W. E. B. Du Bois, The Black Flame, and the Struggle Ahead, has just been published on the African American Intellectual History Society’s newly redesigned blog, Black Perspectives. I’ll be discussing more about Du Bois and The Black Flame at the upcoming second annual AAIHS conference on March 24-25 in Nashville, TN.
(Image from the Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/campus-novels-to-read-this-fall_us_5602e410e4b08820d91b3dcc)
“Our generation – we subscribe to the old liberal doctrine of the inviolate self. It’s the great tradition of realistic fiction, it’s what novels are all about. The private life in the foreground, history a distant rumble of gunfire, somewhere offstage. In Jane Austen not even a rumble. Well, the novel is dying, and us with it. No wonder I can never get anything out of my novel-writing class at Euphoric State. It’s an unnatural medium for their experience. Those kids (gestures at screen) are living a film, not a novel.”
– David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)
Bad news Mr. Lodge. Film is an old medium now. These days we are living a YouTube video: short, truncated, atomized, disintegrated, yet part of the scheme. Much of what I’ve learned about academic fiction has come from the web, whether from the blog Schoolsville (which collects recent articles and reviews of campus novels), or Ms. Mentor columns on academic novels in The Chronicle of Higher Education, or other articles on academic fiction from various sites around the web (some of which I’ve corralled into this bibliography).
Recently I’ve noticed a few YouTube videos and other digital content relevant to the topic and wanted to share them here. This is by no means exhaustive. You can check out my Twitter feed (speaking of fragmentation) where I’m more likely to share individual items as I find them.
The Library at the Edge of the World is a YouTube channel with reviews of all sorts of books. The episode below is about the Campus Novel. Though I disagree with this vlogger’s take on John Williams’s Stoner, there’s some interesting commentary on other academic novels old and new, and the comment section has examples from other viewers.
And just to pluck out one random example of how other people are engaging with these books, one of the commenters on that video vlogs at Dinosaur in the Library and did a review of Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, a book that I have checked out from the library, that has been in my queue for a while, and which I hopefully will get to sometime this spring or summer. (So much to read, so little time…)
I’ve run across Professor Merritt Moseley’s name in the critical literature on academic novels, and I’ve read his anthology The Academic Novel: New and Classic Essays. Here is a video of Moseley giving a lecture on the campus novel at his home campus, the University of North Carolina-Asheville.
And on Twitter, there’s “A Different World Now” a weekly chat group run from the account @hillmantoday which hosts Saturday morning livetweets on the series, which is now streaming on Netflix. The group usually does two episodes per week and they are currently up to Season 5. I haven’t been able to participate often, but I’m happy to see that there’s sustained interest in the show, which remains one of the most important representations of black college life in pop culture.
There are also a number of new films that I’ve seen but haven’t written about. I should probably do an updated list with some of the most recent college films. (A few weeks ago I saw The Five-Year Engagement which was racist as hell, much like too many other college films of its type, and also gave me a slight case of PTSD from the two miserable years I spent in Ann Arbor.)
Lastly, from a more traditional mode of scholarship, the latest issue of the literary journal Callaloo includes my review of Stephanie Brown’s The Postwar African American Novel, a book that caught my attention because it contains an informative chapter on J. Saunders Redding’s 1950 college novel Stranger and Alone, which takes place in a fictional black college called New Hope.
In the meantime I’m working to add a few more items of my own to the critical literature on academic fiction.
Head over to the African-American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) where I have contributed a blog post – “Culture Warriors: Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring and Afro-Asian Critique” – as part of their wonderful Afro-Asia series.
“Percival Everett by Percival Everett”, my second essay for The New Inquiry, has just been posted. Click over there and check it out.
Be on the lookout for “Percival Everett by Percival Everett,” my latest essay forthcoming in The New Inquiry.
Reading through Conversations with Percival Everett in the process of writing that piece. I discovered this outstanding primary and secondary online bibliography on Percival Everett compiled by Joe Weixlmann and hosted by African-American Review, LINK. (And, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the secondary bibliography lists my dissertation chapter on Erasure.)
Below is an abstract for my upcoming talk at the NeMLA conference in Toronto on the panel “College in Crisis: Higher Education in Literature and Popular Culture.” I’m particularly excited about this panel because it’s a rare opportunity for some face-to-face dialogue with other scholars of academic fiction.
“Academia and the Riddle of Race in Percival Everett’s Academic Fiction”
Though his work is often filed under the genre of “literary fiction” Percival Everett’s writing has bounded across an array of literary genres and themes. His first novel, Suder (1983) is the story of a black professional baseball player who is experiencing a batting slump and becomes obsessed with the music of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. Among his other novels are Frenzy (1997) a retelling of the Dionysus myth set in ancient Greece, and God’s Country (1994) an American Western set in the 1870s. In this presentation I will examine Percival Everett’s work in academic fiction, a genre defined by its fictional depictions of universities, students and professors. In his 2001 satirical novel Erasure Percival Everett examines the significance of racial authenticity in black literary and cultural production, and explores broader questions about authenticity, art and cultural politics, while delivering a scathing satire of literary academia’s pretentious excesses. Everett’s novel Glyph, published in 1999 (and recently reissued by Graywolf Press in 2014) features a silent, highly intelligent baby named Ralph who is conversant in literary theory and carries on an interior monologue of insults directed at his parents. Everett’s 2009 novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier includes scenes set at the historically black Morehouse College, featuring a professor named “Percival Everett” who teaches a class on “Nonsense,” and is critical of the college’s respectability politics. In all of these novels Everett engages, undercuts, ridicules and critiques academic discourses and racial logics. This presentation is part of a book project on academic novels and the politics of the black intellectual, and in this paper I will examine the ways in which Everett’s academic fictions generate provocative conversations about the role of black intellectuals in higher education, and the vexing history of race in American culture and literature.
THE BLACKADEMIC LIFE: THE BLOG 