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(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, November 11, 2006

MORE FROM UD'S STUDENT
ABOUT JULES HILBERT,
POPULAR CULTURE'S CURRENT
REPRESENTATION OF THE
ENGLISH PROFESSOR




'The English professor (Dustin Hoffman, known in the movie Stranger Than Fiction as Jules Hilbert) is actually very WHITE NOISE-esque. [Note to UD's readers: This is a reference to Don DeLillo's novel, White Noise, virtually all of whose professor characters are popular culture specialists.] We never see him teaching a class, he has a television in his office that is always on, and the only time we ever see him read, he has Sue Grafton in his hands.

When Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) comes to visit him for initial guidance, he asks Crick a series of questions in order to find out "what kind of character" Crick is supposed to be. However, each question points to a specific literary character that, aside from the Greek tragedies, is in books generally only read in pop culture (Golom from the LORD OF THE RINGS series and Miss Marple from Agatha Christie's mysteries are two that I remember).

Near the end of the movie, Crick gets a copy of the manuscript of his "life" so he can find out the end. Because he's afraid to read it, he gives it to Prof. Hilbert to analyze and then report back. Prof. Hilbert's reaction to Crick, after reading it, is that the story is the best one Karen Eiffel (the author) has ever written; Crick must die so she can publish it. He treats Crick as if his life really is a novel, which reminded me of the post-modern American tendency to approach life like a simulacrum of "real" existence, as we've been discussing in class.

The last noteworthy thing that I noticed about the professor reminded me a lot of Murray's "car crash" class [This refers to a character in White Noise who teaches an entire seminar on car crash scenes in movies.] He elatedly described a class he once taught completely about the phrase "Little did he know..." -- its appearances in various genres and periods of literature.'