Ever the treasonous clerks
If you don’t know Jane Smiley’s delightful comic novel Moo, set in a large Midwestern university, you have a treat ahead of you that should not be delayed. From this 1995 novel, a short passage to illustrate an enduring feature of our political landscape:
It was well known among the citizens of the state that the university had pots of money and that there were highly paid faculty members in every department who had once taught Marxism and who now taught something called deconstructionism which was only Marxism gone underground in preparation for emergence at a time of national weakness.
Comments
On Facebook, Mike Pope comments on his taste for comic novels set in academia, particularly:
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis (of course)
Changing Places, David Lodge, and his follow-up novels with the same characters
Straight Man, Richard Russo
Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon
Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies, or really the whole Cornish Trilogy. tho those are less outright comic than the others
And Lisa McLendon chimes in with a recommendation of The Lecturer's Tale and Publish and Perish by James Hynes.
The Amis has been a talisman for academics, and Davies writes like no one else. Great stuff. But surely Nabokov's Pnin deserves a place of honor on this particular shelf.
Posted by: John McIntyre | September 10, 2011 5:17 PM
I am also a sucker for novels set in academia. Adding to the enjoyment of David Lodge's Changing Places and sequels is the general assumption that one of the main characters was based on Stanley Fish, who was at Hopkins for a while.
I also enjoyed Moo, but was what endures in my memories of that book is a novel use for guacamole.
Posted by: Dahlink | September 11, 2011 7:10 AM
It has long been acknowledged that there is a large kernel of truth buried in comedy.
Posted by: Patricia the Terse | September 11, 2011 5:46 PM
Pnin is far and away my favourite academic satire, but Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution certainly isn't bad:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/393759.html
Posted by: Heather No | September 11, 2011 9:08 PM