The Graduate Revisited: #1, Norman Fell's Landlord as Symbol and Icon
https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-graduate-revisited-1-norman-fells.html
The Graduate Revisited: #2, The Two Scarboroughs
https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-graduate-revisited-2-two.html
The Graduate Revisited: #3, The Four-Hour Flight
https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-graduate-revisited-3-four-hour.html
The Graduate Revisited: #4, When The Music Just Won't Stop
https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-graduate-revisited-4-when-music.html
The Graduate Revisited: #5, The "Mrs Robinson" Character, Her True Origins
https://bqwebpage.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-graduate-revisited-5-mrs-robinson.html
About the Author
Chester Featherstone, Ph.D. is Professor of Media Studies at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1982. His research occupies the largely self-defined fields of cinematic geography, aeronautical hermeneutics, soundtrack repetition studies, and postwar landlord archetypes. Although initially trained in conventional film history, Featherstone gradually developed the view that many of the most important questions in American cinema had been overlooked because previous scholars had failed to pay sufficient attention to flight durations, wardrobe inventories, and Norman Fell.
Featherstone's work has been described as "brilliantly original," "heroically overinterpreted," and "perhaps not entirely necessary." He regards the last characterization as especially unfair.
He lives in Durham, New Hampshire, where he continues work on a projected three-volume study, Toward a Unified Theory of The Graduate.
Selected Publications of Chester Featherstone
Featherstone, C. The Persistent Landlord Problem: Surveillance and Rent Collection in Postwar Cinema. Hanover: Granite State Academic Press, 1987.
———. "Yorkshire Exceptionalism and the Geographic Misreading of American Popular Music." New England Journal of Media Topography 11, no. 2 (1996): 41–68.
———. The Hudson Valley Paradigm: Reconsidering Scarborough in American Film. Portsmouth: Seacoast University Press, 1998.
———. "Commuter Rail and Erotic Displacement in Nichols: Toward a Hudson Valley Reading of* The Graduate*." Proceedings of the Northern New England Society for Cinema Studies 7 (1998): 113–139.
———. Narrative Airspace and the Postwar American Male. Boston: Commonwealth Academic Press, 2004.
———. "Acoustic Narrative Saturation: The Limits of the Leitmotif in* The Graduate*." Journal of Film Musicology 12, no. 1 (2008): 3–37.
———. Mrs. Robinson at Shortstop: Baseball, Costume, and the Late Invention of Adultery. Hanover: Granite State Academic Press, 2013.
———. Portable Archetypes: Norman Fell and the Persistence of Suspicion. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Media Studies Monographs, 2019.
———, editor. Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium on Aeronautical Hermeneutics. Durham: Center for Narrative Transportation Studies, 2021.
Representative Honors
Founding Fellow, Society for Applied Cinematic Geography
Distinguished Lecturer, North American Conference on Narrative Transportation
Recipient, Joe DiMaggio Memorial Award for Interdisciplinary Baseball Studies (declined, citing insufficient archival documentation)
Honorary Chair, Committee on Musical Persistence and Repetition in American Film
Lifetime Achievement Award, New England Association for Excessive Close Reading
Current Research Interests: The precise route of Benjamin Braddock's inbound commercial flight; the statistical distribution of suspicious landlords in American sitcoms, 1955–1995; and whether Mrs. Robinson originally owned four Yankees caps or six.
My favorite line is probably the very last one. It leaves Featherstone exactly where he belongs—not reflecting on the meaning of life, but still trying to settle, after forty years of scholarship, how many Yankees caps Mrs. Robinson originally owned. That feels like a proper ending to the collection.
