Thursday, July 14, 2011

Creative Writing Professors on the Silver Screen


A brief survey of creative writing professors portrayed in movies can be found in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

From the piece...

Writers are overrepresented in popular culture, which makes sense. Novels and screenplays are, after all, written by writers, and writers are just as prone to self-interestedness as everyone else. The fictional writers in books and movies reveal several stereotypes about writers, the most extreme animating the Jack Nicholson character in The Shining.

Looking at a curious subset of this phenomenon—movies featuring creative writing professors as characters—reveals stereotypes of academy-based writers. In movies as different Husbands and Wives, The Wonder Boys, The Squid and the Whale, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, Music & Lyrics, and Throw Mama From the Train, creative writing professors are men. They suffer from a variety of creative ailments (usually both writer’s block and professional jealousy) and personal problems (usually both disintegrated marriages and overuse of alcohol).

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