Faculty towers : the academic novel and its discontents / Elaine Showalter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Showalter, Elaine.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

College stories, English--History and criticism.

College stories, English.

College stories, American--History and criticism.

College stories, American.

English-speaking countries--Intellectual life.

English-speaking countries.

Intellectual life.

Teacher-student relationships in literature.

Universities and colleges in literature.

Education, Higher, in literature.

College teachers in literature.

College students in literature.

Physical Description:

143 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Summary:

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 these books are widly 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 to read 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 sleuthing Kate 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 often controversial career.

Contents:

Introduction: What I Read and What I Read For 1

Chapter 1 The Fifties: Ivory Towers 14

Chapter 2 The Sixties: Tribal Towers 34

Chapter 3 The Seventies: Glass Towers 49

Chapter 4 The Eighties: Feminist Towers 68

Chapter 5 The Nineties: Tenured Towers 87

Chapter 6 Into the Twenty-First Century: Tragic Towers 100.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 125-135) and index.

ISBN:

0812238508

OCLC:

55729994