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:
– On individual novels:
Posted in Bibliography, blogs, campus novel, college novel, films, Lists
Tagged A Single Man, As She Climbed Across the Table, Back to School, cinema, David Lodge, Der Blaue Engel, Educating Rita, Elaine Showalter, Fanshawe, Good Will Hunting, Higher Learning, Horse Feathers, Jonathan Lethem, Kinsey, Margaret Edson, movies, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oleanna, Philip Roth, Possession, School Daze, Something the Lord Made, Surviving Desire, Tenure, The Blue Angel, The Human Stain, The Paper Chase, The Savages, The Squid and the Whale, Wit, Wonder Boys
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?”
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
Posted in campus novel, college novel, films
Tagged Chad Harbach, Crossing to Safety, Dead Poets Society, Herzog, In Her Shoes, Jeffrey Eugenides, Kepesh, Little Miss Sunshine, Mona Lisa Smile, Moonstruck, Oleanna, On Beauty, One True Thing, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Socrates, Surviving Desire, Symposium, Terms of Endearment, The Art of Fielding, The Life of David Gale, The Marriage Plot, The Squid and the Whale, Tuesdays with Morrie, Wallace Stegner, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Wonder Boys, Zadie Smith
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"Schoolsville:" Academic/Campus/College/University Fiction 