Campus Literature

For generations, writers of all stripes have looked to the college campus as both a window into the future and an invented setting from which to reimagine it. In this course, we do the same. Moving from John Williams' Stoner to Christine Smallwood's The Life of the Mind, we examine the evolving history of American higher education over the past century through the lens of its accompanying literature, with a particular emphasis on the campus novel. In doing so, our goal is to not only understand why the modern American university looks and operates the way it does, but also explore where it goes from here. Along the way, we also consider the ways that different writers have used the setting of the college campus to advance a range of political and aesthetic agendas, and then use what we learn to craft compelling campus literature of our own. Prior guest speakers for this course have included several of the novelists we study, as well as prominent historians and literary critics from The New Yorker and The New York Times.