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Hello, All!
I am interested in tracing representations of classrooms (and of teachers, students, in action) as they've appeared in literature from the 19th Century to the present. Anyone have any favorite (or, alternatively, any least-favorite, most-troubling?) scenes to recommend?
Thanks very much!
David Copperfield
To Kill A Mockingbird
The only ones that I can think of (at the moment, and aside from any adolescent literature that might depict classrooms - like The Chocolate War), are the classroom scenes from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce). In fact, a good portion of the novel is set in or around the school Stephen/Joyce attended.
In John Updike's The Centaur one of the main characters is a teacher so we see the classroom from a teacher's view.
Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes.
As much as I did not like the book I would say Portrait of an Artist by Joyce which has been mentioned here already. Some others might come to my mind later but off the top of my head I cannot think of many books I read that displayed a classroom scene.
For a more modern book in my Child lit class we read the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. It is a Young Adult book but it is not bad and it takes place inside of a highschool.
Jane Eyre features some time in classrooms and features both good teachers and nasty ones.
Giorgio Bassani tells a story in Italy, in the 1930s about two students, necessarily some takes place in a classroom. In Italian it was called Dietro la Porta or Behind the Door, like it was translated in Dutch.
I don't seem to read many things about school... Maybe an irrational fear? :D
Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall is well worth a look. Its not a long novel, and over half of it is set in a dreadful Welsh boarding school. Its very funny!
The Poor Mouth/An Béal Bocht - Flann O'Brien. The classroom scene lasts for less than half of one chapter, and is both hilarious and appalling.
Slightly OT, but Orwell wrote a good essay called - I think! - Boy's Weeklies, in which he looks at how the class system is represented in such children's school series as Billy Bunter, written in the 1930s. Not really on your topic, as I presume you are looking at novels, but it is an interesting aside.
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Ah, also, returning to Joyce, the entirety of the Nestor episode (Chapter 2) in Ulysses is set in a classroom and school setting.
The Professor, by Charlotte Bronte.
"The Catcher in the Rye" has a great scene with Holden and his teacher Mr. Antolini. It's always been one of my favorite parts from that novel. Bukowski's "Ham On Rye" has some hilarious class-room scenes.
Nicholas Nickleby - Dickens
Goodbye Mr Chips _ Hilton
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The Rainbow, ?Women in Love? - Lawrence
This is hasn't been mentioned but seems an obvious choice - Hard Times by Dickens, all that nonsense about fancy and fact.
Hard Times!
Thank you to all for the great suggestions...!
'The Professor', by Charlotte Brontë (the one book of hers I hated) depicts a chauvinistic, prejudiced and racist professor who holds his pupils in total contempt. The appalling thing is that this character seems to be a vessel for conveying Brontë's own views on the Flemish girls she taught during her stint as an assistant teacher in Belgium.
'Old School', by Tobias Wolff, is set in a New England boarding school for boys, and has interesting depictions of the interaction between students and teachers. The school is a nurturing place where the kids' interest in literature is actively encouraged.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a good one.
A lot of John Irving's novels (A Prayer for Owen Meanie, The World According to Garp) have sections that center around private boy's schools, but I can't remember them really concentrating too much on the classroom environment.
"The Soul is Not a Smithy" David Foster Wallace (Short Story from Oblivion)