Tales Out of School
Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film
Jo Keroes

June
ISBN 0-8093-2238-2 / cloth / $39.95s
224 pages / 6 X 9
World Literature / Film

Jo Keroes's scope is wide: she examines the teacher as represented in fiction and film in works ranging from the twelfth-century letters of Abelard and Heloise to contemporary films such as Dangerous Minds and Educating Rita. And from the twelfth through the twentieth century, Keroes shows, the teaching encounter is essentially erotic.

Tracing the roots of eros from cultural as well as psychological perspectives, Keroes defines erotic in terms broader than the merely sexual. She analyzes ways in which teachers serve as convenient figures on whom to map conflicts about gender, power, and desire. To show how portrayals of men and women differ, she examines pairs of texts, using a film or a novel with a woman protagonist (Up the Down Staircase, for example) as counterpoint to one featuring a male teacher (Blackboard Jungle) or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie balanced against Dead Poets Society .

The portrayals of teachers, like all images a culture presents of itself, reveal much about our private and social selves. Keroes points out authentic accounts of authoritative women teachers who are admired and respected by colleagues and students alike. Real teachers differ from the stereotypes we see in fiction and film, however. Male teachers are often portrayed as heroes in film and fallibly human in fiction, whereas women in either genre are likely to be monstrous or muddled and are virtually never women of color. Among other things, Keroes demonstrates, the tension between reality and representation reveals society's ambivalence about power in the hands of women.

Jo Keroes is a professor of English at San Francisco State University.Culture.

"Keroes's major contribution is to (quite deftly) use literary and film criticism as tools for exposing the power and gender politics that shape and reflect modern society. To do so, she focuses on a critical microcosm of society, the world of school and schooling, and teachers and students, not as they exist in everyday reality but as they are depicted (and therefore interpreted) in novels and film. With this focus, Keroes also exposes the beliefs and values that the broader culture ascribes to the institution of schooling."

—Melanie Sperling, University of California, Riverside