbodem voor een roman waarin conflictsituaties worden uitgediept. Maar vraag blijft: waarom zo weinig een leraar beschreven die sterk in zijn schoenen staat, die als steun en toeverlaat voor zijn leerlingen fungeert, die enthousiast is en uiterst bekwaam in zijn didactisch handelen. Niet de oplossingen en/of de kansen staan centraal, maar de problemen. In dit opzicht wijken Nederlandse onderwijsromans niet af van de vaak probleemgefocuste teneur in de media.

Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook:

2009-11-28T07:47:00.001-08:00

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook:

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.

Chuck Palahniuk - Survivor

2009-11-28T07:44:00.000-08:00

Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor. Books.Surviver:

The books are never about what you think they are about. Survivor is really about our education system because I feel, more often than not, kids are sort of taught or trained to be the best possible cogs in some big corporate machine. They're not really taught in an empowered way that they can start their own company so that they can create and run their own lives. They are sort of taught to be just good employees, to just fit in.

Charles Knight - Satire and the Academic Novel

2009-11-28T07:18:00.000-08:00

Charles Knight, Satire and the Academic Novel. Literary Encyclopedia

The satiric campus novel, in its contemporary form, begins with a cluster of novels written in the 1950s: Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) and Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong (1959) in Britain; Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1953) and Randell Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (1954) in the United States. But education has been a subject of satire since Aristophanes mocked Socrates in Clouds (423 BC) and Lucian attacked philosophers and rhetoricians in the second century. Novels of education constitute a recognized category including hundreds of examples.

Matt Geroening - School is Hell

2009-11-28T07:15:00.000-08:00

Matt Groening, School is Hell. Pantheon Graphic Novels

Each grade is another level of hell. Each teacher another conductor with a weirder whistle urging you onward. In these 48 comics, Matt Groening gives you something to hide in your textbook and read in class secretl

Andrew Trees - Academy X.

2009-11-28T07:13:00.000-08:00

Andrew Trees, Academy X.
The New York Times Book Review:

The author of "Academy X," an actual private high school teacher in New York named Andrew Trees, is out to settle this score. He started with a book, yes, but this is a book clearly meant to go places, like television, the movies or both. It is a satire of a ritzy Manhattan private school, told from the perspective of a young English teacher torn between idealism and cynicism (aren't we all?).

Dietrich Schwanitz - Der Campus

2009-11-28T07:10:00.000-08:00

Dietrich Schwanitz - Der Campus. THE:

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.Now as some 40,000 students return to Hamburg for the start of the winter semester this week, Professor Schwanitz has turned from fiction to fact to criticise the bureaucracy which he believes is blocking much needed university reforms.

Dietrich Schwanitz - Obituaries, News - The Independent

Few writers in Germany were as notorious as Dietrich Schwanitz, the professor of English whose vitriolic pen skewered the country's education system and and satirised an academic world ruled by political correctness and decisions by committee. As if his unconventional attitude and fame were not enough to incite his colleagues' distrust and even envy, Schwanitz also achieved apparently effortlessly what most academics can only dream of: writing books which became bestsellers.

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberyy Finn.

2009-11-28T07:09:00.000-08:00

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberyy Finn.
SparkNotes: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Themes, Motifs & Symbols

When Huck plans to head west at the end of the novel in order to escape further “sivilizing,” he is trying to avoid more than regular baths and mandatory school attendance.

Satire and Humor in Education

2009-11-28T07:05:00.000-08:00

Satire and Humor in Education by Rolland Callaway. Amazon.com.

A collection of satirical and humorous readings related to education and schooling. The editor contends that perhaps educators, and others, have taken the issues and problems of education too seriously and a satirical and humorous perspective might lighten their task. The readings are categorized according to goals and curriculum; instruction including subcategories on organization, resources, teachers and teaching, learners and learning; evaluation and research; and futures. The editor has provided very little editorial comment, leaving that up to the reader. As noted in the introduction by Will Roy a Professor from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee"...[these essays] aim to deflate pompousness, annoy authority, shake the status quo, empower the little people, bring reality into the Ivory Tower, spur change, and primarily, allow us to take ourselves less seriously."

Harper Lee - To kill a mockingbird

2009-11-28T06:33:00.000-08:00

Harper lee, To kill a mocking bird.

SparkNotes: To Kill a Mockingbird: Themes, Motifs & Symbols

The Importance of Moral Education

Because exploration of the novel’s larger moral questions takes place within the perspective of children, the education of children is necessarily involved in the development of all of the novel’s themes. In a sense, the plot of the story charts Scout’s moral education, and the theme of how children are educated—how they are taught to move from innocence to adulthood—recurs throughout the novel (at the end of the book, Scout even says that she has learned practically everything except algebra). This theme is explored most powerfully through the relationship between Atticus and his children, as he devotes himself to instilling a social conscience in Jem and Scout. The scenes at school provide a direct counterpoint to Atticus’s effective education of his children: Scout is frequently confronted with teachers who are either frustratingly unsympathetic to children’s needs or morally hypocritical. As is true of To Kill a Mockingbird’s other moral themes, the novel’s conclusion about education is that the most important lessons are those of sympathy and understanding, and that a sympathetic, understanding approach is the best way to teach these lessons. In this way, Atticus’s ability to put himself in his children’s shoes makes him an excellent teacher, while Miss Caroline’s rigid commitment to the educational techniques that she learned in college makes her ineffective and even dangerous.

What are examples of satire involving education, court system, religion, and democracy in "To Kill a Mockingbird?" - To Kill a Mockingbird - Questions & Answers

There are many examples of each of these institutions being satirized, but I will give you a few. First of all, education is satirized because Scout is chastised by her teacher for reading too well! The court system and democracy are satirized in that they both fail miserably. Tom Robinson is unjustly accused and tried for a crime he did not commit because of his skin color, and there is no democracy for him nor hope for freedom. Religion is satirized when Calpurnia takes the children to her Black church and the congregation is prejudiced against Jem and Scout because they are White. Also, in a town that thinks of themselves as religious, there is little evidence of any religious precepts. Look further at enotes links for more ideas!

The film: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) van Robert Mulligan

Paul Verrept - Meneer Gijs

2009-11-24T03:02:00.000-08:00

Uit: Meneer Grijs, een liefdesverhaal in kleur. Paul Verrept en Riske Lemmens. Villa Kakelbont.

Wat is het grijs, denkt meneer Grijs.
Hij kijkt in de spiegel, dan uit het raam:
eerst zijn vale gezicht, dan wolken en regen. Altijd die regen.

Wat zal ik doen vandaag?, vraagt hij zich af.
Ach. Ik doe gewoon als elke dag.

In de klas spelen de kinderen.
Meneer Grijs laat ze doen en kijkt uit het raam.
Waar blijft die regen toch vandaan komen?
Dan ziet hij haar. Ze loopt over de speelplaats.
Ze is de juf van de derde klas.

Wat beweegt ze mooi, denk meneer Grijs.
En wat een prachtige rok.

Californication

2009-11-21T14:22:00.000-08:00

An interview (Los Angeles Times)

This season is built around Hank becoming a writing professor and from what I understand, you studied literature in school. Did that inform your character this year?
David Duchovny: *I guess I taught in a similar capacity to him. I was a teaching assistant when I was in graduate school, so I kind of understand what that is but I don’t know if that informs it so much. I guess it’s just that I don’t feel too worried that I can’t pull off a lecturer, you know?

Riikka Pulkkinen - De grens

2009-11-18T14:17:00.000-08:00

Riikka Pulkkinen - De grens

Gezocht en gevonden: de vrouwelijke tegenhanger van Paolo Giordano, het sexy brein achter 'De eenzaamheid van de priemgetallen'. Riikka Pulkkinen is even jong, aantrekkelijk én intelligent. Haar debuut 'De grens' (De Arbeiderspers) is in haar eigen Finland een dikke hit, net zoals Giordano's priemgetallen in Italië. Die is na zijn thuisland aan de verovering van de wereld begonnen; zo ver is Pulkkinen nog niet, maar ze heeft er wel de troeven voor. Niet in de laatste plaats een verrassend straf boek.
Giordano exploreert in zijn debuut de gevoelswereld van twee eenzame pubers; Pulkkinen houdt het bij één eenzame puber en een handvol loners van diverse leeftijden. De zestienjarige Mari laat zich door haar leraar Fins, Julian, verleiden tot een stomende seksrelatie. Dat haar puberhartje gebroken zal worden, hangt in de lucht. Risky business, want Mari speelt graag met de gedachte dat ook jonge meisjes kunnen sterven, en kerft daarbij diepe sneden in haar strakke, zachte huid.

Toch heeft Julian niet veel last van gewetensbezwaren. Hij zet zelfs zijn gezin op het spel, want zijn zesjarige dochter Anni ruikt snel onraad. Het kind is de jongste eenzaat op Pulkkinens schouwtoneel, maar niet de meest onschuldige. Ook de oudste verloren ziel in 'De grens', Mari's tante Anja, gaat gebukt onder schuld. Geveld door alzheimer slijt haar man zijn dagen kwijlend in een verzorgingstehuis. Toen hij Anja nog herkende, heeft hij haar gesmeekt het niet zo ver te laten komen. De vraag is nu: doodt ze hem of doodt ze hem niet?

Riikka Pulkkinen weet haar personages scherp neer te zetten: van de pientere zesjarige over de ontspoorde puber langs de geile verleider tot de tragische tante. Ze flirten elk met de grens van het moreel verderfelijke. De debutante doet haar job goed, ook al drogen de delen over Anja op tot voorspelbare flashbacks en stevent puber Mari op een grotesk einde af. Maar dat is detailkritiek.

Humo: The Wild Site

Va, vis et deviens van Radu Mihaileanu

2009-11-15T13:04:00.000-08:00

Va, vis et deviens*

De Frans-Roemeense regisseur *Radu Mihaileanu* vertelt in *Va, vis et deviens *een ontroerend menselijk levensverhaal. We bevinden ons in 1984 in een vluchtelingenkamp in Soedan. Voor Joodse Ethiopiërs is de redding nabij wanneer zij naar Israël gebracht worden. Een Ethiopische moeder maakt daarom een hartverscheurende beslissing en dwingt haar 9-jarige zoon om zich als Jood op te geven om zo aan een hongersdood te ontsnappen. Het jongetje wordt in Israël geadopteerd door een Franse familie, maar kan hij zijn geheim bewaren?

Canvas 16.11.2009

Een deel van het verhaal speelt zich op school af:

De opgroeiende Schlomo wordt gevolgd van zijn 9e tot zijn 26e jaar waarin hij afstudeert als arts. In het beloofde land heerst wantrouwen tegenover die zwarte joden en op school heerst racisme. Het pleeggezin doet hun best om de zogezegde vrome joodse gast terwille te zijn. Vooral de grootvader speelt met zijn humor een grote rol. De jongen blijft in gedachten solidair met zijn moeder en wil niet eten en slaapt op de grond. Langzamerhand wint de pleegmoeder zijn vertrouwen en slaagt hij erin zijn nieuwe identiteit als Jood vol overtuiging aan te nemen. Als hij op latere leeftijd verliefd wordt op een meisje uit een orthodox-Joods milieu komt hij echter in conflict met zichzelf.

The Israeli Government's Official Website, by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Dare

2009-11-14T09:47:00.000-08:00

Movie Review - Dare - Drama of High School, Starring Eros and Anxiety - NYTimes.com

'Dare' written by David Brind, directed by Adam Salky and based on their short film of the same title, stakes out familiar territory and, true to its name, strikes out in some risky new directions. This high school semi-romance, which blends comic and tearful moods, is at once more provocative and more contemplative than most of its big-screen counterparts. On television and in young-adult novels, candor — or prurience — about teenage behavior is the norm, but Hollywood movies tend to keep one foot firmly planted in a more innocent wor

Alexa at least at first, seems to embody an established teen-comedy archetype. She is a modest dresser, a diligent student and generally a cautious, sensible college-track soul. She’s also the star of her drama class, but her interest in acting may have more to do with academic ambition than with creative passion. That, at least, is what she hears from an alumnus of her school, now a successful stage actor), when he returns to his alma mater to give a master class. see

Dare:

*/DARE/*
*The Story*: Three high school seniors (Emmy Rossum, Zach Gilford, Ashley Springer) on the cusp of diving into the world get involved in a complicated relationship.
*The Pitch:* /Cruel Intentions/ meets /Reckless/ *Who It's For:* People who like very serious looks at high school kids sex lives.
*Cause for Hope:* Looks more thoughtful and interesting than typical high school film; happy return to the screen of Sandra Bernhard. see

Teaching with movies

2009-11-02T06:17:00.000-08:00

U.S. History Lesson Plans - United States, Movies, Film, Videos

Wiki; education in popular culture

2009-11-02T06:15:00.000-08:00

Category:Education in popular culture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Category:Education in popular culture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

High School Movies

2009-11-02T06:14:00.000-08:00

High School Movies: All Time Top 10 | Movie Room Reviews

With a focus on the last two decades, this list of high school movies includes the top ten great movies with a predominantly high school oriented theme. In order to be considered among the best high school movies, the film has to star high school students, target a largely teenage or high school oriented audience, and generally center around characters that are in high school, with a significant portion of the film taking place in the high school environment.

Here are the top ten great high school films that pass the test:

10. Superbad – Time wise, a close follow up to Napoleon Dynamite, this somewhat crude high school comedy helped launch Jonah Hill’s career as an leading actor. Adventureland Director Greg Mottola also directed this movie.

9. Swimfan – A suspense thriller high school movie, Swim Fan is a story about an obsessed girl, Madison (Erika Christensen), who falls for the school’s top swimmer (Jesse Bradford). When he wants to break things off to stay with his girlfriend, Madison is none too happy.

8. Bring It On – This high school film celebrates the best of clicky, overly happy, and highly competitive teenage girls who love to cheer. Two competing high school cheer squads work to become cheer champs.

7. John Tucker Must Die – Starring “the guy from Desperate Housewives” (Jesse Metcalfe), John Tucker Must Die is a romantic high school comedy about the popular jock who is humbled by the new girl (Brittany Snow). Ashanti, Sophia Bush, and Arielle Kebbell add to this formidable cast.

6. Can’t Buy Me Love – One of the best 80s movies, this romantic high school comedy is perhaps best known for starring a young Patrick Dempsey. For many, it is an iconic 80s film about the popular girl and the geeky guy getting together.

5. The New Guy – With a various heavy high school theme, The New Guy starred DJ Qualls and Eliza Dushku. The movie was about an unpopular guy (Qualls) who reinvents himself after moving to a new school. His new attitude transcends his modest frame, which rallies his school to its first football win in a long time and captures the heart of a popular girl (Dushku). There are plenty of laughs.

4. Juno – Ellen Page proved her worth in this 2007 high school movie about a teenage girl who finds herself with an unplanned pregnancy. She goes back and forth between whether to have the kid, and whether to give it up for adoption to a young couple (Justin Bateman and Jennifer Garner). Very humorous and quirky comedy with an excellent message!

3. Mean Girls – The ultimate high school film, this movie is about a new girl (Lindsay Lohan) who changes her persona to impress the popular girls in school and to win over the handsome jock. While poking fun at common click behaviors, the movie closes with a nice message.

2. Election – One of Reece Witherspoon’s early movies, Election remains one of the most classic high school movies even after 10 years (1999). An overly ambitious high school student (Witherspoon) gets under the skin of one of the school’s most popular teachers (Matthew Broderick) when she campaigns for student body president.

1. Napoleon Dynamite - This 2004 film not only landed an iconic high school movie it created an entire cultural revolution, completion with fashion and apparel (”Vote For Pedro” shirts).

SUPER #1. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – Because this 1986 high school comedy has such an elite status among movies with high school students and themes, it has to stand alone above the rest of the top 10 list of high school movies. Matthew Broderick never has never had a better role and movie than his performance in this very funny film about a high school student who takes a remarkably ambitious day off from school.