Inside Scholastic Headquarters

The 9 Best Universities in the World to Study Literature

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

Why are Textbooks So Expensive?

Mental Floss finds out, here.

What Killed American Lit

Today's collegians don't want to study it—who can blame them?



From an article in the Wall Street Journal...



Yet, through the magic of dull and faulty prose, the contributors to "The Cambridge History of the American Novel" have been able to make these presumably worldly subjects seem parochial in the extreme—of concern only to one another, which is certainly one derogatory definition of the academic. These scholars may teach English, but they do not always write it, at least not quite. A novelist, we are told, "tasks himself" with this or that; things tend to get "problematized"; the adjectives "global" and "post"-this-or-that receive a good workout; "alterity" and "intertexuality" pop up their homely heads; the "poetics of ineffability" come into play; and "agency" is used in ways one hadn't hitherto noticed, so that "readers in groups demonstrate agency." About the term "non-heteronormativity" let us not speak.



These dopey words and others like them are inserted into stiffly mechanical sentences of dubious meaning. "Attention to the performativity of straight sex characterizes . . . 'The Great Gatsby' (1925), where Nick Carraway's homoerotic obsession with the theatrical Gatsby offers a more authentic passion precisely through flamboyant display." Betcha didn't know that Nick Carraway was hot for Jay Gatsby? We sleep tonight; contemporary literary scholarship stands guard.



"The Cambridge History of the American Novel" is perhaps best read as a sign of what has happened to English studies in recent decades. Along with American Studies programs, which are often their subsidiaries, English departments have tended to become intellectual nursing homes where old ideas go to die. If one is still looking for that living relic, the fully subscribed Marxist, one is today less likely to find him in an Economics or History Department than in an English Department, where he will still be taken seriously. He finds a home there because English departments are less concerned with the consideration of literature per se than with what novels, poems, plays and essays—after being properly X-rayed, frisked, padded down, like so many suspicious-looking air travelers—might yield on the subjects of race, class and gender. "How would [this volume] be organized," one of its contributors asks, "if race, gender, disability, and sexuality were not available?"

The Perks of Being an English Major

We Can't Teach Our Kids to Love Reading

So notes the Chronicle for Higher Education.

From an article...

At the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps 2 percent of Americans attended a university; now the number is closer to 70 percent (though only about 30 percent get bachelor's degrees). A particularly sharp acceleration occurred in the years after 1945, when the GI Bill enabled soldiers returning from World War II to attend college for free, thus leading universities across the country to throw up quonset huts for classrooms, and English professors to figure out how to teach 40 students at a time, rather than 11, how to read sonnets. (And those GI's wanted their children to have the same educational opportunities they had, or better ones.) These changes have had enormous social consequences, but for our purposes here, the one that matters is this: From 1945 to 2000, or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books.

In 2005, Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, sociologists from Northwestern University, published a paper concluding that while there was a period in which extraordinarily many Americans practiced long-form reading, whether they liked it or not, that period was indeed extraordinary and not sustainable in the long run. "We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class."

I don't think of the distinction between readers and nonreaders—better, those who love reading and those who don't so much—in terms of class, which may be a function of my being a teacher of literature rather than a sociologist, but may also be a function of my knowledge that readers can be found at all social stations. But whatever designations we want to use, it has to be admitted that much of the anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree, arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of "the reading class" beyond what may be its natural limits.

The Teacher Who Encouraged Me to Write

Dave Eggers heaps praise on an old English teacher.

From an article on Salon...

I took his course when I was a junior, and the first book we read was "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." In those first few weeks, he showed us a caricature of James Joyce from the New York Review of Books. In it, Joyce's hands were rendered large, cupped and moving, as if paddling through water. Mr. Criche asked if anyone knew why the artist had depicted Joyce that way, and I raised my hand. "Is he swimming through a stream of consciousness?"

Mr. Criche cocked his head a bit, confirmed the answer, and a wave of validation swept over me. I hadn't known, until that moment, how badly I'd wanted his approval. I was going through some rough times at school and at home -- my face and back were covered in acne, my chest was concave, my last name sounded like food -- but in that class, I felt I had worth. After that, I took it upon myself to impress him. Though William Faulkner wasn't assigned reading, for weeks I brought "As I Lay Dying" to class, stacked neatly upon my other books, hoping he'd notice. (He didn't.)

He was kind to me, but I had no sense that he took particular notice of me. There were other, smarter kids in the class, and soon I fell back into my usual position -- of thinking I was just a little over average in most things. But near the end of the semester, we read "Macbeth." Believe me, this is not an easy play to connect to the lives of suburban high schoolers, but somehow he made the play seem electric, dangerous, relevant. After procrastinating till the night before it was due, I wrote a paper about the play -- the first paper I typed on a typewriter -- and turned it in the next day.

I got a good grade on it, and below the grade Mr. Criche wrote, "Sure hope you become a writer." That was it.

The Case for Graphic Novels in Education

American Libraries Magazine makes one.

From the article...

Perhaps we’re past the point of having to explain that graphic novels, with their knack for attracting reluctant readers and hitting developmental sweet spots, have a legitimate place on library shelves. Perhaps. But what about the idea that graphic novels encompass such a wide range of themes and create such layered experiences through word and art that they actually belong in classrooms? Because contemporary students have a much wider visual vocabulary than we did growing up, I contend that the format offers great opportunities to teach as well as to entertain.

My own experiences as a teacher and a librarian bear out the medium’s potential. It will come as little surprise to anyone who works with children and young adults that graphic novels disappear from library shelves faster than anything else (except, maybe, vampire novels) and are the topic of eager discussion whenever they find their way into classrooms. This interest isn’t solely among kids looking for a fun, colorful story. Equally interested are the graduate students in my class at Pratt Institute, as well as many educators at LREI, the independent school in Manhattan where I work. Fascination with the history and language of the form as a vehicle for education is clear.

Peter Pan House to Become Center for Children's Literature?

That's the hope.

From a story on the BBC...

Author JM Barrie played in the grounds of the building as a child but the property has fallen into disrepair.

The Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust is currently raising funds for the upgrade of the building and has secured Joanna Lumley as a patron for its plans.

She said: "I am so thrilled and proud to be here to launch these exciting plans for the future of Moat Brae House and garden.

"There is such wonderful potential to create a fantastic National Centre for Children's Literature.

"I want to help raise the profile of this admirable project so that Peter Pan fans from all over the world can support this wonderful restoration."

The house and garden were in private ownership between 1823 and 1914.

It subsequently became a nursing home which shut in 1997 and fell into disrepair.

Students Get Close and Personal with Rare Books

NPR highlights the University of Virginia's Rare Book School.



From the article...



The university's Rare Book School estimates that it owns about 80,000 publications and print-related materials. And while some of those items are quite valuable, Michael Suarez — director of the Rare Book School — wants students to be able to handle them so they can better appreciate the history of paper, binding, typography and illustration.



"We insist that students touch and smell and shine light through items, and investigate them to understand the book in history, and understand the book as history," Suarez says.



The classes that bring students into this underground treasure trove mostly deal with antiques, but the program also explores the preservation of materials that were born digital. That might soun

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).