The American College Novel

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

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

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

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

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.

Isherwood - A single man

Ink Quest: A Sinkle Man

Tom Ford's new adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man. I think I've recorded my love of the the book in a previous post. Don DeLillo's White Noise may be the finest campus novel ever written, but Isherwood captures better than anyone else the performance, the adoption of a mask, involved in academic life.

If

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”)