Alma Mater
A College Homecoming
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- 35,00 kr
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- 35,00 kr
Publisher Description
An alumnus of Kenyon College as well as a faculty member, Kluge presents a knowledgeable examination of the dynamics, character, traditions, tensions, and pretensions of the small, private, and costly school. Famous teachers include John Crowe Ransom, and famous students include E.L. Doctorow.
“I love islands. Micronesia — Saipan, Palau, Pohnpei — is full of them. Gambier, Ohio is another kind of island, a small, surrounded place where I live and teach. My alma mater, my current employer. If you live in a place, you write about it. Alma Mater is a loving, scathing, funny account of a year in the life of Kenyon College. No names have been changed. And I put myself in the way of as much experience as I could bear: trustees, hiring searches, fraternity life, dormitory grotesquerie, departmental meetings — I even moved back into the same dorm I’d occupied as a college freshman in 1960-61. For that alone I deserve Nobel Prize consideration.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Kluge ( Eddie and the Cruisers ), who graduated from Kenyon College in 1964, returned to the campus in Gambier, Ohio, in the 1980s to teach English and fiction writing. He also went to reflect on change and stability at his alma mater. Here he takes the measure, casually, of a year in the life of Kenyon, critical and yet affectionate in his regard for a rural liberal arts college with a distinguished tradition, especially in letters, formed by John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and others. As a participant and observer, Kluge notes many events, long-term developments and motley details (e.g., a college-wide ``disintegration of consensus'' about what should be taught and how to teach it that extends, emblematically, beyond Kenyon); considers the circumstances of the 12 or so black undergraduates in a student body of 1500; looks in on a search for a new professor of philosophy; and notes the removal of ivy from the vaunted ivory tower, the better to preserve the stone beneath. This is a chatty, informative portrait that lightly probes the current challenges of higher education--and for a college. As Kluge concludes, ``It is possible to get a wonderful education in Gambier, but it is not required.''