Ever since the colonial period, the American college campus has been more than an architectural space. As the historian Paul Venable Turner has argued, the American campus encoded forms of an idealized national community as well as utopian social visions. Modes of inclusion and exclusion as well as cultural hierarchies have also evolved along with colleges and universities in America.
This course will delve into the imaginaries of the American college campus by surveying the genre of the campus narrative in novels, in films, and on TV. Students will survey the genre, highlighting the narrative, ideological, and spatial dimensions in campus novels by Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Chabon, Elif Batuman, Christine Smallwood, and Brandon Taylor. Moving across to filmic narrative, the course will inquire into recent popular depictions ranging from Wonder Boys (2000) and Dear White People (2014) to the Netflix show The Chair (2021). Our conceptual framings will include the history and development of American higher education, the recent rise of “critical university studies”, as well as the ongoing campus culture wars, which are often fueled by conservative and right-wing media.
- Lehrende(r): Alexander Starre