Francisco Olvera Callejas

This course asks students to think critically and meta-critically about the role and presence of higher education/ academics, university life and college experience(s) in American literature, particularly as it has appeared within the genre of the novel. To that end, this course combines literary studies alongside the still nascent “critical university studies” to ask, at the most basic level, how different American writers—across different times and spaces—have envisioned what living and learning within a college/ campus looks like. And furthermore, how this affects—or doesn’t—the broader American society under which these colleges exist within. Students will read within the diverse, but fluid, genre of “campus novels” and these readings may include Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson, This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stoner by John Williams, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Japanese by Spring by Ishmael Reed. Films that students will watch may include National Lampoon’s Animal House, Good Will Hunting and Accepted.