Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 2005 - Literary Criticism - 166 pages
In the days before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice columns for graduate students and junior faculty, there were academic novels teaching us how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think, write, love, and (more than occasionally) solve murders. If many of thesebooks are wildly funny, others paint pictures of failure and pain, of lives wasted or destroyed. Like the suburbs, Elaine Showalter notes, the campus can be the site of pastoral and refuge. But even ivory towers can be structurally unsound, or at least built with glass ceilings. Though we love toread about them, all is not well in the faculty towers, and the situation has been worsening.In Faculty Towers, Showalter takes a personal look at the ways novels about the academy have charted changes in the university and society since 1950. With her readings of C. P. Snow's idealized world of Cambridge dons or of the globe-trotting antics of David Lodge's Morris Zapp, of the sleuthingKate Fansler in Amanda Cross's best-selling mystery series or of the recent spate of bitter novels in which narratives of sexual harassment seem to serve as fables of power, anger, and desire, Showalter holds a mirror up to the world she has inhabited over the course of a distinguished and oftencontroversial career.
 

Contents

The Fifties Ivory Towers
17
The Sixties Tribal Towers
42
The Seventies Glass Towers
60
The Eighties Feminist Towers
84
The Nineties Tenured Towers
107
Into the TwentyFirst Century Tragic Towers
123
Conclusion
145
Notes
153
Bibliography of Academic Novels
161
Index
164
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About the author (2005)

Elaine Showalter is Professor Emeritus of English and Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, where she received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2003. Her books include iA Literature of Their Own/i (1977); iThese Modern Women: Autobiographies of American Women in the 1920s/i (1978); iThe New Feminist Criticism/i (1985); iThe Female Malady: Women, Madness and Culture/i (1985); iSexual Anarchy: Gender and Creativity in the Fin-de-siècle/i (1990); iSister's Choice: Traditions and Change in American Women's Writing/i (1991); iHystories/i (1997); iInventing Herself/i (2001); iTeaching Literature/i (2002); and iFaculty Towers/i (2005). In addition, she has edited more than twenty anthologies and editions, and has published over 100 articles on British and American fiction.

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