Reviewers Wanted

Have you recently read a newly published campus novel or seen a new movie tackling academe? Would you like to write a short, critical, and thoughtful review for this site? Become a Schoolsville reviewer and email me at: marta.lysik@uwr.edu.pl.

CfP:”Representations of Textual and Contextual Boundaries in Academic Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Film” in Kaunas, Lithuania 27-28 April, 2017

 

Session organized within the framework of the

“Texts and Contexts: The Phenomenon of Boundaries” conference

Vilnius University Kaunas, Faculty of Humanities

This panel aims to explore the representations of different boundaries at work in academic fiction, non-fiction and film, be they referring to genre and its textual fabric, or the reality and different contexts these narratives depict.

Submissions can relate, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Textual vs. material reality in academic narratives,
• Student-teacher boundaries and off-limits behaviors in academic narratives,
• Divisions in the academe,
• No limits – academic utopias and dystopias,
• Breaking the boundary of realism – sci-fi academic narratives,
• Limits of empathy and identification – academics reading and writing academic novels,
• Frontiers and trailblazers in the academe,
• Probing the limits of truth, or facts and fiction in academic narratives and life writing – autofiction, roman à  clef etc.,
• Academic metafiction and breaking down of the fourth wall – writers writing about writers and writing,
• Limitless navel-gazing? Self-reflexivity in academic narratives, or academics writing about academe and academics
• Academic novel – genre boundaries and margins

Please send a short abstract (no more than 200 words) for a 20-minute paper, and a bio note by 6 February, 2017 to the session organizer Marta Lysik at marta.lysik@uwr.edu.pl.

Black Academic Fiction

I have recently stumbled upon a blog whose author wrote a dissertation titled The Over-Education of the Negro: Higher Education, Academic Novels, and the Black Intellectual. His blogging and some posts are of interest:

– On black academic fiction (bibliography)

– On academic criticism (bibliography)

– On academic films:

http://lavelleporter.com/2010/06/18/the-university-on-screen-the-top-10-academic-films-2/

http://lavelleporter.com/2010/08/19/10-more-academic-films-2/

– On individual novels:

http://lavelleporter.com/2013/02/17/academic-novel-imperium-in-imperio/

http://lavelleporter.com/2011/05/05/pym/

http://lavelleporter.com/2010/12/29/japanese-by-spring/

http://lavelleporter.com/2010/08/18/stoner-by-john-williams/

Eros + pedagogy = [brain] sex

 

 

 

 

 

 

The American Scholar, Summer 2007

Love on Campus. Why we should understand, and even encourage, a certain sort of erotic intensity between student and professor

By William Deresiewicz

“Look at recent movies about academics, and a remarkably consistent pattern emerges. In The Squid and the Whale (2005), Jeff Daniels plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps with his students, neglects his wife, and bullies his children. In One True Thing (1998), William Hurt plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps with his students, neglects his wife, and bullies his children. In Wonder Boys (2000), Michael Douglas plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps with his students, has just been left by his third wife, and can’t commit to the child he’s conceived in an adulterous affair with his chancellor. Daniels’s character is vain, selfish, resentful, and immature. Hurt’s is vain, selfish, pompous, and self-pitying. Douglas’s is vain, selfish, resentful, and self-pitying. Hurt’s character drinks. Douglas’s drinks, smokes pot, and takes pills. All three men measure themselves against successful writers (two of them, in Douglas’s case; his own wife, in Daniels’s) whose presence diminishes them further. In We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004), Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause divide the central role: both are English professors, and both neglect and cheat on their wives, but Krause plays the arrogant, priapic writer who seduces his students, Ruffalo the passive, self-pitying failure. A Love Song For Bobby Long (2004) divides the stereotype a different way, with John Travolta as the washed-up, alcoholic English professor, Gabriel Macht as the blocked, alcoholic writer. […] What’s going on here? If the image of the absent-minded professor stood for benevolent unworldliness, what is the meaning of the new academic stereotype? Why are so many of these failed professors also failed writers? Why is professional futility so often connected with sexual impropriety? […] Why are these professors all men, and why are all the ones who are married such miserable husbands?”

http://theamericanscholar.org/love-on-campus/#.Ux2tVrvLhdc

A student paper on a similar subject (analyses of Wonder Boys, On Beauty and The Art of Fielding):

http://scholar.harvard.edu/claybaugh/pages/biblarz-campus-novel-sex-campus-other-musings