Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its DiscontentsIn 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 |
161 | |
164 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
academic fiction academic novel affair Alison Lurie American Angela become British C. P. Snow called campus career chair characters Chip Coleman Silk colleagues conference course Cranton critic culture David Lodge decade demic Dobson Elaine Showalter Eliot Enfield English department English professors faculty wives female feminism feminist Friend in Power Further references genre given parenthetically Harvard Heilbrun heroine higher education Howard intellectual Jago James James Hynes Jane Janet Jewish Joyce Joyce Carol Oates Kate Fansler Kepesh Kirks lecturer Lecturer's Tale literary literature live London Lucky Jim Lurie Malcolm Bradbury male Masters McCarthy ment Middlemarch Morris Zapp murder mystery novelists Odd Woman party Philip Roth plot Princeton profession Ravelstein Robyn romance Rummidge satire scholar seems sexual harassment Showalter Snow's society Stanley Fish story studies Swenson teaching tenure theory Towers undergraduate Victorian Watermouth wife women writing wrote York young