Adventures in Pop/Culture: Popular pictures of professors

Popular pictures of professors as pitiful pedants: Puh-leez

He is The Professor — and nothing more has to be said, because The Professor rarely varies from one movie to the next. WildeBoomerz

Smart People

Smart People (2008)

Into the life of a widowed professor comes a new love and an unexpected visit from his adopted brother.

Quote:

Lawrence Wetherhold: [stilted date conversation] We respond to literary texts using precisely the same fundamental interpretive categories that authors and poets use to create them. So there's no need to posit any kind of unstable ontology, or ruptured consciousness. You following me? imdb

The Philip Dolly Affair

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

Slumdog Literacy

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

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

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

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.