This seminar will have two foci: American fiction about higher education and critical university studies. We will spend our time talking about contemporary American fiction as a field of study, about the genre of the academic novel, about critical university studies, and about the intersection of the three areas. Students will be responsible for writing daily questions about the reading, giving presentations, writing and presenting book reviews, and writing and presenting conference-length papers.

Texts to be announced, but may include some of these: in fiction, Willa Cather, The Professor’s House; Don DeLillo, White Noise; Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin; Ishmael Reed, Japanese by Spring; Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members; Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind; Jane Smiley, Moo; John Williams, Stoner; in critical university studies, Roderick Ferguson, We Demand: The University and Student Protests; Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University; Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class; Julia Schleck, Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism; Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen; shorter readings from Jeffrey J. Williams, Heather Steffen, Mark McGurl, Eric Bennett, Leonard Cassuto, Marc Bousquet, and others; we will also watch Adam Dietrich and Arun Baja’s film Concerned Student 1950.

via GIPHY