A Contemporary Version of Stoner? Loner by Teddy Wayne

September 13, 2016 – vanityfair.com

Loner Author Teddy Wayne on Tackling the Campus Novel and Male Privilege
The author discusses the dark social forces that influenced his latest book.
BY MIKE SACKS

“Vanity Fair contributor and New York Times columnist Teddy Wayne has a new campus novel, Loner (Simon & Schuster), out today, just in time for back-to-school season. Wayne’s third book follows David Federman, an alienated Harvard freshman who soon becomes infatuated with Veronica, a glamorous, sophisticated Manhattanite in his dorm.

What begins as a wry coming-of-age story soon spirals into a dark, disturbing portrait of obsession and an examination of class and gender politics.”

More:

http://kdlg.org/post/first-year-college-student-finds-himself-outclassed-loner#stream/0

http://www.dailynebraskan.com/arts_and_entertainment/hammack-loner-represents-modern-college-life/article_ed40ec9c-8f62-11e6-8e10-ff014ed49d2a.html

Good books, bad books

“All writers have been students, and nowadays a sizable number are teachers, so it seems nearly unavoidable that we write about the golden groves we knew.

It’s easy to dismiss “Tom Brown’s School Days” or “Stover at Yale,” or to make fun — as Tom Wolfe did more recently in “I Am Charlotte Simmons” — of a fictionalized Duke University. But there’s a sizable shelf of books about bookishness — some of them first-rate — which take education as their subject and explore the idea of learning as initiation rite. As with any other category (the Southern novel, the Jewish novel, the on-the-road novel) there are excellent and execrable texts. It’s a question not so much of genre as of how well it’s done. […]

As suggested above, there are bad books as well that deal with the circumstance of education. The professoriate makes an easy target; so does the undergraduate. Often a writer gets tempted to make intellectual molehills into mountains; lord knows it’s easy enough to overstate the cultural significance of freshman year. The risk is that of stereotype and even caricature: the absent-minded professor, the scheming administrator, the idealistic and then disillusioned student — stock figures from English 101. But the college campus is no more and no less fertile a place to situate a story than is, say, a boxing ring or tenement or cattle barn.”

April 13, 2012, Chicago Tribune

English 101 by Nicholas Delbanco

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-prj-0415-book-of-the-month-20120413,0,154025.story

Boring, repetitive, elitist…

April 5, 2012 – idioland.com

The Great American Campus Novel Yawn

http://idioland.com/culture/great-american-campus-novel-yawn/

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?”

Love on Campus

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

More than just a baseball novel — The Art of Fielding (2011) by Chad Harbach

“This good-enough undergraduate institution is filled with truly good people: a deeply literary president who is personally admirable, even though he has fallen in love with a student; a gruff chef in charge of dining services who is committed to cooking actually good food; a brilliant, gay, mixed-race roommate who takes his hick of a straight roommate shopping for more socially acceptable jeans; a baseball team captain who is a genuine leader of men, and so on.” http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/09/the_perfect_game.single.html

Reviews:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-books-review-art-of-fielding-harbach,0,7773863.story

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/29/art-fielding-chad-harbach-review?newsfeed=true

http://www.therecord.com/whatson/books/article/665603–chuck-erion-on-books-great-novels-can-point-to-the-path-of-your-life

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-chad-harbach-20120421,0,7822952.story

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-prj-0422-bom-chart-20120423,0,1895920.story

      Chad Harbach @ internationales literaturfestival berlin 2012

David Lodge on campus novels

source: http://randomhouseindia.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/david.jpg

September 24, 2010 11:34 pm, Financial Times

“The campus novel emerged as higher education expanded and novelists increasingly took day jobs in universities. Inherently comic and satirical, it is focused on the lives of academic staff rather than their students, and explores the gap between the high ideals of the institution and the human weaknesses of its members.”

The List: Five of the best campus novels

David Lodge on Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin

Other top tens, top fives etc.:

Jeffrey Moore’s top 10 campus novels:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jul/03/bestbooks.fiction

10 Classic Campus Novels:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/04/10-classic-campus-novels_n_857756.html#s274149&title=Gaudy_Night

Literature of the campus:

http://theconcordian.com/2013/09/articulate-literature-of-the-campus/

Top 5 Campus Novels Written by Women by Jane Bradley:

http://forbookssake.net/2013/07/05/top-five-campus-novels-written-by-women/