Kenneth Womack-Postwar Academic Fiction - Satire, Ethics, Community-Palgrave Macmillan (2002)

Postwar Academic Fiction
Satire, Ethics, Community
Kenneth Womack
10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15
Also by Kenneth Womack
BRITISH BOOK-COLLECTORS AND BIBLIOGRAPHERS (3 volumes, co-edited

with William Baker)
FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL (co-edited with William Baker)
RECENT WORK IN CRITICAL THEORY, 1989-1995 (compiled with William

Baker)
TWENTIETH-CENTURY BIBLIOGRAPHY AND TEXTUAL CRITICISM (com-

piled with William Baker)

Satire, Ethics, Community

Kenneth Womack
Assistant Professor of English, Penn State Altoona

© Kenneth Womack 2002
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Womack, Kenneth.
Postwar academic fction: satire, ethics, community /
Kenneth Womack.
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Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0-333-91882-7
1. College stories, English-History and criticism. 2.

College stories, American-History and criticism. 3. English
fction-20th century-History and criticism. 4. American
fction-20th century-History and criticism. 5. Satire,
American-History and criticism. 6. Satire, English-History
and criticism. 7. Universities and colleges in literature. 8.
Community in literature. 9. Ethics in literature. I. Title.
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Contents
Acknowledgments viii

1 Introduction: Ethical Criticism and Postwar Literary
Theory 1
2 Reading the "Heavy Industry of the Mind!: Ethical

Criticism and the Anglo-American Academic Novel 19
3 Negotiating the University Community: Lucky Jim

and the Politics of Academe 27
4 Scholar Adventurers in Exile: Nabokov's Dr. Kinbote

and Professor Pnin 43
5 Searching for Goodness and the Ethical Self: Joyce

Carol Oates's The Hungry Ghosts 60
6 The Professoriate in Love: David Lodge's Academic

Trilogy and the Ethics of Romance 77
7 Performing the Academy: Alterity and David Mamet's

Oleanna 98
8 Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project:

Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring 109
9 Academic Nonfction and the Culture Warriors:

"Teaching the Conficts! in Gilbert and Gubar's
Masterpiece Theatre 127
10 Jane Smiley's Academic Carnival: Rooting for Ethics

at Moo U. 143
11 Conclusion: Ethical Criticism and the Academic

Novel beyond the Culture Wars 156
Notes 164
Bibliography 188
Index 202
vii

Acknowledgments
A project of this magnitude and scope only succeeds with the en-

couragement and guidance of an ethical community of friends and
colleagues. I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Craig S.
Abbott� Janice M. Arwood� Carol �ookhamer� Richard G. Caram�
Ildik� de Papp Carrington� Arra M. Garab� Susan Gubar� James L.
Harner� Thomas R. Lis�ka� Matthew T. Masucci� Harrison T. Meserole�
Dinty W. Moore� Neal R. Norrick� William P. Williams� Michael W.
Wolfe� and Katherine L. Wright. I would also like to thank Todd �.
Davis� James M. Decker� and Julian Wolfreys for their assistance
with my research and with the direction of this study. I am particu-
larly grateful for the scholarly experience provided by my students
in a Summer 2000 seminar at Penn State Altoona on "Reading the
Academic Novel.! The fnancial assistance of Dean Jerrold H. �ar of
Northern Illinois University in the form of a fellowship greatly
expedited the fruition of my project� as did the various travel grants
and course-load reductions afforded to me by Kjell Meling� Penn
State Altoona's Associate Dean and Director of Academic Affairs� and
the Altoona College Advisory �oard. I owe a special debt of thanks
to William �aker� David Gorman� and John �. Knapp for their tire-
less enthusiasm for my work and their many generous efforts on
behalf of this volume.
viii

��rod��o� 1
1
Introduction: Ethical Criticism
and Postwar Literary Theory

"Every decoding is another encoding . . ."
- David Lodge, Small World
How do academic fctions create meaning and value through their

satirical narratives in a critical era that bemoans the cultural rel
evance of poststructuralist hermeneutics and proclaims the death of
literature in a postmodern world? As scholars engage in debate over
the social and pedagogical value of critical projects such as
deconstruction to contemporary institutions of higher learning, aca
demic novels enjoy frequent publication during the latter half of
this century, an era marked by the increasing accessibility of
postsecondary education. Academic novels often satirize and
problematize the contradictions and sociological nuances of cam
pus life, yet critics of academic fction - despite the remarkable
growth and evolution of the AngloAmerican academic novel as a
literary genre since the 1950s - neglect to address the satiric ethos
that undergirds the genre's thematic landscape. The scathing repre
sentation of professors and institutions alike in these fctions as
fgures of deceit, duplicity, and falsehood, moreover, remains
unexamined in the scholarly monographs devoted to the study of
the academic novel.
The brand of satire endemic to the genre of academic fction - a
"pejorative poetics" that I will trace through analyses of specifc
works in subsequent chapters of this study - fnds its genesis in the
disillusionment that marks the professional lives of academics in
the twentieth century. Like their forebears in the academic fctions
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who languished

2 Pos�aar A�adem�� F��o�
under the specter of "Oxbridge," modern academic characters suffer

from the whimsy of global economic slumps and university budget
cuts, the fashionable nature of structuralist and poststructuralist lit
erary criticism, growing social and racial divisions on college
campuses, and an increasingly hostile academic job market, among
a host of other issues. The enormous and expanding oe�vre of aca

demic fction confronts its readers with a variety of fgures who
encounter similar dilemmas - characters either satirically proffered
as amoral, selfserving human forms or as larger, coldly manipula
tive, and omnipresent institutional machines. By using the interpretive
strategies established by the ongoing project of ethical criticism, I
will reveal the manner in which the practitioners of AngloAmerican
university fction utilize academic characters and institutional themes
as a means for exploring, through the deliberately broad strokes of
their satirical prose, the ethical and philosophical questions endemic
to their genre that impinge upon such issues as culture, morality,
romance, knowledge, and commitment.1
Like the characters in academic fctions who fnd personal and
vocational dissatisfaction within the prevailing power structures of
modern institutions of higher learning, many literary critics during
this same era searched for interpretive methodologies that could
provide them with culturally relevant modes of interpretation. The
recent incarnation of ethical criticism functions both as a response
to the nihilism of poststructuralist theoretical concerns such as
deconstruction and postmodernism, as well as to the growing schol
arly interest in the humanistic interpretation of literary works.2 By
the mid1980s, deconstructionist, Marxist, and postmodernist meth
odologies appeared to reach their infuential apex, prompting a critical
backlash from a variety of quarters. A brief survey of literary theory's
competing voices demonstrates the shape and character of the vari
ous contemporary perspectives regarding ethical criticism and its
(often controversial) place in the theoretical project. As David Parker
remarks in E�h��s, Theory, a�d �he Novel (1994): "The irresistible
expansive moment of poststructuralism in the 1970s and early 1980s
has suppressed some discursive possibilities which, constituted as
we partly are by various religious and humanistic traditions, we
stand in abiding need of, and are poorer without. The possibilities I
mean are evaluative, and especially ethical ones" (3-4). With the
evolution of a number of new, socially and culturally relevant modes
of critical thought - including, for example, gender studies, historical
criticism, and other forms of cultural criticism - poststructuralist

��rod��o� 3
schools of interpretation, deconstruction in particular, increasingly

endured charges of "antihumanism" and the development of
"antitheory" movements that persist in the present. The emergence
of these movements, moreover, underscores the value of deriving a
critical parlance that accounts for ethical issues and their consider
able roles in the creation and interpretation of literary works.3

The current reevaluation of poststructuralism's theoretical hege
mony fnds its origins in the initial critical responses that often
accompanied the promulgation of the trend's various submovements.
This is, of course, not at all unusual, for new critical paradigms
inevitably blossom amidst a fury of debate. JeanFran�ois Lyotard's
widely acknowledged postmodernist manifesto The Pos�moder�
Co�d��o�� a Repor� o� K�oaledge (1979), for example, enjoyed its
publication almost concomitantly with the appearance of Gerald
Graff's L��era��re aga��s� ��self� L��erary �deas �� Moder� So��e�y (1979),
a volume that problematizes "the myth of the postmodern break
through" as a literary and critical movement destined to implode
because of postmodernism's dependence upon its own extreme
elements of skepticism, alienation, and selfparody. As an historical
response to modernist conceptions of art as a panacea for the chaos
of the early twentieth century, postmodernism posits that art lacks
the required faculties of consolation to assuage the human condition
in the postindustrial world. "Postmodernism signifes that the night
mare of history, as modernist esthetic and philosophical traditions
have defned history, has overtaken modernism itself," Graff writes.
"If history lacks value, pattern, and rationally intelligible mean
ing," he continues, "then no exertions of the shaping, ordering
imagination can be anything but a refuge from truth" (32, 55). Rather
than asserting its utter impossibility in the postmodern world, Graff's
search for truth in literature and criticism underscores one of the
principal arguments emanating from the practitioners of ethical
criticism: that literature and its interpretation do offer readers the
possibilities for locating truth and defning value despite the persis
tence of a contemporary landscape that seems to rest upon a skeptical
and chaotic social foundation.4 "Postmodern literature," Graff remarks,
"poses in an especially acute fashion the critical problem raised by
all experimental art: does this art represent a criticism of the distorted
aspects of modern life or a mere addition to it?" (55). The criticism
that postmodernist literature evokes likewise subverts the normative
roles of meaning and value in literary interpretation.
In his controversial volume, Aga��s� De�o�s�r��o� (1989), John

M. Ellis proffers a similar argument regarding deconstruction and

what he considers the textual violence that it inficts against the
practice of literary criticism. Further, Ellis questions the nature of
the deconstructionist argument regarding the indeterminacy of
language that Jacques Derrida ascribes to Western philosophy and
culture. According to Derrida, this abiding tendency toward

ethnocentrism lies in the linguistic construct of logocentrism - a
cultural bias that presupposes speech acts over the possibility of a
determinant reality.5 Like many of deconstruction's other detrac
tors, Ellis seizes upon the inability of deconstruction's proponents,
including Derrida himself, to make explicit the critical project's own
terminology and the manner in which it functions to create mean
ing.6 As Ellis notes, "There is a strong tendency for Derrida's advocates
to object that a demand for clarity begs the question at issue and
violates the spirit of the deconstructive enterprise" (33). What, then,
is the aim of the deconstructive project? How does it provide knowl
edge and meaning for its advocates, as well as for readers?
Although Derrida's expositors argue that deconstruction endeavors
to undermine traditional views of philosophy and literature by
exploding the logocentric myth of the determinant, communicative
powers of language, Ellis suggests that deconstruction emanates instead
from a remarkably conservative position. The ideas that it attempts
to deconstruct, through the privileged status that they enjoy during
the actual process of being deconstructed, fnd themselves imbued
with a state of permanence by virtue of the process rather than
being undermined in favor of a more progressive mode of thinking.
"Deconstructive writings tend to go over the same ground and use
the same vocabulary . . . without substantial modifcation or fresh
analysis on each occasion," Ellis writes. "These are not the signs of
a genuinely open, intellectually probing new movement" (89). In
this way, deconstruction reveals its fundamental inability to construct
any form of coherent meaning, although it does, as Ellis notes,
provide for the production of a multiplicity of ambiguous possibilities
for interpretation (127). While deconstruction's approach to language
allows for a host of coexistent meanings to modify a particular sign
- for the signifed to be the object of so many disparate signifers -
it cannot deliver truth and knowledge through the production of
an infnite number of conficting assertions.7 Ellis argues that such
a process results in "a windowless monad that cannot communicate
with any other." Deconstruction, he concludes, "shuts its eyes to
how inquiry actually proceeds - through the clash of differing view

��rod��o� 5
points and the consequent winnowing out of those that cannot

hold up" (129).
The commentaries produced by Graff and Ellis illustrate the cli
mate of uncertainty and reassessment that critical theory endured
during the 1980s - an era that saw the publication of a number of
texts eschewing critical nihilism and arguing in favor of ethically

forceful and socially relevant means of interpretation. Steven Knapp
and Walter Benn Michaels's infuential 1982 essay, "Against Theory,"
radically underscores the foundations for this sentiment. Knapp and
Michaels challenge the belief that the theoretical project truly supple
ments the act of literary interpretation, and the crux of their argument
rests upon the validity of the notion of critical intentionality. If
critical theory indeed offers readers a valuable guide to prescient
literary interpretation, they argue, then theory effectively serves its
purpose. "But as soon as we recognize that there are no theoretical
choices to be made" in order to achieve meaningful interpretations,
they caution, "then the point of theory vanishes. Theory loses"
(18). Knapp and Michaels further suggest that the "theoretical im
pulse" only separates those essential properties that should remain
inseparable during the practice of literary criticism: "on the onto
logical side, meaning from intention, language from speech acts; on
the epistemological side, knowledge from true belief," they write
(29). In short, their argument against the theoretical project takes
issue with the machinery of critical theory - the very mechanism
that Ellis laments in Aga��s� De�o�s�r��o� because it succeeds in
producing an infnite number of conficting assertions rather than
the elements of meaning and value that readers ultimately seek.
While scholars such as Knapp and Michaels problematize the fun
damental nature of the theoretical project, critics such as Peter J.
Rabinowitz, Christopher Norris, and Tobin Siebers offer texts that
reassess the place of critical theory in an era absorbed with the politics
of literary interpretation and the ethical value of poststructuralism
to narrative study. Rabinowitz's Before Read��g� Narra��ve Co�ve��o�s
a�d �he Pol��s of ��erpre�a��o� (1987) endeavors to explain the manner
"in which any interpretive practice is always politically engaged."
"Indeed," Rabinowitz remarks, "one of the functions of ideology -
and literature helps in this function - is to naturalize these power
relationships" (5). Rabinowitz reveals the ways in which the act of
reading inevitably impinges upon such politically and emotionally
charged issues as class, race, and gender - formidable challenges to
the coherent interpretation of literary works. In his discussion of

canon formation and detective fction, Rabinowitz notes that texts

by female authors, for instance, often become marginalized because
of a masculine language bias that through its encoding denies access
to female writers and readers. Rabinowitz argues that only the
alteration of our existing evaluative procedures can provide an effective
remedy for such a dilemma: "Another course of action suggests itself,"

he writes, "to teach ourselves to read in new ways . . . that are self
conscious about how interpretation itself can be ideological, and
ways that can thus help us to make the most of the rich literary
heritage that has been passed down to us" (230).
In Tr ��h a�d �he E�h��s of Cr��sm (1994), Norris examines the
ways in which literary theory must redefne itself in a contemporary
hermeneutic circle concerned with epistemological rigor and cultural
critique. Norris - himself an admitted apologist for deconstruction
during the 1980s - argues that literary theorists can implement a
series of correctives that may yet infuse the theoretical project with
muchneeded doses of pragmatism and social relevance.8 Norris char
acterizes this paradigmatic shift as "the retreat from high theory,"
as an era in which "a great deal depends on where one happens to
be in terms of the wider sociopolitical culture and the local
opportunities for linking theory and practice in a meaningful way"
(1, 5). By providing readers with the means to establish vital
interconnections between texts and the divergent, heterogeneous
community in which we live, we can empower the theoretical project
with the capacity to produce socially and culturally relevant cri
tiques. This way of reading, Norris writes, allows critics to look to
"the prospect of a better, more enlightened alternative where the
difference a��h�� each and every subject is envisaged as providing
the common ground, the measure of shared humanity, whereby to
transcend such differences be�aee� ethnic and national ties" (94). In
this way, Norris posits an ethics of criticism that selfconsciously
assesses the theoretical presuppositions undergirding the moral char
acter of contemporary hermeneutics.9
In one of the more forceful ethical critiques of literary theory,
The E�h��s of Cr��sm (1988), Siebers identifes the crisis that confronts
modern criticism - an interpretive dilemma that "derives in part
from an ethical reaction to the perceived violence of the critical
act" (15). He further argues that an ethical approach to literary
study requires critics to engage their subjects selfconsciously with
sustained attention to the potential consequences of their interpre
tive choices: "The ethics of criticism involves critics in the process

��rod��o� 7
of making decisions and of studying how these choices affect the

lives of fellow critics, writers, students, and readers as well as our
ways of defning literature and human nature." Siebers ascribes the
aforementioned crisis in criticism to a linguistic paradox that in
evitably problematizes critical practice. "Modern literature has its
own cast of characters," he writes. "It speaks in a discourse largely

concerned with issues of language, but behind its defnitions of
language lie ideals of human character" (10). Siebers argues that
acknowledging the place of ethics in critical theory affords practi
tioners of the discipline with the autonomy to offer relevant
conclusions about literary texts and their considerable social and
ideological import. "Literary criticism cannot endure without the
freedom to make judgments," Siebers notes, "and modern theory
urgently needs to regain the capacity to decide" (41). The ability to
render sound, moral interpretations, then, provides the foundation
for an ethical criticism that fully engages the remarkably human
nature of literary study. Such a reading methodology allows for the
selfconscious reassessment of our evaluative procedures and their
potential for the production of meaningful critiques. As Siebers
concludes: "To criticize ethically brings the critic into a special
feld of action: the feld of human conduct and belief concerning
the human" (1).
Volumes such as Wayne C. Booth's The Compa�y We Keep� a� E�h��s
of F��o� (1988) and Martha C. Nussbaum's Love's K�oaledge� Essays
o� Ph�losophy a�d L��era��re (1990) demonstrate the interpretive power
of ethical criticism, as well as the value of its critical machinery to
scholarly investigations regarding the nature of literary character,
the cultural landscapes of fction, and the ethical motivations of
satire - the narrative maneuver that Booth ascribes to our desire to
"make and remake ourselves" (14). Critics such as Booth and Nussbaum
avoid the textual violence of censorship to advocate instead a form
of criticism that explores the moral sensibilities that inform works
of art. In Love's K�oaledge, Nussbaum illustrates the nature of ethi
cal criticism's recent emergence as a viable interpretive paradigm:
"Questions about justice, about wellbeing and social distribution,
about moral realism and relativism, about the nature of rationality,
about the concept of the person, about the emotions and desires,
about the role of luck in human life - all these and others are
debated from many sides with considerable excitement and even
urgency," she writes (169-70). In its desire to examine the ethical
nature of these artistic works, ethical criticism seeks to create a

meaningful bond between the life of the narrative and the life of
the reader. Although ethical criticism hardly functions as a conven
tional interpretive paradigm in the tradition of Marxist, Lacanian,
or gender textual readings, it serves effectively nevertheless as a
selfrefexive means for critics to explain the contradictory emo
tions and problematic moral stances that often mask complex and

fully realized literary characters. Ethical criticism provides its prac
titioners, moreover, with the capacity to posit socially relevant
interpretations by celebrating the Aristotelian qualities of living well
and fourishing. In this way, ethical criticism evokes the particu
larly "human character" of literature that Siebers extols the merits
of in The E�h��s of Cr��sm.
In The Reader, �he Tex�, �he Poem� �he Tra�sa��o�al Theory of �he
L��erary Work (1978), Louise M. Rosenblatt supplies ethical critics
with an interpretational matrix for explaining the motives of readers
and their "transactions" with literary texts.10 Rosenblatt identifes
two different types of reading strategies - aesthetic reading, in which
the reader devotes particular attention to what occurs d�r��g the
actual reading event, and nonaesthetic reading, a reading strategy
in which the reader focuses attention upon the traces of knowledge
and data that will remain af�er the event. Rosenblatt designates the
latter strategy as a kind of "efferent" reading in which readers pri
marily interest themselves in what will be derived materially from
the experience (23-5).11 Efferent readers refect upon the verbal
symbols in literature, "what the symbols designate, what they may
be contributing to the end result that [the reader] seeks - the infor
mation, the concepts, the guides to action, that will be left with
[the reader] when the reading is over" (27). Booth argues that ethical
criticism functions as a methodology for distinguishing the "efferent
freight" that results from this reading strategy (14). Rosenblatt
describes the act of reading itself - whether aesthetic or nonaesthetic
- as a transaction that derives from the peculiar array of experiences
that defne the reader's persona: "Each reader brings to the transaction
not only a specifc past life and literary history, not only a repertory
of internalized 'codes,' but also a very active present, with all its
preoccupations, anxieties, questions, and aspirations," she writes (144).
This recognition of the complexity of the reading transaction
underscores the deep interconnections between readers and the
human communities in which they live and seek personal fulfllment.
Rosenblatt argues that the transaction of reading involves "laying
bare the assumptions about human beings and society and the

��rod��o� 9
hierarchy of values that govern the world derived from the text"
(149-50), a conclusion regarding the ethical value of art in the
human community that John Gardner illuminates in his infuential
volume, O� Moral F��o� (1978). He argues that literary art should
offer readers the opportunity for receiving knowledge from its pages,
the possibility - rather than the didactic requirement - of emerging

from a reading experience with a heightened sense of communal
awareness. Gardner writes:
We recognize art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for

and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching
by authority and force, it explores, openmindedly, to learn what
it should teach. It clarifes, like an experiment in a chemistry
lab, and confrms. As a chemist's experiment tests the laws of
nature and dramatically reveals the truth or falsity of scientifc
hypotheses, moral art tests values and rouses trustworthy feel
ings about the better and the worse in human action. (19)
The role of the ethical critic, then, involves the articulation of a

given text's ability to convey notions of knowledge and universal
good to its readers, whether through the auspices of allegory, satire,
morality plays, haiku, or any other fctive means of representation.12
In Gardner's estimation, ethical critics can only accomplish this
end through the fomentation of understanding in their readership.
"Knowledge may or may not lead to belief," he writes. But "under
standing always does, since to believe one understands a complex
situation is to form at least a tentative theory of how one ought to
behave in it" (139). Thus, ethical criticism examines the ways in
which literary characters respond to the divergent forces they
encounter in the fctional landscapes that they occupy. Their human
behaviors and actions provide the interpretive basis for moral refection
and conclusion.
As Gardner notes in O� Moral F��o�, however, practitioners of
ethical criticism must invariably confront the specter of censor
ship, a dangerous commodity rooted in the human tendency to
instruct without regard for the plurality of competing value systems
at work in both the theoretical realm of literary criticism and the
larger world of humankind. "Didacticism," he cautions, "inevitably
simplifes morality and thus misses it" (137). 13 Similarly, critics must
avoid the perils of attempting to establish models of behavior and
codifed moral standards of acceptability, for such practices inevitably

lead to the textual injustice of censorship. Gardner writes: "I would

not claim that even the worst bad art should be outlawed, since
morality by compulsion is a fool's morality" (106). Despite his own
admonitions to the contrary in O� Moral F��o� - and because of
the dearth of genuine scholarly wisdom inherent in his study of
moral criticism - Gardner himself nevertheless trolls dangerously

close to the shores of censorship when he speaks of carrying out
"art's proper work": art "destroys only evil," he argues. "If art destroys
good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it re
quires denunciation" (15). Such a proposition inevitably leads to
the establishment of singular standards of good and evil in the
heterogeneous, pluralistic spheres of criticism and human reality. 14
Can e�h��al critics, in good conscience, operate from superior posi
tions of moral privilege and arrogant didacticism?
Understanding the place of moral philosophy in the latest incar
nation of ethical criticism offers a means for exploring this dilemma.
Bernard Williams's E�h��s a�d �he L�m��s of Ph�losophy (1985), for
instance, discusses the ways in which the tenets of moral philoso
phy provide a context for us "to recreate ethical life" in the skeptical
world of contemporary Western culture (vii). In addition to exam
ining the Johnsonian question of how to live, Williams devotes
particular attention to assessing the role of the ethical critic. "Given
people who are in some general sense committed to thinking in
ethical terms, how should they think?" he asks. "Are their ethical
thoughts sound?" (71). The issue of a valid ethical criticism itself
poses a spurious philosophical quandary, for it requires the critic to
defne standards of moral correctness, or, as Williams concludes, to
dispense with establishing them altogether. "An ethical theory is a
theoretical account of what ethical thought and practice are," he
writes, which "either implies a general test for the correctness of
basic ethical beliefs and principles or else implies that there cannot
be such a test" (72). Williams suggests that critics can only surmount
this dilemma by interpreting a given set of events from an empathetic
position, and, moreover, through their "ability to arrive at shared
ethical judgments" (97). In this way, ethical critics and moral phil
osophers alike can implement a form of ethical practice that allows
for the refexive process of critical contemplation, a selfconscious
methodology for critically articulating the pluralistic nuances of
that which constitutes a shared sense of moral correctness.15
In addition to questioning the nature of our communal sense of
ethical propriety, moral philosophers such as Williams attempt to

��rod��o� 11
account for the motives of those critics who dare to engage in the
interpretation of human values. Such critics must assume the risks
- whether or not they employ an equitable and pluralistic system
of evaluation - of impinging upon the current direction of the philo
sophical conversation regarding human ethics. "Critical refection
should seek for as much shared understanding as it can fnd on any

issue, and use any ethical material that, in the context of the refec
tive discussion, makes some sense and commands some loyalty,"
Williams notes, although "the only serious enterprise is living, and
we have to live after the refection" (117). For this reason, the prin
ciples of moral philosophy charge ethical critics with the maintenance
of a sense of free intellectual discourse, in addition to obliging them
to render sound moral conclusions.16 "We should not try to seal
determinate values into future society," he warns, for "to try to
transmit free inquiry and the refective consciousness is to transmit
something more than nothing, and something that demands some
forms of life more rather than others" (173).
Ethical criticism endeavors, as a matter of course, to communi
cate the meaning of this "something" and its greater social relevance
through the interpretation of literary works. In The Compa�y We
Keep, Booth offers an expansive account of ethical criticism and its
potential for literary study, while also attempting to allay any fears
that his heuristic rests upon dogmatic foundations. Booth affords
particular attention to the range of hermeneutic functions that ethical
criticism performs, as well as to its unfortunate lack of clarity as an
interpretive paradigm:
We can no longer pretend that ethical criticism is passe. It is

practiced everywhere, often surreptitiously, often guiltily, and often
badly, partly because it is the most diffcult of all critical modes,
but partly because we have so little serious talk about why it is
important, what purposes it serves, and how it might be done
well. (19)
Booth notes that ethical criticism's opponents often misread the

paradigm's intent as didactic in nature. Instead, Booth argues, "ethi
cal criticism attempts to describe the encounters of a storyteller's
ethos with that of the reader or listener. Ethical critics need not
begin with the intent to evaluate, but their descriptions will always
entail appraisals of the value of what is being described." In this
way, Booth supports a refexive interpretational methodology, an

ethical criticism that allows for the recognition of the interconnections

between the reading experience and the life of the reader. Ethical
criticism acknowledges, moreover, the powerful factors of language
and ideology in its textual assessments. "There are no neutral ethical
terms," Booth writes, "and a fully responsible ethical criticism will
make explicit those appraisals that are implicit whenever a reader

or listener reports on stories about human beings in action" (8-9).
Booth defnes these instances of appraisal - these practical
applications of ethical criticism - as acts of "coduction," referential
moments in which critics compare their reading experiences with
the conclusions of others.17 Like Siebers, who argues that "the heart
of ethics is the desire for community" (202), Booth notes that the
act of "judgment requires a community" of trustworthy friends and
colleagues (72).18 Coduction, in Booth's schema, valorizes the refexive
relationship that develops between texts and their readers, as well
as the equally refexive manner in which texts postulate meaning.
"The question of whether value is in the poem or in the reader is
radically and permanently ambiguous, requiring two answers," Booth
writes. "Of course the value is not in there, a��ally, until it is
actualized, by the reader. But of course it could not be actualized if
it were not there, �� po�e��al, in the poem" (89). Booth also notes
ethical criticism's pluralistic imperatives and their value to the un
derstanding and operation of ideological paradigms.19 In his analysis
of feminist criticism, for example, Booth discusses the ways in which
"the feminist challenge" derives from fundamental ethical dilem
mas inherent in the construction of literary texts: "Every literary
work implies either that women can enter its imaginative world as
equals or that they cannot - that instead they must, in reading,
decide whether or not to enter a world in which men are a privi
leged center" (387). As Booth reveals, feminist criticism itself functions
as type of ethical criticism, a means of literary interpretation that
seeks to repair an abiding social injustice that, through its misogyny,
problematizes the lives of the larger community of readers.20
In Co��ge��es of Val�e� Al�er �a��ve Perspe��ves for Cr��al Theory
(1988), Barbara Herrnstein Smith offers an appraisal of an evalua
tive criticism's propensity for determining meaning and value in
literary study. Like Booth, Smith notes the capacity of an ethical
criticism to address the concerns of ideological paradigms, although
she remains skeptical that ethical criticism can function as a fully
realized interpretive methodology: "Recent moves in the direction
of opening the question of value and evaluation in the literary

��rod��o� 13
academy have come primarily from those who have sought to sub
ject its canon to dramatic revaluation, notably feminist critics," she
writes. "Although their efforts have been signifcant to that end,"
she continues, "they have not amounted as yet to the articulation
of a welldeveloped noncanonical theory of value and evaluation"
(24). Smith also argues that an evaluative criticism would respond

to the interpretive gulf left in the wake of the theoretical project's
intellectual preeminence during the poststructuralist era. "Beguiled
by the humanist's fantasy of transcendence, endurance, and univer
sality, [critical theory] has been unable to acknowledge the most
fundamental character of literary value, which is its mutability and
diversity," Smith remarks (28). Smith valorizes instead an evaluative
criticism that "would seek, rather, to clarify the nature of literary -
and, more broadly, aesthetic - value in conjunction with a more
general rethinking of 'value'" (28). For Smith, this production of
value through literary evaluation would result in an enhanced
understanding of "human culture and behavior," signifcant
components themselves in Booth's ethical paradigm (28).
In The E�h��s of Read��g� Ka��, de Ma�, El�o�, Trollope, James, a�d
Be�aam�� (1987), J. Hillis Miller posits an "ethics of reading" that
seeks to explain the refexive process that occurs between the text
and the reader, in addition to offering testimony to the ethical pos
sibilities of poststructuralism, particularly deconstruction.21 Miller
argues that the act of reading ethically transpires when "an author
turns back on himself, so to speak, turns back on a text he or she
has written, rereads it" (15). For Miller, such a process allows readers
- the de fa��o authors of the texts that they appraise - to offer relevant
conclusions about the moral properties of literary works and the
ethical sensibilities of the readers' theoretical premises, whether
they be deconstructive or otherwise. In Vers�o�s of Pygmal�o� (1990),
Miller proffers a similar argument regarding the "ethics of narration"
and the shifting, performative aspects of reading experiences. Miller
derives the title of his volume from the story of Pygmalion in Book
10 of the Me�amorphoses - a narrative in which something inanimate
comes alive, just as reading ethically creates a vital, living relation
ship between the text and the reader. Miller devotes special attention
to the ways in which reading defes stasis, as well as to the manner
in which reading ethically, moreover, evolves during successive read
ings of a given text: "Reading occurs in a certain spot to a certain
person in a certain historical, personal, institutional, and political
situation, but it always exceeds what was predictable from those

circumstances," he observes. "It makes something happen that is a

deviation from its context, and what happens demands a new
defnition each time" (22). In his paradigm for the ethics of read
ing, Miller allows for the negative possibilities of reading, aspects
that Booth, in his effort to celebrate ethical criticism and its myriad
of affrmative outcomes, prefers to ignore: "A theory of the ethics of

reading that takes seriously the possibility that reading might lead
to other morally good or valuable actions would also have to allow
for the possibility that the reading even of a morally exemplary
book might cause something morally deplorable to occur," Miller
writes (21). In this manner, Miller postulates a valuable corollary to
the refexive properties of ethical criticism and the ways in which
context and temporality possess the propensity to alter the quality
of reading experiences.
Like Williams, Nussbaum advocates an ethical criticism with
tenable foundations in moral philosophy, as well as an interpretive
mechanism that functions as an impetus for sustaining moral discourse
and social interconnection. In addition to her enthusiastic subscription
to many of the arguments inherent in Booth's ontology for an ethical
criticism, Nussbaum proffers a series of essays in Love's K�oaledge
that sharpen the ethical paradigm's focus through her discussion
about the interrelations between philosophy and literature, as well
as through her close, ethical readings of a diversity of writers, in
cluding Henry James, Proust, Ann Beattie, and Samuel Beckett, among
others. Drawing upon selected works by these fgures, Nussbaum
examines the ways in which style and content impinge upon ethical
issues, while also deliberating about the manner in which the ethical
interpretation of literary works offers readers a means for exploring
the moral import of emotions and locating paths to selfknowledge.
Nussbaum affords particular attention to the roles that stylistics,
linguistics, and structure play in articulating the moral essence of a
given narrative:
Form and style are not incidental features. A view of life is �old.
The telling itself - the selection of genre, formal structures, sen
tences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader's
sense of life - all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a
sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and
communicating are, of life's relations and connections. Life is
never simply prese��ed by a text; it is always represe��ed as some
thing. (5)

��rod��o� 15
In Nussbaum's schema, then, the literary artist bears the responsi

bility for honorably positing narratives that allow readers the
opportunity to discover their own paths to selfunderstanding and
meaning, to formulate their own strategies for living well. Like Booth,
Nussbaum equates the quality of life with the ethical dimensions of
literature.22 "The novel is itself a moral achievement," she writes,

"and the welllived life is a work of literary art" (148).
In addition to advancing the ethical notion of community in her
work, Nussbaum argues for the place of love as a subject in the
evolving discourse of ethical criticism. "The subject of romantic
and erotic love is not often treated in works on moral philosophy,"
she admits (336). For this reason, Nussbaum differentiates between
the Kantian notions of "pathological" and "practical" love in her
analysis. Pathological love, she notes, signifes the often irrational
emotions of romantic love in sharp contrast to the more enduring
qualities of practical love, an emotion that Nussbaum defnes as "an
attitude of concern that one can will oneself to have toward another
human being, and which is, for that reason, a part of morality."
The moral dimensions of practical love, therefore, merit consider
able attention as a methodology for understanding the many ways
in which readers respond ethically to literary texts. Moreover, "if
one believes, in addition, that the realm of morality is of special
and perhaps of supreme importance in human life . . . one will be
likely, having once made that distinction, to ascribe high h�ma�
worth to practical love" (336-7). In this way, the acknowledgement
of practical love provides additional insight into human concep
tions of living well and the manner in which literary texts depict
love's capacity to produce personal fulfllment. Nussbaum also refnes
the communal aspects that mark the ethical paradigm. She extends
the metaphor that ethical criticism forges a type of community between
text and reader to allow for not only the possibility of living well
as an individual, but living together well in a much larger sense of
the word. "A community is formed by author and readers," she
writes. "In this community separateness and qualitative difference
are not neglected; the privacy and the imagining of each is nourished
and encouraged. But at the same time it is stressed that living to
gether is the object of our ethical interest" (48). In Poe�� J�s��e�
The L��erary �mag��a��o� a�d P�bl�� L�fe (1995), Nussbaum advances
this concept through her exploration of the value of ethical reading
as a means for infuencing political theory and public discourse: "If
we think of reading in this way, as combining one's own absorbed

imagining with periods of more detached (and interactive) critical

scrutiny, we can already begin to see why we might fnd in it an
activity well suited to public reasoning in a democratic society"
(9).23 By widening the scope of the ethical paradigm to account for
a range of emotional states, as well as a variety of public and private
modes of discourse, Nussbaum shares in the creation of an ethical

criticism that provides for the relevant interpretation of the social,
political, and cultural nuances of the human community.
In Ge��g �� R�gh�� La�g�age, L��era��re, a�d E�h��s (1992), Geoffrey
Galt Harpham continues Booth's and Nussbaum's efforts to elabo
rate the ethical paradigm as an interdisciplinary means of
interpretation. Ethical criticism should "be considered a matrix, a
hub from which the various discourses and disciplines fan out and
at which they meet, crossing out of themselves to encounter each
other," he writes. "Ethics is perhaps best conceived as a 'conceptual
base' - neither as organic drive nor as properly conceptual super
structure, but rather as a necessary, and necessarily impure and
unsystematic, mediation between unconscious and instinctual life
and its cognitive and cultural transformation" (17-18). Harpham
supports this endeavor through his examinations of such "ethical
terms" as "obligation," "o�gh�," "ethical duty," and "ethicity." Through
their delineation, he seeks to establish meaningful interconnections
between ethical criticism and other means of textual inquiry. 24
Harpham argues that the issue of choice lies at the heart of obliga
tion. "One can - one must - choose which principle to be governed
by," he observes. "Ethics in general is a species of risk that affords
no rigorous way to tell ethical reasons from other reasons, choices
from obligations" (37). Harpham further asserts that "at the dead
center of ethics lies the o�gh�," or the ethical obligation. This no
tion of an o�gh� - the moral obligations of an ethical person -
reveals that person's "commitments, values, character. To be ethical,
an o�gh� must not refer itself to threats or desires, coercion or self
ends" (18). Harpham defnes "ethical duty" as a form of critical
refection: "One must always refect," Harpham writes. "This is the
law that ethical discourse virtually presumes as well as teaches"
(42). Finally, in Harpham's conception of an ethical terminology,
"ethicity" refers to the interpretive moment in ethical criticism:
"the most dramatic of narrative turnings, the climactic point just
between the knitting and unraveling of the action, the fort and the
da, the moment when the rising line of complication peaks, pauses,
and begins its descent into the denouement." Addressing the

��rod��o� 17
narratological and characterological essences of this evaluative

instance - what Harpham calls the "macroturn" - enables ethical
critics, through their obligations to their own sets of values and
commitments, to refect upon and interpret the moral choices depicted
in narratives (171).
In the tradition of Harpham and Miller, Stephen R. Yarbrough's

Del�bera�e Cr��sm� Toaard a Pos�moder� H�ma��sm (1992) advocates
the ethical possibilities of the theoretical project. Yarbrough argues
that postmodernism simply needs to reconfgure its modes of dis
course in order to account for the recent wave of humanism and its
infuence upon literary studies. "If we wish to revitalize criticism as
a humanistic exercise of freedom, a certain reorientation is neces
sary," he writes (1). Yarbrough aligns himself with the singular
conclusion of his ethical precursors, particularly Gardner, Siebers,
Booth, and Nussbaum, that ethical thought fnds its useful applica
tion in the narrative illustration of the human community, a
propitious arena for examining the social factors that infuence the
moral choices that literary characters make. "The communal sense
is exactly what we need to rediscover and reaffrm if we are ever to
regain what . . . we all want so desperately - our capacity to make
decisions," Yarbrough observes (23). Like Siebers, Yarbrough depicts
poststructuralism in a state of theoretical crisis fomented by recent
developments in moral philosophy. Yarbrough's efforts to revitalize
postmodernism in an intellectual era marked by a humanist revival
seems to underscore, through its very postulation, the growing force
fulness of ethical criticism as an interpretive paradigm that provides
meaningful accounts regarding the moral properties of our grand
narratives. "The present crisis calls for a rediscovery of the sense of
the common, which is at the same time a rediscovery of grace, a
rediscovery of propriety, a rediscovery of the possibility of discovery,"
Yarbrough remarks. "Postmodernism can be defned in terms of an
intense awareness of the presentday incapacity to discover," he
continues, "and postmodern humanism can be distinguished from
postmodernism in general by the fact that it takes this incapacity
as a problem, as a failure of thought and not as a glorious path to
'freedom'" (35).
Yarbrough asserts that his notion of a postmodern humanism - a
postmodernism enhanced by its conspicuous attention to ethical
issues - will provide critics and readers alike with a mode of dis
course that, in addition to allowing for the ethical interpretation of
literary works, acknowledges the peculiar places of meaning and

value in a postmodern world beset by moral chaos and verbal dys

function. As Yarbrough concludes: "The crucial task now set before
the humanist is that of seeking and articulating a��h�� he d�s�o�rse
of pos�moder��sm a still center of common experience from which
to order the world" (36).25 Although Yarbrough provides a useful
account of recent developments in ethical thought, his promulga

tion of a postmodern humanism nevertheless neglects to address
the cogent admonition of Knapp and Michaels: "As soon as we
recognize that there are no theoretical choices to be made" in or
der to achieve meaningful interpretations, they write, "then the
point of theory vanishes" (18). Yarbrough's paradigm for a postmodern
humanism inevitably rests upon the uncertain and often ar��l��al
foundations of the theoretical project, while ethical criticism, by
eschewing poststructuralism's privileged modes of critical discourse,
concerns itself with the interpretation of personal values and their
relevance to the larger, l�v��g human community.
Drawing upon the divergent arguments of a range of ethical critics
from Booth, Gardner, and Nussbaum to Miller, Harpham, and
Yarbrough, the preceding review of ethical criticism's recent incar
nation in hermeneutics and its principal voices quite obviously
demonstrates its power as a mode of interpretation that intersects a
variety of critical spheres and cultural applications. Yet despite its
increasingly signifcant role at the fore of the theoretical project -
an intellectual vantage point that it enjoyed throughout the 1990s
and that it clearly seems to be sustaining in the early years of the
twentyfrst century - ethical criticism must still establish innova
tive and interdisciplinary methodologies in order to persevere as
an interpretive paradigm. How, indeed, can ethical criticism chal
lenge its own theoretical boundaries while continuing to propound
socially and culturally relevant modes of literary analysis?

Read��g �he �Heavy ��d�s�ry of �he M��d� 19
2
Reading the "Heavy Industry of
the Mind": Ethical Criticism and

the AngloAmerican Academic
Novel
"An open mind, I need not remind readers, is the key to a

successful university life, and may even have indirect ap
plications to those living and working outside the academy."
- Richard Russo, S�ra�gh� Ma�
The academic novel, through its express desire to critique, by means

of satire, the unethical sensibilities that it ascribes to university
life, seems a particularly meaningful arena for testing ethical criticism's
capacity to produce socially relevant literary interpretations. As the
chapters that follow this brief introduction to the genre of aca
demic fction will reveal, ethical criticism proves especially revelatory
when employed as a means for examining the satires of academic
life propounded by the authors of university fction. The very na
ture of their craft - through their deliberately derisive fabulation of
story and character - underscores the ethical choices that practitioners
of the academic novel confront as they construct their critiques of
the academy and the hegemony of its institutions, the questionable
morality of its denizens, and the fractured philosophical underpinn
ings of its mission. Because the very publication of these works of
academic fction can be read as a form of social protest, as a means
for their authors to document the institutional dilemmas and pro
fessional insecurities that problematize postsecondary education,
ethical criticism offers a powerful and revealing interpretive method
ology for assessing the ethical functions, both real and imagined, of
our institutions of higher learning in the postwar world. In this
19

way, ethical criticism, in its effort to repair cultural and social in
justices in the human community, possesses the propensity for
producing meaningful critiques of those fctions that confront the
moral challenges inherent in contemporary academic life.
Although volumes such as Mortimer R. Proctor's The E�gl�sh U��
vers��y Novel (1957) and John Lyons's The College Novel �� Amer��a

(1962) offer useful accounts of the genre's long and distinguished
history, a brief review of academic fction's emergence as a literary
form, particularly during the nineteenth century, accounts for its
archly satirical manifestations during the latter half of the twenti
eth century. "As a literary genre," Proctor writes, the academic novel
"has always refected conditions within Oxford and Cambridge far
more closely than it has followed any literary trends or movements"
(185). The universal conceptions of Oxford and Cambridge as unique
intellectual societies - in short, the fctive terrain of "Oxbridge" -
inspired centuries of fctions devoted to university life, from Chaucer's
Clerk of Oxford through the romanticized academic novels of the
early nineteenth century.1 While these narratives poked occasional
fun at the ineffectuality of university faculty or the unreality of
college life, their plots generally involved sentimental, often melo
dramatic portrayals of Oxford and Cambridge. The genre of English
university fction fnds its more satiric origins, however, in the various
educational reform movements of the midnineteenth century, as
well as in the admission of women to the sacred groves of Oxford
and Cambridge in the latter half of the nineteenth century.2 During
this era, Oxford and Cambridge witnessed an observable decline in
the hegemony of their infuence upon English society and culture.
Their fctional portrayals, once predicated upon more lofty elements
of esteem and erudition, now languished in narratives about "uni
versity lecturers who did not lecture, and undergraduates who freely
enjoyed all the pleasures of depravity" (Proctor, 11). The acts of
reform endured by Oxford and Cambridge found their roots in the
1850s, when a series of reports commissioned by the English gov
ernment revealed a set of institutions that operated on an outmoded
classical curriculum and blatantly catered to the needs of the so
cially privileged.3 While a set of statutes during the 1870s virtually
redesigned the governance of both institutions, reform acts in 1854
and 1856 abolished religious tests at Oxford and Cambridge, re
spectively, thus providing access to the universities for students outside
of the Church of England (Proctor, 56-7). This movement against
exclusion ultimately resulted, of course, in the momentous events

of 1879, when Somerville College frst opened its doors to female

students at Oxford.4
In addition to increasing the public's interest in the business of
higher education, the nineteenthcentury reform acts at Oxford and
Cambridge succeeded in establishing a social landscape ripe for
narrative consideration: "Reform," Proctor observes, "brought new

causes to urge, and a new cast of characters to add to the tradi
tional rakes. With reform, it became more plausible to take an interest
in the success of scholars; examination halls became the scenes of
triumphs and disasters in which good very nearly always triumphed
over evil," he continues (59). Like their English antecedents, American
novels about academic life fnd their modern origins in the nine
teenth century, an intense era of social change and industrial growth
that destabilized the prodigious cultural infuences of privileged in
stitutions of higher learning such as Oxford and Cambridge, and
in America, Harvard.5 In his examination of the American evolu
tion of the academic novel, Lyons remarks:
The advance of industrial capitalism during the nineteenth cen

tury is another cause for the popular suspicion of the academy.
The mechanical sciences which fathered and made this advance
possible were eminently practical ones. It was engineering which
laid the rails and built the bridges and designed the mills, not
philosophy. And the money which engineering made possible
was used to buy and sell engineers, so it was unlikely that the
capitalist businessman should even respect the engineer when
his knowledge brought him so little power. (4)
The "popular suspicion of the academy" that Lyons ascribes to the

industrialized societies of the latter nineteenth century underscores
the emergence of the brand of satire endemic to the AngloAmerican
novels about university life. Satire, by its traditional defnition, func
tions as a critique of the follies of humankind. Yet Lyons astutely
differentiates the modern incarnations of satire in university fction
from the texts of the great satirists of the Augustan Age who invari
ably situated themselves on the side of "Reason, . . . tempered by
humanity and common sense." The satirists of the Augustan era,
Lyons notes, often hinted at solutions to the dilemmas depicted in
their narratives. Satiric novels of academic life, however, provide
no such answers (162-3).6 Their nostalgia for the ivory towers of
their prenineteenthcentury cultural and social supremacy prevents

academic fctions from positing solutions in a pragmatic world where

the idealism of the academy lacks viability and signifcance. In the
frst half of the twentieth century, then, when the world demanded
answers to even more complicated social and political predicaments
- from the calamities of the First and Second World Wars to the
Great Depression and beyond - the academy once again lacked the

practical answers to the human community's vexing problems.7 And
academic novels fourished as never before.
Monographs such as Ian Carter's A��e�� C�l��res of Co��e�� Br��
�sh U��vers��y F��o� �� he Pos��War �ears (1990) feature thorough
accounts of the genre's enormous output in England since the 1950s.8
Carter affords particular emphasis to the ways in which the prolif
eration of provincial "redbrick" universities, like the reform acts of
the nineteenth century, undermined the formerly exalted infuence
of Oxford and Cambridge and expanded appreciably the public's
access to institutions of higher education in England. Unlike Lyons,
Carter argues that academic novels, through their satire, do offer
implicit solutions for the problems that confront modern readers.
For Carter, the answers lie in "taking culture seriously, and taking
universities to be important bastions of culture. But the notion of
what constitutes culture," he cautions, "must be transformed from
that typical of British university fction" (277). In this way, the
academic novel proffers - through its satiric depiction of the insti
tutional states of malaise inherent in its fctive representations of
contemporary universities - a means for both implicitly and explicitly
advocating positive value systems. In short, academic novels, by
postulating a kind of antiethos in their narratives, ultimately seek
to enhance the culture and sustain the community through a more
ethically driven system of higher education. This antiethos, what I
will later describe as a "pejorative poetics," underscores the satirical
motivations of the authors of academic fction and the manner in
which their narrative ambitions function as progressive forces when
read in regard to the tenets of ethical criticism.
In The U��vers��y �� Moder� F��o�� Whe� Poaer �s A�adem�� (1993),
Janice Rossen provides a thematic analysis of various works of post
war academic fction in a similar effort to explain the reasons for
their promulgation. In this valuable text, Rossen identifes a "dy
namics of power" that undergirds the genre of English and American
academic novels. "We should begin to read these novels less in
terms of their actual brilliance or success," she argues, "and more
in terms of what they reveal about the dynamics of power between

the contemporary novelist and his audience" (188). Rossen's para

digm for reading the products of academic fction reveals the various
structures of power that simultaneously manipulate the life of the
individual scholar and the life of the university community. These
power structures, she argues, ultimately problematize campus life
through their creation of a philosophical paradox that scholars ul

timately cannot escape. As Rossen observes, "The scholarly life
inevitably consists of life in community, though it is fundamentally
predicated on a principle of individualism" (9). Modern universi
ties, by virtue of their tenure and research requirements, maintain,
at least for the beneft of their nontenured members, the explicit
threat of expulsion.9 The ominous power of this vestige of profes
sional affliation creates "an imposing fa�ade" in favor of the
university, Rossen writes, "which suggests a powerful presence through
its ability to exclude potential members" (30).
The politics of exclusion - the threat of ultimate severance from
the community - functions as a menacing obstacle in the path to
institutional success for the individual scholar. For this reason, the
nature of academic scholarship receives particular attention in
university fctions. As Rossen observes, "All novels about academic
life and work exploit the tension between these two poles of idealism
and competition, or scholarship as a means to an end and as an
end in itself" (140). This tension confronts scholars with an
emotional dilemma of staggering proportions: in one sense, campus
life purports to offer them an arena to engage their colleagues in
free intellectual discourse, while in another sense it necessitates
that they confront their colleagues in a highstakes competition
based upon the quality and proliferation of their intellectual
capabilities in order to ensure their professional security. "The
emotional dimension of such work can lead to heightened battles
between scholars," Rossen remarks, "and in a way which brings
their powerful intellectual abilities and skills to bear on what is
fundamentally an emotional issue" (145).
The remarkably volatile ways in which the life of the individual
intersects the life of the community in the genre of academic fc
tion obviously merits the consideration of ethical criticism and its
conspicuous attention to the moral choices that individuals encounter
while pursuing selfknowledge in their chosen communities. Through
their satiric representations of campus life, the practitioners of aca
demic fction render de fa��o judgments regarding the prevailing
states of affairs in our postsecondary institutions. These ethical

judgments, as the various voices of ethical criticism assert, possess

considerable social and ideological import. In the chapters that follow,
I will explore the works of fve authors of AngloAmerican univer
sity fction from the genre's modern origins during the 1950s through
the form's manifestations in the present in an effort to reveal the
value of ethical criticism as a salient means of interpretation, as

well as to demonstrate the ways in which the ethical paradigm
illuminates our understanding of the special contradictions inherent
in university life. Particular emphasis will be afforded in this investigation
to the function of literary character, especially regarding the rela
tionships between scholars and the larger university communities
that they populate. In addition to exploring the depictions in academic
novels of the rites of scholarly competition, close analysis will be
devoted to the academy's marginalization of different classes and
social groups, especially regarding the precarious places of women
in academe. Attention will also be allotted to recent developments
on the global academic scene, including scholarly conferences and
their roles in the already competitive arena of scholarly research;
the triumphs and perils of multiculturalism; and the predominance
of the academic meritocracy and its fomentation of what Rossen
calls "intellectual territorialism" (146), the hoarding of manuscripts
and knowledge in order to secure the individual scholar's uncertain
niche in the larger academic community.
For these purposes, I will examine Kingsley Amis's 1954 novel,
L��ky J�m, which, in addition to its place as one of the modern
progenitors of the genre, features a number of nuances endemic to
the satiric narratives of academic fction, exemplifed particularly
through Amis's depictions of the inimitable Professor Welch and
the forlorn, fedgling academic, Jim Dixon. Attention will also be
devoted to P�� (1957) and Pale F�re (1962), novels in which Vladimir
Nabokov proffers two sardonic examinations of the academy in the
guises of, respectively, Professor Pnin, the hopelessly prolix Russian
scholar, and Dr. Charles Kinbote, whose autobiographical pyrotech
nics and idolatry adorn - indeed, threaten to overwhelm - his textual
commentary of the late John Shade's fnal poetic achievement. I
will also examine the colorful assortment of characters who popu
late Joyce Carol Oates's The H��gry Ghos�s� Seve� All�s�ve Comed�es
(1974). Oates's satiric admixture of disinterested scholars, greedy
intellectual dilettantes, and ineffectual plagiarists underscores her
overarching thesis regarding the nature of academic malpractice in
North American institutions of higher learning. David Lodge's tril

ogy of academic novels - Cha�g��g Pla�es� a Tale of Tao Camp�ses

(1975), Small World� a� A�adem�� Roma��e (1984), and N��e Work
(1988) - offers a postmodern progress from the advent of the English
redbrick university through the professional and social perils of
transatlantic conferences and professorial exchange. Adorned with
such characters as the internationally renowned literary critic, Morris

�app - that fctive paragon of selfinterested poststructuralism - and
the struggling, brilliant young academic, Robyn Penrose, Lodge's
fctions explore the intellectual and cultural gamut of contemporary
intellectual life and afford particular emphasis to its proclivity for
critical fashion and its disdain for intellectual and social stasis. A
reading of the flm version of David Mamet's play Olea��a (1992)
will focus on the playwright ��m director's narrative about a con
temporary professor and his student's inability to communicate with
each other on any genuinely meaningful level. Their utter incapa
bility of comprehending the nature of their obligations and
responsibilities, both to each other and to higher education, predi
cates Mamet's brutal musings on sexual harassment and political
correctness.
I will also offer an analysis of Ishmael Reed's 1993 novel, Japa�ese
by Spr��g, the story of an AfricanAmerican junior professor quest
ing for tenure amidst a cauldron of infghting and xenophobia at
Jack London College. Following a Japanese conglomerate's purchase
and cultural redefnition of the institution, he revels in the power
associated with his new appointment as a college administrator while
the campus descends into racial and political turmoil. In "Academic
Nonfction and the Culture Warriors," I will dispatch, if only tem
porarily, with the fctional narratives of university fction to address
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Mas�erp�e�e Thea�re� a� A�adem��
Melodrama (1995). Gilbert and Gubar's volume offers a satirical survey
of the recent proliferation of even more pejorative, nonfctional
academic commentaries regarding the controversial advent of the
multicultural project, including such works as Allan Bloom's The
Clos��g of �he Amer��a� M��d� Hoa H�gher Ed��a��o� Has Fa�led
Demo�ra�y a�d �mpover�shed �he So�ls of Today's S��de��s (1987), Roger
Kimball's Te��red Rad��als� Hoa Pol��s Has Corr�p�ed H�gher Ed��a��o�
(1990), and William J. Bennett's The De�Val��g of Amer��a� �he F�gh�
for O�r C�l��re a�d O�r Ch�ldre� (1992). These volumes, the mono
cultural master texts of the "culture wars" of the late 1980s and
early 1990s, share an abiding angst over the ills and excesses of
contemporary bastions of higher learning. The propagation of such

caustic and often belligerent appraisals of the academy - published,

remarkably, as four decades of academic fction reach their acerbic,
selfcritical apex - surely warrants further exploration. Finally, a
study of Jane Smiley's Moo (1995) will examine the novelist's
carnivalesque representation of Moo U.'s administration, faculty, and
student body as they engage in a variety of revealing social, cultural,

and political transgressions.
Selected because of their capacity for illuminating many of moral
philosophy's central concepts - including the notions of commu
nity, artistic fulfllment, goodness, love, and cultural inheritance -
the literary works featured in this study will demonstrate the vi
ability of ethical criticism as an interpretive methodology. By virtue
of my usage of the ethical paradigm, the aforementioned chapters
will feature entirely new (and, in some instances, inaugural) read
ings of these texts - these "Professorroma�," Richard G. Caram's useful
rubric for describing academic fction's growing corpus - while also
uniting in an innovative fashion the culturally disparate voices of
international moral philosophers and academic novelists from a
variety of social and national origins.10 In addition to contributing
to the existing body of scholarship devoted to the genre of aca
demic fction, this study underscores the ways in which ethical
criticism, with all of its contingent pedagogic and interdisciplinary
possibilities, provides readers with a useful paradigm for reinvigor
ating the theoretical project as the millennium approaches. As the
chapters that follow this introduction will further show, ethical
criticism affords theorists with a revelatory means for commenting
upon the interconnections between the lives of readers and their
textual experiences. In this manner, I intend to capture both the
shape and nature of the argument, fctional as well as nonfctional,
regarding our postsecondary institutions and their ethical roles as
social and educational leaders of an expanding global culture.

Nego��a��g �he U��vers��y Comm��y 27
3
Negotiating the University
Community: L��ky J�m and the

Politics of Academe
"It was one of those days when he felt quite convinced of

his impending expulsion from academic life. What would
he do afterwards? Teach in a school? Oh dear no. Go to
London and get a job in an offce. What job? Whose offce?
Shut up."
- Kingsley Amis, L��ky J�m
In addition to its widely acknowledged place as the quintessential

campus novel of the twentieth century, Kingsley Amis's L��ky J�m
(1954) illustrates the peculiar dilemmas endured by young scholars
in their efforts to achieve selfhood and fnd acceptance within the
larger academic community. Often characterized as an unabashedly
comic novel, L��ky J�m in fact offers a moral landscape that con
fronts the novel's protagonist, Jim Dixon, with a variety of ethical
predicaments. For this reason, a few astute critics such as John
McDermott refer to Amis as a "serious comic novelist" (1). As I will
demonstrate in this chapter, Amis utilizes the m��er of comedy in
the novel as a means for delivering his judgments regarding the
problematic moral state of academic life during the remarkably frac
tious era in which his novel frst appeared. His satiric attacks on
the university community fnd their targets, moreover, in those privi
leged individuals who endeavor to maintain the academic status
quo in their favor through the exploitation of junior colleagues,
and, ultimately, through the threat of expulsion from the seemingly
sacred groves of campus life. As Amis's novel so stridently reveals,
27

the very threat of severance from the scholarly community poses

as a powerful obstacle in the young academic's path to selfknowledge.
L��ky J�m fnds its origins in Amis's wellknown 1946 visit to the
Senior Common Room at Leicester University, although it also owes
its genesis to the confuence of three historic moments in twentieth
century British social and literary history: the passage of the Education

Act of 1944, the advent of the redbrick university in England dur
ing that same era, and the subsequent apotheosis of L��ky J�m as
the mastertext of the Angry Young Man movement in the 1950s.
In 1946, Amis visited Philip Larkin at Leicester University, where
Larkin, Amis's friend from their scholarship days at Oxford, worked
as an assistant librarian. "He took me into the Common Room there,"
Amis later remarked, "and after about a quarter of an hour I said,
'Christ, someone ought to do something about this lot.'" 1 Amis's
experiences during the late 1940s as a junior lecturer at University
College, Swansea, only served to confrm his initial impressions
about the ethical inequalities of academic life (McDermott, 17). In
addition to his personal observations of the university community,
Amis found the inspiration for his novel in the social and political
turmoil that followed the passage of the Education Act of 1944, an
article of legislation that, for the frst time since the landmark edu
cational acts of the midnineteenth century, attempted to undermine
the place of university education as an exclusive privilege of the
upper classes. The Education Act required students to pursue their
primary education to at least the age of 15, while also creating a
twotiered system of free secondary education that consisted of
"Grammar Schools" and "Secondary Modern Schools" (Gardner,
K��gsley, 23).
During the decades that followed, the Education Act accomplished
its intended goal of producing a greater quantity of collegebound
workingclass students. Accommodating this infux of postsecondary
students likewise necessitated the wholesale expansion of the English
university system and resulted in the construction of an assortment
of provincial redbrick institutions and "New" universities across
Great Britain.2 Despite the Act's intention of assimilating a larger
workingclass student population into English university life, Philip
Gardner observes that the Education Act of 1944 "gave rise to a
signifcant number of deracinated and disoriented young men, no
longer at home in their working or lowermiddleclass attitudes
and environments, but at the same time not feeling accepted by the
social system into which their education appeared to be pushing

them" (24). This culture of alienation in the 1950s ultimately pro

duced the "angry young man," that peculiar social manifestation of
cultural angst and intellectual derision depicted in such works as
John Wain's H�rry o� Doa� (1953), L��ky J�m, and John Osborne's
Look Ba�k �� A�ger (1956), among others. The fgure of the angry
young man as a fctive persona reveals himself as a literary charac

ter simultaneously oppressed by the hypocritical value system of
the same society whose standards and traditions he so desperately
strives to oblige. For this reason, protagonists in the literature pro
mulgated by such "angry young men" as Amis and Osborne initially
founder in their social confusion and ultimately fnd themselves
overwhelmed by their own disillusion. Although Richard Bradford
remarks that Amis's text succeeds "in refecting the mood and atmo
sphere of contemporary life," he also argues that Amis refuses to
use the novel "as an instrument of moral judgment or informed
social commentary" (32).
An ethical reading of L��ky J�m proves otherwise, however, for in
Dixon, Amis creates a protagonist who - when confronted with the
chaos and trauma of mediating between an upperclass value sys
tem beyond his comprehension and the contradictions of academic
life - reconfgures his own ethos in an effort to locate a new path
to selfhood beyond the campus walls. Dedicated to Larkin, L��ky
J�m illustrates the ways in which Dixon, well supplemented in his
quest for selfknowledge by a liberal dose of serendipity, negotiates
his way through a maze of ethical choices - choices in which he
invariably opts for mischief rather than goodness. He emerges never
theless as a selffulflled member of the larger human community as
opposed to the alienated fgure of deceit that he represented as "tem
porary assistant lecturer" in the cloistered academic world. As this
chapter will demonstrate, Amis's novel, when considered in terms
of the tenets of ethical criticism and its abiding interest in the
ethical decisions that literary characters make, functions both as a
critique of the academy and as a narrative of surprising social ac
commodation. When Dixon effects his own expulsion from university
life at the novel's conclusion, his sense of humanity soars when he
fnds solace and acceptance in a bona fde community of genuine
friends and truly conscientious mentors.
Amis's utilization of satire in L��ky J�m underscores his express
attempt to undercut the academy by highlighting its contradictions
and illuminating the ways in which it subverts goodness and the
search for selfknowledge, an end that it accomplishes through its

creation of a miniature society that functions upon existential threats

and dubious rites of competition. In this manner, Amis participates
in the construction of the pejorative poetics that undergirds the
satire inherent in many works of academic fction. By elaborating,
through their particularly acerbic brand of satire, the failings and
inconsistencies of the university community, writers such as Amis

implicitly argue for a revitalized academic milieu, an ethically en
hanced world in which the life of the individual fnds acceptance
and fruition in an intellectual community that heeds their percep
tion of the mission of the university: to imbue human affairs with
the collective wisdom produced by the unrestricted discourse of an
academic cooperative.3 Such a poetics, a narrative strategy that pro
duces, through satire, a series of moral possibilities for the larger
human community, fnds its basis in the reading challenges proposed
by the ethical paradigm. Ethical criticism, by furnishing readers
with the interpretive tools for the analysis of a given narrative's
estimations of truth and goodness, reveals the valuable moral insights
produced by the satirist's employment of a pejorative poetics. In his
discussion of L��ky J�m, for instance, McDermott identifes the
usefulness of exploring Amis's novel as an ironic ethical construct:
"It is a novel about good people and bad people," he writes, "about
right and wrong ways of behaving and thinking, and, as in all the
major novels, its main interest and much of its delight lies in feeling
the tension between these elements" (54). By highlighting this tension
through his broad satiric commentaries regarding the university
community, Amis provides readers with a means, then, for self
consciously reconsidering the social and ethical roles of the academy
and its inhabitants.
Amis's careful portrayal of Dixon in L��ky J�m allows him to
investigate a number of problematic social and cultural issues related
to academic life. In addition to his satiric characterizations of Dixon's
senior colleagues, particularly the unforgettable Professor Welch,
Amis addresses the perils of scholarly research and publication, as
well as the peculiar, unforgiving nature of university politics.
Focalizing the narrative through Dixon's workingclass eyes allows
Amis to dramatize the uneasy relationships that develop between
the privileged upperclass denizens of the university community
and their disoriented and insecure junior counterparts. A graduate
of Leicester University, Dixon secures a temporary adjunct position
at an unnamed provincial redbrick university after besting an Oxford
candidate at his job interview. Like the other angry young working

class men who struggle to fnd acceptance and selfsuffciency in

the groves of academe, Dixon hungers for job security amidst a
world that both bores and bewilders him. A probationary junior
lecturer in medieval history - a subject that he detests, yet seems to
offer him the promise of secure employment that he so covets -
Dixon confesses in the novel that his policy "was to read as little

as possible of any given book" (16-17). He harbors little regard for
academic research and scholarly publication, although he realizes
their esteemed places in the competitive campus arena. As Hazard
Adams notes in A�adem�� Tr�bes (1976), "Life in academe is marked
by periodic rituals of ascension which bear aspects of trial by per
turbation and ordeal" (77). Similarly, Dixon recognizes the value
placed on knowledge, or at least the perception of it, by the senior
colleagues who will decide his fate, as the following conversation
with Professor Welch, the head of the History Department, reveals:
"I [Welch] was having a chat the other day with an old friend of
mine from South Wales. The Professor at the University College
of Abertawe, he is now. Athro Haines; I expect you know his
book on medieval Cwmrhydyceirw."
Dixon said "Oh yes" in a different tone, but still guardedly. He
wanted to indicate clear and devout recognition that should not
at the same time imply frsthand knowledge of the work in question,
in case Welch should demand an epitome of its argument. (81)
At such moments, Dixon opts to disengage his attention, "just keep

ing enough of it going to enable him to nod at proper intervals"
(81), and lapses into the states of boredom that occupy much of his
existence in the academic world.4
In the La�g�age of F��o�� Essays �� Cr��sm a�d Verbal A�alys�s
of �he E�gl�sh Novel (1966), David Lodge identifes such instances as
products of the incongruities between Dixon's "outer world and his
inner world." According to Lodge, "While he [Dixon] tries - not
very successfully - to show the outer world the image of an indus
trious, respectable wellmannered young man, his mind seethes with
caustic sarcasm directed against himself and others, with fantasies
of violence done to enemies, of triumph for himself" (251). Dixon
expresses the turmoil and disgust of his inner world through a series
of facial contortions. Succumbing to stagefright as the hour of his
fateful "Merrie England" lecture approaches, for instance, prompts
him to effect his "Evelyn Waugh face": "Gripping his tongue between

his teeth, he made his cheeks expand into little hemispherical bal
loons; he forced his upper lip downwards into an idiotic pout; he
protruded his chin like the blade of a shovel. Throughout, he alter
nately dilated and crossed his eyes," Amis writes (220). In this way,
Dixon masks the honest expressions of his inner self. As Richard
Fallis notes, Dixon only "asserts his freedom in his imagination"

(69). For this reason, Amis provides us with Dixon's one true aes
thetic vision in the novel, a dream of liberation beyond the walls
of the university:
As he stood in the badlylit jakes, he was visited again, and un

bearably, by the visual image that had haunted him ever since
he took on this job. He seemed to be looking from a darkened
room across a deserted back street to where, against a dimly
glowing evening sky, a line of chimneypots stood out as if carved
from tin. A small double cloud moved slowly from right to left. . . .
He was certain that it was an image of London, and just as certain
that it wasn't any part of London he'd ever visited. He hadn't
spent more than a dozen evenings there in his life. Then why, he
pondered, was his ordinary desire to leave the provinces for London
sharpened and particularized by this halfglimpsed scene? (26)
The manner in which Dixon damns and diverts the emotions expe
rienced by his inner self results in a series of mischievous attacks
upon academic life and its denizens. Harmless misdemeanors against
the community rather than wholesale crimes, these incidents include
his imagined acts of violence against Professor Welch and his efforts
to problematize the relationship between Welch's son, Bertrand, a
pretentious artist, and his society girlfriend, Christine Callaghan.
Dixon must also contend with the confounding academic activity
of scholarly publication and the peculiar romantic advances of a
colleague, Margaret Peel. These nefarious forces of university life,
the corrosive elements of Dixon's "outer world" of which Lodge
speaks, function collectively to dehumanize and annihilate his sense
of selfworth.
Professor Welch serves as Dixon's primary nemesis in L��ky J�m,
as well as the target of many of the novel's satiric barbs. As Amis
remarked in a 1975 interview conducted by Dale Salwak: "In my
novels . . . there are bad people, and it is essential to make them
ridiculous" (5). In Welch, Amis proffers a blistering portrayal of
academic pretension and indifference, what Gardner calls "a

devastating portrait, incidentally, of a certain type of British aca

demic" (27). For Dixon, Welch represents everything that he fnds
troubling about academic life - from snobbery and cultural affecta
tion to vocational ineffectuality and selfindulgence. "No other
professor in Great Britain," Dixon muses, "set such store by being
called Professor" (7). Dixon fnds himself equally perplexed by the

disparity between Welch's academic standing and his vague qualif
cations: "How had he become Professor of History, even at a place
like this?" Dixon wonders. "By published work? No. By extra good
teaching? No in italics" (8). Yet, because Welch possesses the power
to decide Dixon's ultimate fate at the university, he remains unable
to express his dismay at the inequities of his precarious position as
a probationary lecturer. For this reason, he accedes to all of the
professor's demands for his service, while secretly imagining the
violent acts to which he would subject Welch. In addition to agree
ing to attend Welch's "Arty Weekend" of madrigal songs and chamber
music - activities that the workingclass Dixon fnds utterly detest
able - Dixon conducts his senior colleague's research activities and
provides Welch with notes for a lecture that the professor intends
to deliver. As McDermott notes: "Welch combines cultural affecta
tion . . . with a professional position that has no honest base and is
sustained by the efforts of others (notably Dixon) over whom he
exercises a control that is absolute" (60). For this reason, when
Dixon prods Welch for reassurance regarding the state of his uncer
tain position in the department, the professor refuses to show any
compassion for his adopted "protege" and nervously avoids Dixon's
glance while stammering unintelligibly. Despite all of his efforts to
curry Welch's favor, Dixon essentially lacks any palpable identity
in the professor's eyes, for Welch frequently refers to him as
"Faulkner," the name of a previous temporary assistant lecturer.
Welch's careless responses to Dixon's plight and his generally
ineffectual demeanor serve to enrage the already bewildered Dixon,
prompting the young scholar to fantasize repeated acts of violence
against the professor. On one occasion, Dixon confesses his desire "to
bundle Welch into the revolving door and whirl him round in it till
lunchtime" (172). In yet another instance, Dixon dreams of an elabo
rate methodology for literally silencing his overbearing senior colleague:
He pretended to himself that he'd pick up his professor round

the waist, squeeze the furry greyblue waistcoat against him to
expel the breath, run heavily with him up the steps, along the

corridor to the Staff Cloakroom, and plunge the toosmall feet in

their capless shoes into a lavatory basin, pulling the plug once,
twice, and again, stuffng the mouth with toiletpaper. (9-10)
During a visit to Welch's home, Dixon even attempts to impress the

family ginger cat, Id, into vengeful service against its selfimportant

master: "Dixon bent and tickled Id under the ear," Amis writes. "He
admired it for never allowing either of the senior Welches to pick
it up. 'Scratch 'em,' he whispered to it; 'pee on the carpets.' It began
to purr loudly" (180). In sharp contrast with the multidimen
sional faces that Dixon covertly sports, Welch - as that selfcentered,
iddriven fgure of academic deceit - can produce only one visage, a
"longlived, wondering frown" (53). As respective members of the
cultural elite and the working class, Welch and Dixon already exist
as polar opposites, yet their most notable difference lies in their
divergent capacities to occupy ethical spaces and render moral
judgments. "What Dixon has against Welch is not that he is an
academic, or the head of a department, but that he is a bad one,"
McDermott astutely observes (56). Welch fts the profle of "a
thoroughly bad man," McDermott argues, because of "his egotism's
unreserved unawareness of anyone else" (60). This general disinter
est in the life of the community underscores Amis's motivation for
satirizing those unsavory gatekeepers of academic life, who, like
Welch, lack the ethical faculties to perform their duties with humanity
and benevolence.
Like his father, Bertrand shares in the construction of Dixon's
debilitating "outer world," a region distinguished by what McDermott
describes as "the linguistic code through which each [character] is
presented, explored, and fnally judged" (57). In the novel, Bertrand
and Dixon's differences in social class and personal ethics result in
a number of verbal altercations, and, ultimately, in a transcendent
moment of physical violence that allows Dixon to unite his inner
and outer worlds. A pompous, selfimportant artist, Bertrand adopts
a variety of measures expressly intended to establish distance be
tween himself and the inferior beings that he sees around him.
Fiercely dedicated to achieving his desires at any cost, Bertrand
even develops his own pretentious jargon, a devious language that
allows him to manipulate conversations in an effort to subjugate
the needs of his associates and achieve his own selfsh ends. In one
instance, Dixon witnesses Bertrand's usage of "you sam," for which
Amis provides an extended morphology:

The last word ["sam"], a version of "see," was Bertrand's own

coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted
into a short "a," as if he were going to say "sat." This brought
his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was
to end the syllable with a light but audible "m." (51)

As Bertrand slowly discovers that Dixon poses a threat to his poten
tial intimacy with the delectable socialite, Christine Callaghan, his
verbal spats with the young academic occur more frequently. While
threatening to use his relationship with his father to get Dixon
dismissed from the History Department, Bertrand cautions Dixon
about the powerful range of his infuence: "Don't think you can
defy me and get away with it, Dixon. People never do" (184). When
their confict fnally degenerates into fsticuffs, Dixon appears to
defeat his superior's son, although Bertrand punches Dixon in a
last, desperate attempt at asserting his dominion over the young
scholar. Bertrand's momentary interruption of his rival's triumph
affords Dixon with the impetus for blurring the frustrating bound
aries between his inner and outer worlds: "The bloody old
towserfaced bootfaced totempole on a crap reservation, Dixon
thought. 'You bloody old towserfaced bootfaced totempole on a
crap reservation,' he said" (209). In addition to demonstrating the
manner in which Dixon establishes unity between his inner self
and his outer world, this instance exemplifes his victory over the
prisonhouse of language. By successfully transforming his mental
experience into a fully realized speech act, Dixon undermines the
hegemony of Bertrand's absurd phraseology, and, for the frst time,
verbally asserts himself in the hostile environs of the academic
community.
Dixon endures an even more disturbing, emotional form of ma
nipulation at the hands of his colleague, Margaret Peel, another
junior lecturer in the History Department. Ostensibly Dixon's friend
and confdante, Margaret surreptitiously preys upon Dixon's innate
senses of guilt and humanity. Depicted in the novel as an anachro
nistic predatory female, Margaret establishes her emotional strangle
hold upon Dixon after her apparent attempt at suicide over a failed
romance.5 Concerned for his colleague's mental health, Dixon allows
Margaret to refer to them publicly as a couple, although their romantic
relationship never progresses beyond his drunken attempt to kiss
her and her subsequent rebuff of his advances during Professor
Welch's "Arty Weekend." Dixon emerges from the experience confused

about Margaret's intentions, as well as over his ethical role as the

trusted friend of a person in her supposedly fragile condition:
Had he really wanted what his actions had implied? . . . The only
answer was Yes, in a way. But he wouldn't have tried, would he?
or not so hard, anyway, if she hadn't seemed so keen. And why

had she decided to seem so keen, after so many weeks of seem
ing so not keen? (59)
As Dixon's infatuation with Christine develops, Margaret begins to

converse with him using a series of theatrical cliches, the narrative's
linguistic counterpart to Bertrand's pretentious lexicon. As her emo
tional power over Dixon wanes while he pursues his rival's girlfriend,
Margaret stages a ft of hysterics in his offce in an effort to enjoy
the benefts of his diminishing compassion for her plight. Dixon
only discovers her deceptions after meeting with Catchpole, the
chimerical lover who functioned as the specious impulse for
Margaret's initial, and equally fallacious, mental breakdown. Her
efforts to manipulate Dixon's proclivities for human kindness and
ethical awareness function, moreover, as a means for underscoring
his inherent ability to perceive himself in terms of his own moral
code, rather than that of the ethically challenged academic community.6
Dixon must also adapt his evolving ethos to yet another menac
ing nuance of his outer world, the arena of scholarly publication
and research. Advised by Welch that a forthcoming journal publi
cation might enhance his chances of maintaining his position at
the university, Dixon submits his essay, "The Economic Infuence
of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485," to
a London editor, Dr. L. S. Caton (15).7 Although Dixon covets the
professional rewards of published scholarship, he fnds the rites of
academic competition particularly unsettling. He discovers himself
equally perplexed by the infated language that adorns the pages of
his own article:
It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling

mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawnenforcing facts, the
pseudolight it threw upon nonproblems. Dixon had read, or
begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than
most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and
signifcance. "In considering this strangely neglected topic," it
began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This

strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having

defled and set fre to the typescript only made him appear to
himself as more of a hypocrite and fool. (14-15)
Despite his substantial misgivings about the nature of scholarship

and his own haughty prose style, Dixon anxiously awaits Caton's

decision. Remarkably, when Caton accepts the article for publica
tion yet evades Dixon's queries about the essay's publication date, it
is Welch who gossips about the spurious nature of Caton's previous
publishing activities. "Don't let this out, will you, Dixon," he cau
tions his protege, "but there was something like a forged testimonial
or something of the sort, I gathered. Something rather shady, any
way" (82). After Dixon learns of Caton's subsequent appointment as
Chair of History of Commerce at the University of Tucum�n, Argentina
(171), he catches a glimpse of a "fat and luxurious journal" in the
department's Common Room:
He'd never learnt any Italian, but the name at the head of this
article, L. S. Caton, presented no diffculty, nor, after a minute or
two, did the general drift of the text, which was concerned with
shipbuilding techniques in Western Europe in the later ffteenth
century and their infuence on something or other. There could
be no doubt about it; this article was either a close paraphrase or
a translation of Dixon's own original article. At a loss for faces,
he drew in his breath to swear, then cackled hysterically instead.
So that was how people got chairs, was it? Chairs of that sort,
anyway. (229)
Dixon's goodnatured, outward response to Caton's thievery reveals

both his recognition of the academy's ethically fractured rites of
competition and his evolving public self, a persona that no longer
relies upon the construction of obnoxious faces to vent his emo
tions. As McDermott remarks, "What chiefy redeems Dixon is that
he does see what is wrong in the situation, including himself and
the factitiousness of the articles he is obliged to write when schol
arship is reduced to the level of a competitive game" (68). In this
way, Amis provides a scathing commentary about the fallacious
qualities of one of the university community's most revered schol
arly proving grounds.
Finally cognizant of the elements that render the academy into a
bankrupt institution of sham and pretense - including Professor

Welch, Bertrand, Margaret, and the dubious nature of the scholar

ship that they venerate - Dixon slowly realigns himself with the
human community beyond the university's infuence. As Jerome
Meckier argues, "From being a minority of one, Jim becomes in
stead a genuine person who has been trapped in a crowd of boobies
and fakers" (49). In Christine, Dixon discovers a means for escap

ing the convoluted world of the academy. The beautiful niece of
the wealthy London art collector, Julius GoreUrquhart, Christine
seems at frst glance to be little more than an elaborate plot device,
an object over which to establish the rivalry between Dixon and
Bertrand. To Dixon, Christine initially appears to serve as a mere
ornament for Bertrand's social excursions. She seems to confrm
this belief after openly referring to GoreUrquhart as "Uncle" during
their frst meeting during the "Arty Weekend": "Dixon wanted to
laugh at this," Amis writes. "It always amused him to hear girls
(men never did it) refer to 'Uncle,' 'Daddy,' and so on, as if there
were only one uncle or daddy in the world, or as if this particular
uncle or daddy were the uncle or daddy of all those present" (50).
Lodge agrees with this conclusion, arguing that "the character of
Christine, admittedly, rarely rises about her archetype, the blonde,
beautiful, virginal yet voluptuous object of male desire, and the
conversations between her and Jim are often embarrassingly banal"
(Introduction, xiii).
Yet, as the narrative of L��ky J�m progresses, Christine provides
Dixon with a true colleague in every sense of the word, a trusted
confdante, who, unlike the pernicious Margaret, shares in his mis
chievous attacks on the academy. As Merritt Moseley notes, for Dixon,
"Christine is both beautiful and normal, a combination for which
he has no preparation" (23). Dixon disavows his original judgment
of Christine after she demonstrates her willingness to help him
hide the charred bedclothes in his quarters during the "Arty Week
end," as well as after she agrees to depart with him from the Summer
Ball that she originally attended as Bertrand's date, and later, after
she agrees to meet with him secretly at the local pub. Despite Lodge's
arguments to the contrary, Dixon's ethical reconsideration of Chris
tine imbues her with the attributes of a fully realized literary character.
For this reason, Bertrand's demands that the young scholar desist in
his relationship with Christine seem all the more meaningless to
the ethically reinvigorated Dixon:

"This business between Christine and myself," Bertrand said, fd

dling with his beard, "is a serious business, unquestionably. We've
known each other for some considerable period of time. And
we're not in it just for a spot of the old slap and tickle, do you
follow. I don't want to get married yet awhile, but it's distinctly
on the cards that I might marry Christine in a couple of years or

so. . . . Just get this straight in your socalled mind. When I see
something I want, I go for it. I don't allow people of your sort to
stand in my way. That's what you're leaving out of account. I'm
having Christine because it's my right. . . . If I'm after something,
I don't care what I do to make sure that I get it. That's the only
law I abide by; it's the only way to get things in this world."
(206, 208)
Bertrand's love affair with Carol Goldsmith, the wife of one of his
father's colleagues in the History Department, further underscores
the artist's commodifcation of Christine. For Dixon, however, she
exists as a remarkably healthy personality in contrast to the insular
atmosphere of the academy and its inhabitants. Through Christine
and his ethical reevaluation of her, Dixon fnally realizes the possi
bilities of a new life outside of the university.
Along with GoreUrquhart, Christine provides the trappings for
Dixon's new community apart from the "boobies and fakers" that
Meckier derides. During their conversation moments before Dixon's
disastrous "Merrie England" lecture begins, GoreUrquhart evinces
compassion and trust in his discussion with Dixon. He affords Dixon
with the opportunity, moreover, to articulate his feelings regarding
the dismal state of the History Department: "Well taught and sensi
bly taught, history could do people a hell of a lot of good," he tells
GoreUrquhart, "but in practice it doesn't work out like that. Things
get in the way. . . . Bad teaching's the main thing. Not bad students,
I mean" (214). After sharing his fask of whiskey with the nervous
scholar, GoreUrquhart remarks: "No need to worry; to hell with
all this" (221).8 Counseled by Welch that an effective public lecture
on behalf of the department might save his job at the university,
Dixon's discourse on "Merrie England" functions as the central crisis
of the novel, as well as Dixon's supreme, inebriated moment of
ethical judgment. Ted E. Boyle and Terence Brown observe that "Jim
Dixon sober could not summon suffcient courage to attack the sham
of the world he is forced to inhabit" (104). Well fortifed with alco
hol, however, Dixon delivers a protracted and forceful parody of

the academy, scholarship, and his senior colleagues. During his "Merrie
England" speech, Dixon replaces his inventory of faces with drunken
imitations of the voices of Welch, the university Principal, and,
fnally, a Nazi stormtrooper. In this way, he posits his fnal, blister
ing attack upon the untenable foundations of the academic world
of his experience:

Gradually, but not as gradually as it seemed to some parts of his
brain, he began to infuse his tones with a sarcastic, wounding
bitterness. Nobody outside a madhouse, he tried to imply, could
take seriously a single phrase of this conjectural, nugatory, deluded,
tedious rubbish. . . . A growing mutter, halfamused, halfindignant,
arose about him, but he closed his ears to it and read on. . . . He
began punctuating his discourse with smothered snorts of derision.
He read on, spitting out the syllables like curses, leaving mispro
nunciations, omissions, spoonerisms uncorrected, turning over
the pages of his script like a scorereader following a pres�o move
ment, raising his voice higher and higher. (226)
"The point about Merrie England," he concludes, "is that it was

about the most unMerrie period in our history" (227). Moments
later, the intoxicated Dixon faints in front of his stunned colleagues.
While his powerful denunciation of university life certainly fails to
convince his History Department audience of the unfortunate state
of the academy, Dixon's speech functions nevertheless as a means
for fnally establishing his own voice, for fusing together, once and
for all, his inner and outer worlds.
For this reason, Dixon discovers himself "at a loss for faces" (229)
after the lecture and following his expected dismissal from the His
tory Department faculty. A series of fortuitous events, however, support
the novel's sudden, de�s ex ma�h��a conclusion as Dixon's fortunes
shift and he secures a new job, solidifes his incipient relationship
with Christine, and prepares for a new life beyond the academy. "It
is no accident," Janice Rossen argues, "that many of the best Uni
versity novels are about someone leaving academe at the end of the
book" (188). An offer of employment from GoreUrquhart, the lib
erator of Dixon's inhibitions before the "Merrie England" speech,
sets the propitious events of the novel's closing chapters in motion.
The job offer surprises Dixon, who believed that Bertrand would
receive the coveted position in GoreUrquhart's offces: "I knew young
Welch was no good as soon as I set eyes on him. Like his pictures,"

GoreUrquhart tells him. "I think you'll do the job all right, Dixon.
It's not that you've got the qualifcations, for this or any other work,
but there are plenty who have. You haven't got the disqualifcations,
though, and that's much rarer" (234).9
After Dixon recognizes the role of chance and the possibility of
good fortune in his future - forces at work in his life, ironically,

only hours after his dismissal from the university - he fashions a
new philosophy for governing his newly discovered personal ethos.
First, Dixon remarks, "To write things down as luck wasn't the same
as writing them off as nonexistent or in some way beneath consid
eration" (242), and second, "there was no end to the ways in which
nice things are nicer than nasty ones" (243), he observes.10 When
Christine fortuitously misses her train to London, allowing Dixon
to meet her at the station and tell her about his upcoming job in
the city, he recognizes the degree to which his previous outlook
lacked the capacity to express feelings of jubilation: "He thought
what a pity it was that all his faces were designed to express rage
or loathing," Amis writes. "Now that something had happened which
really deserved a face, he'd none to celebrate it with. As a kind of
token," Amis continues, "he made his Sex Life in Ancient Roman
face" (250). Dixon establishes his ultimate connection with the human
community beyond academe when he and Christine encounter
Professor Welch and Bertrand as they leave the train station. Rather
than resorting to the insularity of a facial contortion, Dixon opts
for a more heroic - and, perhaps more signifcantly, verbal -
expression of his victory over the academy: "Dixon drew in breath
to denounce them both, then blew it all out again in a howl of
laughter" (251).
By choosing the more affrmative path to selfhood offered by the
conviviality of laughter, Dixon shuns the impulse to denounce his
enemies in favor of the oral celebration of his new place in the
human community. As Meckier notes, novelists of the Angry Young
Man movement such as Amis, in addition to highlighting the frus
trating class distortions of the 1950s, also sought to expose "the
limitations of anger and its inevitable collapse as an approach to
life" (57). In this way, Dixon selfconsciously devises a more opti
mistically human mechanism, as opposed to his earlier, angry stance,
for rendering ethical judgment. Establishing an exterior persona by
which to assert his emotions allows him to accomplish this end. In
O� Moral Perso�hood� Ph�losophy, L��era��re, Cr��sm, a�d Self�
U�ders�a�d��g (1989), Richard Eldridge underscores the manner in

which human beings, through the unrestricted communication of

their emotions, fnd selfknowledge and selfsatisfaction among a
larger community: "Our lives as persons," he writes, "emerge as
expressions of our being fated to succeed and fail, partially and
along various dimensions, in coming to know our nature and to act
on principle in an ongoing, fulflling, and cooperative way" (5).

Although Dixon enjoys the spoils of victory - indeed, the re
wards of moral behavior - at the conclusion of L��ky J�m, he will
surely experience failure and disappointment as his fctive exist
ence progresses, for living ethically hardly mitigates the experiential
risks inherent in life among the many and diverging forces of the
human community. As an ethical reading of Amis's novel reveals,
however, Dixon emerges from the novel as a more fully realized
individual who both recognizes the limitations of his unvoiced anger
and seeks to share in the life of a community founded on prin
ciples of morality and fairness. Dixon's experiences in the narrative
likewise underscore Amis's satiric denigration of the academy's ca
pacity to undermine the selfexpression of the individual. For this
reason, academic readers of Amis's novel often discover life experi
ences not so unlike their own depicted in L��ky J�m's selfrefexive
narrative. As Fallis notes, "Much of Jim's hold on us comes because
we see him as a fantasized version of our unrealized selves and
because we recognize the novel to be a version of heroic fantasy
cast into superfcially realistic situations" (66).11 Ethical criticism,
in its desire to establish vital interconnections between the life of
the individual and the life of the text, provides readers, then, with
a methodology for refecting upon the satiric depictions of campus
life in academic novels, while also affording us with a means for
reconsidering the indiscretions of a world that possesses so much
potential for goodness.

S��olar ��ent�rers in ��ile 43
4
Scholar Adventurers in Exile:
Nabokov's Dr. Kinbote and

Professor Pnin
"I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral

or social satirist."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions
Ethical criticism presupposes that works of art necessarily implore

us, through their depictions of so many morally disparate heroes
and villains, to render value judgments based upon our experiences
as readers and members of the larger human community. Yet in his
published essays, interviews, and correspondence, Vladimir Nabokov
consistently reminds us of the dangers inherent in the application
of unexamined moral philosophies to works of literature. In a letter
of 24 October 1945 to Professor George R. Noyes, for example,
Nabokov notes that only an "uninhibited art" offers the possibility
of registering a moral impact upon the reader. "Deliberate moraliz
ing," he cautions, "does violence to the very notion of art" (56-7). 1
Although he maintains that writers must distance themselves from
the infuence of socially constructed moral imperatives during the
production of their texts, he ultimately manufactures characters in
novels such as Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962) who
often suffer tangible consequences for their morally reprehensible
actions. In the latter two volumes, Nabokov employs the novel as a
forum for illustrating the capacity of academic characters to act
with cruelty and emotional negligence in their dealings with their
peers, and, in some instances, with their students. He also devotes
considerable attention to the false prophecy of academic scholarship,
43

44 Posttar ��a�eii� Fi�tion
an enterprise that functions in his aesthetic as merely the product

of misguided personal ambition, rather than as the result of spirited
and meticulous research. This chapter will demonstrate that Nabokov
- despite his strident opposition to the appropriation of literature
as a means for codifying public standards of behavior - neverthe
less postulates an ethical schema in his fctions and literary criticism

that fnds its roots in his antipathy for what he calls pos�lost, a
particularly vulgar form of philistinism.2 In this way, this chapter
will underscore his especially vehement arguments regarding the
university community and its lust for pos�lost, or what Nabokov
derides in Strong Opinions as "academic kitsch" (213), over scrupu
lous research and scholarly substance.
In Nikolai Gogol (1944), Nabokov defnes pos�lost as a form of
counterfeit art, as an ersatz attempt, moreover, to make aesthetic
distinctions about perceived objets �aart through the utilization of
essentially bankrupt and superfcial value systems. Pos�lost includes
"not only the obviously trashy," he writes, "but also the falsely
important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attrac
tive." Pos�lost seems "especially vigorous and vicious," Nabokov
argues, "when the sham is not obvious and when the values it mimics
are considered, rightly or wrongly, to belong to the very highest
levels of art, thought, or emotion" (68-70).3 In his biographical
study, Vla�iiir Naboko�� t�e R�ssian Years (1990), Brian Boyd aptly
describes Nabokov's notion of pos�lost as "the enemy of conscious
ness, the denial of individual vitality: a desire to conform to the
values of one's group, to see the world as others see it rather than
to animate it with one's own perceptions" (281). In short, the un
warranted elevation of pos�lost art mitigates the aesthetic power of
originality. Scholars and critics, therefore, sustain pos�lost's sad
hegemony when they simplify true art's inherent complexity in
order to accommodate the spurious value systems of yet another,
uninitiated audience. Generally regarded as protectors of our shared
culture, academics in novels such as Pnin and Pale Fire either explicitly
embrace pos�lost in their scholarly endeavors or parasitically ingra
tiate themselves with genuine artists in an effort to justify their
hallowed places in academe.4 For this reason, Nabokov warns in
Nikolai Gogol, pos�lost's tawdry presence can manifest itself "in a
book, in a soul, in an institution, in a thousand other places" (64).
In "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," a lecture delivered
during his tenure at Cornell during the 1940s, Nabokov deepens
this aesthetic philosophy through his analysis of morality and

"commonsense," his useful metaphor for understanding the myster

ies of language and beauty and their thoroughly indeterminate
qualities. Nabokov also establishes an ethical dimension for
commonsense, arguing that an authentic morality, like authentic
works of art, assumes the complex proportions of a "round" and
wellconstructed literary character. Commonsense, however, seems

"square" and ill conceived in contrast with the naturally evolving
values of humankind. Nabokov writes:
Commonsense is fundamentally immoral, for the natural morals

of mankind are as irrational as the magic rites that they evolved
since the immemorial dimness of time. Commonsense at its worst
is sense made common, and so everything is comfortably cheap
ened by its touch. Commonsense is square whereas all the most
essential visions and values of life are beautifully round, as round
as the universe or the eyes of a child at its frst circus show. (372)
Further, in its celebration of complexity over commonality, Nabokov's

ontology of commonsense necessarily embraces irrationality in its
ethical construction. "The defeat of commonsense," Nabokov remarks,
results in an "irrational belief in the goodness of man. . . . It becomes
a solid and iridescent truth" (373). In this way, he extols the unin
hibited virtues of goodness and truth over the banality of common
sense. As this chapter will show, Nabokov attempts to undermine
the infuence of commonsense in novels such as Pnin and Pale Fire
through his pejorative depictions of the academy, an institution
that, in his estimation, provides sanctuary - a place of exile, if you
will - for pos�lost and ineffectual scholarship.
In this manner, Nabokov, despite his stated distaste for satire as a
narrative mode, proffers his own peculiar form of a pejorative poetics.5
The academic characters who populate his fctions clearly illustrate
the commonsensical proclivities of institutions of higher learning,
and the scholarship that they celebrate and publish in Nabokov's
fctive world fnds its origins in the insignifcant and the mundane.
Professor Timofey Pnin and Dr. Charles Kinbote, the protagonists of
Pnin and Pale Fire, respectively, live in exile as eiigres among their
academic communities. Yet, when read together, their characters
allow us to observe the ethical matrix that undergirds Nabokov's
satire of the academy: Pnin, a thoroughly decent and moral fgure,
truly embraces the members of the Waindell College community,
although they lampoon his prolixity and awkward mannerisms and

clearly do not deserve his adoration; Kinbote, however, personifes

academic pos�lost, pursues his scholarly activities with narcissistic
zeal, and regards his colleagues at Wordsmith College with absolute
derision, treatment that his peers - at least in the metaphysical
dimensions of Nabokov's pejorative aesthetic - seem to merit. An
examination of their divergent approaches to scholarship offers simi

lar revelations regarding Nabokov's satire of the academy as well.
Pnin devotes himself wholeheartedly to teaching and to the com
position of a Petite Histoire of Old Russia, a textual labor of love
rather than a solution to his tenure problems. Nabokov depicts
Kinbote, however, as a fgure of scholarly deceit who literally re
moves the manuscript of Pale Fire� a Poei in Fo�r Cantos from the
body of his dying friend and neighbor, the celebrated American
poet, John Shade. His subsequent critical edition of Shade's poem
features his own pretentious and selfindulgent Foreword, in addi
tion to the inclusion of his overwhelming Commentary, a selection
of selfserving annotations replete with fundamental errors in schol
arship. By addressing the narratives of Pnin and Pale Fire in terms
of Nabokov's contrapuntal depictions of Professor Pnin and Dr. Kinbote,
I will demonstrate the ways in which his philosophies of pos�lost
and commonsense inform the ethical critiques of the university
communities in his novels.
In Pnin, Nabokov's wayward, prolix professor functions as the
novel's ethical standard, who, despite his inability to communicate
with his colleagues outside of his scholarship and research interests,
nevertheless attempts to embrace an academic community of jaded
pseudointellectuals, and, in Nabokov's words, "campus dummies"
(146). In a letter of 8 December 1955 to Cass Canfeld, Nabokov
describes his latest creation:
In Pnin, I have created an entirely new character. . . . A man of

great moral courage, a pure man, a scholar and staunch friend,
serenely wise, faithful to a single love, he never descends from a
high plane of life characterized by authenticity and integrity. But
handicapped and hemmed in by his incapability to learn a lan
guage, he seems a fgure of fun to many an average intellectual. . . .
(182)
In the narrative, Pnin lives in virtual exile as an Assistant Professor

of Russian at Waindell College, a provincial New England institu
tion characterized by its hollow and artifcial intellectual society.

Nabokov evinces these particular nuances of academic life at Waindell

College through his description of a large mural "displaying recognizable
members of the faculty in the act of passing on the torch of knowledge
from Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Pasteur to a lot of monstrously
built farm boys and farm girls" (9). An ethically vacant employer of
unproductive scholars and profigate teachers, the college and its

phony pretensions provide the backdrop for Pnin's tragic progress
from tenuretrack professor endeavoring to fnd friendship amid an
indifferent community to his emergence at the novel's conclusion
as a lonely but competent intellectual, a "schlemielhero," in the
words of David Cowart ("Art," 206).
For the denizens of Waindell College, Pnin seems little more than
an international oddity, a linguistically challenged clown who pro
vides them with an entertaining diversion from their ineffectual
professional lives. His awkward attempts at conversation and his
frequent social gaffes make him a fgure of legendary comic propor
tions on campus. At the beginning of the novel, for example, Nabokov
depicts Pnin traveling by train to deliver a lecture - "Are the Rus
sian People Communist?" - to the Cremona Women's Club. Using
an outdated, fveyearold timetable, Pnin succeeds in missing his
stop. When he belatedly arrives in Cremona, moreover, he discov
ers that the paper in his coat pocket - "Dostoevski and Gestalt
Psychology," rather than his intended lecture - actually belongs to
Betty Bliss, a Waindell College graduate student (16-19). Although
they malign these frequent social and scholarly pratfalls, Pnin's
colleagues fail to realize that his errors actually result from his
efforts to a�oi� the inevitable cultural clashes that problematize life
for him in his adopted homeland. As the narrator of Pnin, a fellow
eiigre, remarks:
Pnin, it should be particularly stressed, was anything but the

type of that goodnatured German platitude of last century, �er
zerstre�te Professor. On the contrary, he was perhaps too wary, too
persistently on the lookout for diabolical pitfalls, too painfully
on the alert lest his erratic surroundings (unpredictable America)
inveigle him into some bit of preposterous oversight. (13)
For this reason, Pnin's efforts to overcorrect his behavior, rather

than his absentmindedness or lack of sophistication, make him a
comic fgure in the eyes of his peers. During his trip to Cremona,
for instance, Pnin only employs the partially obsolete timetable in

an effort to arrive in town early so as to avoid his inevitable con

ficts with the frustrating dilemmas of life in a foreign, and often
unfriendly, locale. The timetable debacle likewise results in the loss
of Pnin's luggage, which contained his suit - a suit in whose pockets,
of course, his intended Cremona lecture safely rests.
As the Cremona incident demonstrates, Pnin's inability to sur

mount the linguistic and social hurdles of life in the United States
ultimately renders him unable to communicate with his colleagues.
As Pnin's Waindell College associate Professor Clements observes,
"Our friend . . . employs a nomenclature all his own. His verbal
vagaries add a new thrill to life. His mispronunciations are mytho
poeic. His slips of the tongue are oracular. He calls my wife John"
(165). Frustrated by such language barriers, Pnin attempts to com
municate with his peers using the only means at his disposal, the
international parlance of scholarship. As the narrator of the novel
explains, Pnin "was utterly helpless without the prepared text" (15).
Without the beneft of scholarly language, Pnin stumbles blindly
and embarrasses himself frequently in his attempts to socialize with
his new American "friends." When he meets his latest landlord, for
example - after a succession of lodgings including the College Home
for Single Instructors - he bluntly remarks, "I must warn: will have
all my teeth pulled out. It is a repulsive operation" (34). Yet in
other instances, with the wisdom of scholarly research at his disposal,
Pnin fnds solace in his capacity to pursue academic research and
ultimately communicate knowledge to his peers. After his colleague,
Roy Thayer, asks him about a Russian bird, Pnin - the "annotator
par excellence," according to Lucy Maddox (86) - diligently retires
to the college library and studies its origins. At their next meeting,
Pnin tells Thayer: "I have to report, sir, on the skylark, z�a�oronok
in Russian, about which you made me the honor to interrogate me.
Take this with you to your home. I have here tapped on the type
writing machine a condensed account with bibliography" (157).
Once again, Pnin o�erindulges himself in the activity at hand,
providing Thayer with a detailed bibliography when a simple response
might suffciently answer his colleague's query. Yet for the linguistically
frustrated Pnin, no other means exists for establishing vital inter
connections with his community.
Ironically, Nabokov depicts Pnin in the novel as a thoughtful
teacher and a capable scholar in sharp contrast with his professorial
peers - "academic nonentities," Nabokov writes in Strong Opinions
- who perform their academic duties with little zest or evidence of

scholarly productivity (55). Despite their ineffectual teaching and

scholarship, Pnin's colleagues enjoy tenure and success in a univer
sity community that treats the adroit Pnin as a comic fgure, ultimately
expelling him from its sacred groves. As Cowart notes, "In an aca
demic milieu that seems to reserve its highest esteem for the successful
disguise of ineptitude, Pnin invariably fails to avoid the public display

of shortcomings that, however venial, expose him to ridicule" ("Art,"
198). As teachers, the professors at Waindell College seem particularly
ineffective in comparison to Pnin. While Pnin conducts his classes
with benevolence and sprinkles his lectures with generous doses of
spontaneity, his colleagues appear content to indulge their students
with the "stale goods" of previous course sections (12). Professor
Clements, for example, offers his annual "EOS" seminar. "This stood
for the Evolution of Sense," the narrator reveals, "his greatest course
(with an enrollment of twelve, none even remotely apostolic) which
had opened and would close with the phrase destined to be
overquoted one day: The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evo
lution of nonsense" (32-3).
Professor Hagen, yet another teacher in Pnin's orbit at Waindell,
advocates a pedagogy that allows the instructor "to lock the student
up in a soundproof cell and eliminate the lecture room." As Hagen
gleefully observes, "The world wants a machine. . . . Phonograph
records on every possible subject will be at the isolated student's
disposal" (161). Finally, Professor Thomas lauds the merits of class
room discussion, "which means letting twenty young blockheads
and two cocky neurotics discuss for ffty minutes something that
neither the teacher nor they know" (161). In this way, the profes
sors in Nabokov's satire of academic life function as the purveyors
of an unexamined pos�lost culture, rather than as the trustworthy
articulators of wisdom for America's naIve youth.
As active and publishing scholars, Pnin's colleagues seem perhaps
even more incompetent. Unlike their more productive eiigre friend
who devotes himself to the careful composition of his history of
Old Russia, the faculty of Waindell College only pursue those scholarly
interests that allow them to indulge their egos and maintain their
intellectual status. In addition to referring to Professor Blorenge as
"a mummy, a bore, one of the stucco pillars of education" (30),
Nabokov undermines Professor Lake's stature as a "recognized art
expert": "While endowed with the morose temper of genius,"
Nabokov's caustic narrator remarks, Lake "lacked originality and
was aware of that lack; his own paintings always seemed beautifully

clever imitations, although one could never quite tell whose manner
he mimicked" (95-6). When a number of the faculty members gather
for Pnin's disastrous housewarming party at the novel's conclusion,
Nabokov's careful, blistering description of them serves as a virtual
catalogue of their communal ineffectuality. Professor Thomas, for
example, glows with delight after receiving a $10,000 grant to visit

Havana and interview "palmclimbing fshermen." Remarkably, he
gladly admits that "most of the actual feld work has been done
already by others" (155). Yet another party guest, Professor Thayer,
a member of Waindell's Department of English - that "aerie of hy
pochondriacs," Nabokov writes - toils at his discipline in absolute
anonymity. Thayer steadfastly refuses to discuss English literature,
Nabokov's narrator tells us; moreover, he
had squandered a decade of gray life on an erudite work dealing

with a forgotten group of unnecessary poetasters, and kept a de
tailed diary, in cryptogrammed verse, which he hoped posterity
would someday decipher and, in sober backcast, proclaim the
greatest literary achievement of our time - and for all I know,
Roy Thayer, you might be right. (157)
Ironically, the Waindell scholar who exhibits the most originality

in his research, Professor Clements, also languishes as the "least
liked scholar on campus." At the housewarming party, Clements,
"fatter than ever, dressed in nice gray fannels, sank into the easy
chair and immediately grabbed the frst book at hand, which hap
pened to be an EnglishRussian and RussianEnglish pocket dictionary.
Holding his glasses in one hand, he looked away, trying to recall
something he had always wished to check but now could not re
member," Nabokov's sardonic narrator observes (154). At the party,
Clements, not unlike the exiled Pnin, can only communicate with
his colleagues through his latest scholarly indulgences. As the evening
progresses, for instance, Clements obsesses pretentiously about the
dustjacket photograph that will adorn his latest book on the "Phil
osophy of Gesture" (162).
In this manner, Nabokov establishes the culture of artistic
"commonsense" that defnes the campus community of Waindell
College, itself a satiric microcosm of the selfinterested academic
world inherent in Nabokov's aesthetic. The novel fnds its most
ironic and revealing moments, however, in the author's depiction
of himself as Pnin's pompous eiigre narrator.6 An ethically vacant

fgure of comic proportions, the novel's narrator alludes to his identity

during Pnin's visit to that eiigre haven, The Pines. In this instance,
Nabokov refers to a coterie of exiled Russian authors, including
Sirin, Nabokov's penname during his early years as a novelist (117).7
The following exchange between Professor Chateau and Pnin re
garding butterfies - one of Nabokov's own abiding passions - also

directs our attention to the identity of the novel's elusive narrator:
"Pity Vladimir Vladimirovich is not here," remarked Chateau.

"He would have told us all about these enchanting insects."
"I have always had the impression that his entomology was
merely a pose." (128)
As Michael Wood notes, Nabokov endows the narrator "with all

his own literary gifts . . . and [has] invited us to view him with the
deepest moral suspicion" (161). In Pnin, the narrator, himself a pos�lost
fgure in the tradition of the Waindell professorial faculty, problem
atizes Pnin's life at every turn, hence Pnin's acerbic remark about
Sirin's entomology. Nabokov's unsavory narrator later remembers
meeting the young Pnin on "an April night in the early twenties, at
a Paris cafe" (179). He likewise refects upon his earlier experiences
with the love of Pnin's life, the aspiring poet, Liza, who once inaug
urated a correspondence with the writer in an effort to secure a
famous advocate for her verse:
I wrote back telling Liza that her poems were bad and she ought
to stop composing. Sometime later I saw her in another cafe,
sitting at a long table, abloom and ablaze among a dozen young
Russian poets. She kept her sapphire glance on me with a mock
ing and mysterious persistence. We talked. I suggested she let me
see those poems again in some quieter place. She did. I told her
they struck me as being even worse than they had seemed at the
frst reading. (181)
In addition to offering sardonic refections upon Pnin's preexile

years, the narrator refers to Pnin pejoratively as "a happy, footnote
drugged maniac" (143), and, in the novel's closing pages, alludes to
himself as "the fascinating lecturer" who will replace Pnin as Pro
fessor of Russian at Waindell College (169).
Pnin learns of his imminent dismissal from the college at the
conclusion of his housewarming party, an affair that, if only for a

feeting instant, unites the disparate faculty members under the

hospitable care of Pnin, their ethical host. Yet his party comes to
its disastrous and halting close when Pnin asks Professor Hagen
about his future at Waindell: "'Naturally, I am expecting that I will
get tenure at last,' said Pnin rather slyly. 'I am now Assistant Profes
sor nine years. Years run. Soon I will be Assistant Emeritus'" (167).

Pnin understandably becomes livid when he learns about his un
savory replacement, although much of his anger stems from his genuine
interest in establishing himself among the fragmented university
community at Waindell College, a prospect that suddenly dissolves
with his denial of tenure. Pnin's banishment from academe allows
him, however, to maintain the optimism and intellectual autonomy
that differentiate him from the pseudointellectuals that populate
such institutions. Charles Nicol astutely argues, moreover, that Pnin's
"character development lies in his rejection of . . . Nabokov's per
sona" (103). Indeed, Pnin steadfastly refuses throughout the novel
to adopt the jaded mindset of his eiigre successor. By rebuffng Sirin's
unethical ways in favor of his own integrity, Pnin opts for exile
over compliance with the contradictory and unethical proclivities
of his colleagues. As our sardonic narrator himself remarks, "Ge
nius is nonconformity" (89). Nabokov underscores the true genius
of Pnin through his scathing depiction of the protagonist's unwor
thy peers, particularly through the characterization of his scornful
narrator. Vladimir E. Alexandrov asserts that "Nabokov's purpose in
portraying purblind, and, consequently, morally tarnished charac
ters" establishes "a satirical contrast that makes his cognitive and
aesthetic values stand out in bolder relief" (131-2). For this reason,
Nabokov depicts an academic world that places scant value upon
the employment of a competent and ethical scholar such as Pnin,
and thus offers a devastating critique of postsecondary institutions
and the pos�lost that their laziness and ineffectuality breeds.
In Pale Fire, Dr. Kinbote embodies these very elements through
his esoteric commentary and annotations to Shade's epic verse effusion,
as well as through the fabulation of his own dramatic netherworld,
the kingdom of Zembla, in his notes to Shade's poem. Kinbote's
enigmatic approach to both his subject and his scholarly duties as
the editor of a critical edition of Shade's Pale Fire� a Poei in Fo�r
Cantos underscores, moreover, the ways in which academics create
pos�lost works of art through their hyperawareness regarding the
signifcance of their own roles in the maintenance of our larger
artistic culture. In Kinbote's case, this selfindulgence results in his

"epic and vandalously solipsist misreading of John Shade's poem,"

according to Martin Amis (118). This reifcation of the self in both
the Foreword and the Commentary to the poem - in this instance,
the self of the annotator rather than the self of the artist - allows
Kinbote to satisfy his monomaniacal desires as a scholar over the
ethical requirements of judicious scholarship that his editorial project

necessarily entails. As Martine Hennard notes, Kinbote's reading of
Shade's poem also "exemplifes in a parodic form the elusive nature
and ambivalent status of any creative or interpretive activity" (300).
In this way, Nabokov questions both the ethos of scholarship as
well as the slippery requirements of the act of interpretation. De
picting an academic madman engaged in scholarly activity of such
a remarkably selfimportant nature also enables Nabokov to satirize
the hallowed duties of scholarly editors and their efforts to reconfgure
the mastertexts of our artistic culture in their own images.8
In his Foreword and Commentary to the poem, Kinbote frequently
identifes himself as the friend and confdante of Shade, although a
series of covert remarks in the text will simultaneously unhinge
the extended hoax that Nabokov, in the narrative guise of Kinbote,
establishes in the novel. Kinbote meets the poet when he accepts a
teaching post at Wordsmith College in New Wye, Appalachia, and
subsequently rents the house next door to Shade's. Nabokov's de
scription of the institution demonstrates his abiding angst for the
general perception of the academy as a bastion of culture and learning.
Like Waindell College, Nabokov adorns Wordsmith College with
the surreal and otherworldly trappings of an idealized vision of
academe in contrast with the problematic scholars who populate its
campus:
Here are the great mansions of madness, the impeccably planned

dormitories - bedlams of jungle music - the magnifcent palace
of the Administration, the brick walls, the archways, the quad
rangles blocked out in velvet green and chrysoprase, . . . the
prisonlike edifce containing our classrooms and offces (to be
called from now on Shade hall), the famous avenue of all the
trees mentioned by Shakespeare, . . . the turquoise dome of the
Observatory, wisps and pale plumes of cirrus, and the poplar
curtained Romantiered football feld, deserted on summer days
except for a dreamyeyed youngster fying - on a long control
line in a droning circle - a motorpowered model plane.
Dear Jesus, do something. (92-3)

Kinbote's descriptions of his friendship with Shade seem equally

contradictory. He depicts their relationship as "on that higher, ex
clusively intellectual level where one can rest from emotional troubles,
not share them. I experienced a grand sense of wonder whenever I
looked at him," he continues, "especially in the presence of other
people, inferior people" (27). These "inferior people," especially the

Wordsmith College faculty, receive particular attention in Kinbote's
deceitful Commentary to the poem. In his Foreword, Kinbote fre
quently documents his ostensibly Herculean efforts to capture Shade
in the act of composing his masterpiece, when in fact he illustrates
himself in the clandestine activity of spying on his neighbor: "I
had learned exactly when and where to fnd the best points from
which to follow the contours of his inspiration," Kinbote writes.
"My binoculars would seek him out and focus upon him from afar
in his various places of labor" (88-9). Such instances afford Nabokov
with the opportunity to highlight the discrepancy between Kinbote's
zeal for his subject and the actual manner in which he annotates
Shade's poem. In this way, then, Nabokov satirizes the selfserving
impetus that motivates academic research - the "slings and arrows
of outrageous American academe," according to Priscilla Meyer (201)
- as well as the fallacious scholarly distance that academics osten
sibly maintain between themselves and the art that they critique.
In his Foreword to Shade's poem, Kinbote himself initially adopts
the persona of a meticulous and methodical textual editor through
his identifcation of the poem, the nature of its composition, and
the 92 extant index cards upon which the poet composed Pale Fire.
The monumental narrative intrusions endemic to his critical edition
quickly reveal themselves, however, when he remarks in his intro
duction that "there is a very loud amusement park right in front of
my present lodgings" (13). Kinbote's prolifc moments of textual
interruption, motivated by the annotator's desire to establish his
identity despite its dangers to the integrity of the Urtext of Shade's
poem, underscore Nabokov's intent in the novel to illustrate the
creation of academic pos�lost. In many instances, Kinbote's editorial
intrusions seem irrelevant to the exegesis of Shade's verse. The
explanatory note to line 130 of the poem ("I never bounced a ball
or swung a bat"), for example, demonstrates the erratic intrusiveness
of Kinbote's own ego: "Frankly I too never excelled in soccer and
cricket; I am a passable horseman, a vigorous though unorthodox
skier, a good skater, a tricky wrestler, and an enthusiastic rock
climber," Kinbote writes, with little regard for his rejoinder's lack

of pertinence to the passage in question (117-18). In his note to

line 550 ("Iph borrowed some peripheral debris"), moreover, Kinbote
- in a moment of outlandish editorial circularity - actually refers to
the text of a supposedly problematic earlier note that continues to
nag at his conscience:

I wish to say something about an earlier note (to line 12). . . . It
is the only time in the course of the writing of these diffcult
comments, that I have tarried, in my distress and disappoint
ment, on the brink of falsifcation. I must ask the reader to ignore
these two lines (which, I am afraid, do not even scan properly).
I could strike them out before publication but that would mean
reworking the entire note, or at least a considerable part of it,
and I have no time for such stupidities. (227-8)
In another instance, his note to line 697 ("It heaved and went on
trudging to a more/Conclusive destination"), Kinbote concludes
one of his more circuitous notes with the simple, albeit irrelevant,
remark: "I think I shall break this note here" (253). Finally, in his
note to lines 747-8 ("It was a story in a magazine/About a Mrs.
Z."), Kinbote declines to delineate the origins of Shade's arcane
allusion, arguing that "anybody having access to a good library
could, no doubt, easily trace that story to its source and fnd the
name of the lady; but such humdrum potterings are beneath true
scholarship" (256).
David Packman remarks that in Pale Fire Nabokov postulates a
"parody of the vertigo of interpretation" (68), an intensely satirical
depiction of the hermeneutic circle. While these examples demon
strate Kinbote's inherently intrusive editorial persona, his greatest
sins as a textual critic lie in the fundamental errors in scholarship
that mark his commentary to Shade's poem. His most glaring error
concerns the Shakespearean origins of the title of Shade's work. In
his note to line 962 ("Help me, Will! Pale Fire."), Kinbote rightly
ascribes the title of the poem to Shakespeare: "Paraphrased, this
evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might
use for a title," he sarcastically remarks. "But in which of the Bard's
works did our poet cull it?" he asks, while ceding his textual auth
ority to an implied audience: "My readers must make their own
research." Although Kinbote admits to possessing "a tiny vest pocket
edition of Tiion of �t�ens," he fails to locate the origins of Shade's
title in the play. "It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded

as an equivalent of 'pale fre' (if it had, my luck would have been a

statistical monster)," Kinbote concludes (285).9 Kinbote offers a vir
tually untenable reading of the aesthetic quality of Shade's verse in
his note to lines 557-8 ("How to locate in blackness, with a gasp,/
Terra the Fair, an oracle of jasp"). Remarkably, Kinbote describes
this instance in Pale Fire as "the loveliest couplet in this canto"

(228). In Literary Syibiosis� t�e Re�ongg�re� Te�t in Ttentiet�Cent�ry
Writing (1993), Cowart argues that such "fabricated variants" lend
credence to the verisimilitude of Kinbote's commentary, "which
parodies the practice of critical annotation" (82). Such a maneuver
allows Nabokov, then, to problematize once again the selfrefexive
nature of academic scholarship and its propensity for the unwarranted
elevation of pos�lost art.
While Kinbote utterly fails to recognize the monumental editorial
intrusions and scholarly errors that he effects in Pale Fire, he re
serves special contempt nevertheless for his equally ineffectual
colleagues at Wordsmith College, as well as for the international
coterie of "Shadeans" who devote themselves to the study of the
late poet and his works. Like the denizens of Pnin's Waindell College,
Kinbote's peers at Wordsmith, a locale that he describes disdainfully
as "academic suburbia" (24), embrace their scholarly duties because
of their selfindulgent possibilities of tenure, salary, and selfpromotion.
Drawing upon his penchant for "covert polylingualism" (267) -
Joseph Nassar's metaphor for the annotator's adhoc denigration of
his colleagues - Kinbote comments about the shallow intellectual
activities of the professoriate. In addition to mocking the "United
English Department" and its "Freudian fancies" (228), Kinbote ma
ligns the visiting "delegates to the New Wye Linguistic Conference,
all of them lapellabeled, and representing the same foreign language,
but none being able to speak it, so that conversation was conducted . . .
in rather ordinary AngloAmerican" (279-80).10 He harbors particu
lar malice for the college's "bloated Russian Department" and its
Head, the rejuvenated "Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to
his underlings" (155). Kinbote's animus for his colleagues also fnds
its roots in his discovery of an English department memorandum
questioning his scholarly capacity to edit his late neighbor's poem.
According to the memo, circulated by the Head of the department,
Professor Nattochdag:
Several members of the Department of English are painfully con

cerned over the fate of a manuscript poem, or parts of a manuscript

poem, left by the late John Shade. The manuscript fell into the
hands of a person who not only is unqualifed for the job of
editing it, belonging as he does to another department, but is
known to have a deranged mind. (195)
Marianna Torgovnick argues that Kinbote's feud with the Shadeans

in the Department of English over the disposition of the late poet's
manuscript underscores Nabokov's satire regarding "the attitudes of
veneration and scholarship unto deadliness that have made so much
literature solely the province of the academy" (24). By depicting
Kinbote in the act of reconfguring the meaning of Shade's poem
for his own nefarious ends, moreover, Nabokov problematizes the
academy's exclusive domain over the mastertexts of our culture.
In "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," Nabokov observes
that "a madman is reluctant to look at himself in a mirror because
the face he sees is not his own: his personality is beheaded" (377).
Pale Fire illustrates Kinbote's own deranged machinations as he at
tempts to redefne his elusive personal identity through the
transformational matrix of scholarship. As Nabokov's novel clearly
demonstrates, academic research, when entrusted to the wrong hands
- or in Kinbote's case, to the hands of the insane - affords the
commonsensical critic with the power to shrink the distance that
sound scholarship demands between the critic and the text. In Lit
erary Syibiosis, Cowart writes that "Kinbote's reading of Shade's poem
also reveals a ridiculous desire to participate in its production -
and Nabokov, hinting that many a critic is motivated by precisely
this ignoble confession of creative impotence and envy," Cowart
continues, "anticipates to devastating effect the pretensions of a later
generation of literary analysts who routinely attempt to place their
own necessarily dependent and even parasitic work on the same
plane as original works of the imagination" (81).11 Pale Fire under
scores this parasitic behavior through Nabokov's depiction of
Kinbote's actions throughout the novel, as well as his behavior
moments after Shade's murder. By illustrating Kinbote's manifold
attempts to forge his own imprint upon Shade's text, Nabokov es
tablishes the ways in which the overzealous critic strives to
participate in the creative process. When Shade becomes the victim
of an assassin's bullet at the novel's conclusion, Kinbote makes cer
tain that "the poem was safe" before ascertaining the poet's condition.
He then locates Shade, lying "prone on the ground with a red spot
on his white shirt." Although Kinbote "still hoped that he [Shade]

had not been killed," he fnds a place in his house to conceal the
manuscript of Shade's poem before calling for an ambulance. Kinbote
later admits in the fnal pages of his Commentary to literally wearing
the manuscript as an article of clothing for several days. He confesses
to distributing "the ninetytwo index cards about my person, twenty
in the righthand pocket of my coat, as many in the lefthand one,

a batch of forty against my right nipple and the twelve precious
ones with variants in my innermost breast pocket." In this manner,
Kinbote transcends his scholarly identity and unites himself at last
with the object of his research: "Thus with cautious steps, among
deceived enemies, I circulated, plated with poetry, armored with
rhymes, stout with another man's song, stiff with cardboard, bullet
proof at long last," Kinbote writes (300).
In his effort to reveal the demented scholar in the act of collaps
ing the boundaries between life and art, between prudent scholarship
and pos�lost, Nabokov satirizes the academy and its often unfortu
nate sanctifcation of selfindulgent scholarly inquiry over more
socially and culturally relevant academic endeavors such as effec
tive teaching or even poor Pnin's carefully researched history of
Old Russia. In Vla�iiir Naboko�� t�e �ieri�an Years (1991), Boyd
argues that "Pale Fire portrays the isolation of the soul as the funda
mental condition of mortal life" (447). Like Pnin, Nabokov's latter
novel banishes its protagonist to virtual exile in its concluding chap
ter. Kinbote's fnal words themselves indicate the dangers of pos�lost
and its enduring threat to the valid interpretation of the artistic
gems of our culture: "I shall continue to exist," he warns. "I may
assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may
turn up yet on another campus . . ." (300). Pnin's exodus from the
narrative, however, leaves the reader with a sense of optimism jus
tifed by the elements of humanity and integrity that defne his
persona. At Pnin's conclusion, Nabokov's narrator watches as Pnin's
"little sedan boldly" departs Waindell College, and, "free at last,
spurted up the shining road, . . . where there was simply no saying
what miracle might happen" (191). The narrative of Pale Fire, of
course, rewards the eiigre Pnin with a new position and yet another
opportunity to fnd selfhood and interconnection in New Wye. For
this reason, Andrew Field argues, "it is Kinbote - not merely mad,
but also supremely confdent, who may be spoken of as truly 'alien
ated'" (319). In Nabokov's philosophy of pos�lost, Kinbote operates
by virtue of a bankrupt value system, a selfaggrandizing schema
that lauds the pursuit of personal achievement over the needs of

the community. As F. G. Bailey asserts in Morality an� ��pe�ien�y�

t�e Folklore of ��a�eii� Politi�s (1977), "The scholar's frst obligation
is to serve mankind . . . by scrutinizing continually and carefully
the likely effects of new knowledge on the world" (40). In the ethi
cal world of Professor Timofey Pnin - despite his prolixity and his
pratfalls - a magnanimous doctrine such as Bailey's truly matters.

5
Searching for Goodness and the
Ethical Self: Joyce Carol Oates's

T�e H�ngry G�osts
"The academy is, despite everything, a good place" " " ""
- Geoffrey Hartman, Criti�isi in t�e Wil�erness
In an effort to abstain from the textual violence of censorship, con

temporary ethical criticism naturally eschews the strict codifcation
of moral standards to afford readers instead with a pluralistic means
for examining the depiction of concepts such as truth and goodness
in narratives" Yet as Lawrence Douglas observes, "For all our savvy
and theoretical sophistication, we have lost the capacity to make
very simple judgments about a text - such as, for example, whether
it claims to be true or intends to make us laugh" (A56)" For this
reason, ethical critics advocate the parlance of moral philosophy
over the critical fnesse of poststructuralism" The rhetoric of moral
philosophy empowers critics with the interpretive latitude to account
for ethical issues and their substantial roles in the creation and
interpretation of literary works" In their desire to highlight the inter
connections between readers and their textual experiences, proponents
of an ethical paradigm challenge us to render value judgments about
narratives and their propensity to enlighten us about the human
condition" In this manner, ethical criticism informs us about the
essential nature of ourselves, while inviting us to deliberate, moreover,
about our own notions of good, evil, truth, and knowledge, among
other moral issues"
In her important volume of moral philosophy, T�e So�ereignty of
Goo� (1970), Iris Murdoch elaborates upon the concept of goodness
60

Sear��ing for Goo�ness an� t�e �t�i�al Self 61
and the ways in which our personal confgurations of it govern

human perceptions regarding the relationship between the self and
the world" Murdoch's paradigm for understanding goodness func
tions upon the equally abstract notions of free will and moral choice"
"Good is indefnable," Murdoch writes, "because judgments of value
depend upon the will and choice of the individual" (3)" Postulating

any meaning for goodness, then, requires individuals to render per
sonal observations about the nature of this precarious expression
and its role in their life decisions" Although Murdoch concedes
that goodness essentially fnds its origins in "the nature of concepts
very central to morality such as justice, truthfulness, or humility,"
she correctly maintains, nevertheless, that only individual codes of
morality can determine personal representations of goodness (89)"
"Good is an empty space into which human choice may move"
(97), she asserts, and "the strange emptiness which often occurs at
the moment of choosing" underscores the degree of autonomy in
herent in the act of making moral decisions (35)" Individuals may
also measure their personal conceptions of goodness in terms of its
foul counterpart, evil, which Murdoch defnes generally as "cyni
cism, cruelty, indifference to suffering" (98)" Again, though, like good,
evil fnds its defnition in the personal ethos constructed by indi
viduals during their life experiences in the human community"
Because such ontological concepts remain so vitally contingent upon
personal rather than communal perceptions of morality, Murdoch
suggests that their comprehension lies in the mysterious fabric of
the self" "The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion,"
she observes, and "goodness is connected with the attempt to see
the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a
virtuous consciousness" (93)" In Murdoch's philosophy, then, good
ness manifests itself during the meaningful pursuit of selfawareness
and selfknowledge"
In T�e H�ngry G�osts� Se�en �ll�si�e Coie�ies (1974), Joyce Carol
Oates offers a collection of short stories that, when read as a thematic
ensemble, provide a fascinating portrait of the academic self and its
fragmented ethical construction"1 Oates "mockingly looks at the fears
and phobias, the stock characters and situations of the socalled
ivorytower life, the cruelty, cowardice, plagiarism, pedantry, jeal
ousy, and rivalry among academic peers," Joanne �" Creighton writes
(128)" Her satiric tales depict intellectuals looking inward to satisfy
their own desires with scant concern for the larger, and often more
urgent, needs of their communities"2 This abiding selfimportance,

in addition to an insatiable appetite for power and status, ensures

that Oates's academic characters remain virtually unable to main
tain interpersonal relationships" In a letter of 22 September 1974 to
the Net York Tiies Book Re�iet, Oates defends her acerbic attack on
the academy in T�e H�ngry G�osts: "In writing about the academic
and literary world, I wanted only to illustrate from the inside, so to

speak, how ambition, lust for fame and prestige, and egotism, can
rule the lives of presumably intelligent people" (43)" Particularly
infuenced by her experiences as an English professor at such insti
tutions as the University of Windsor, the University of Detroit, and
Princeton University, Oates's academic fctions demonstrate the ways
in which scholars opt for personal satisfaction over universal good
ness"3 As Mary Kathryn Grant writes, "Running throughout Oates's
fction is the persistent absence of community, of loving, support
ive, enduring commitments to others" (22)" This enduring lack of
positive human interconnection underscores Oates's pejorative as
sessment of the academy and its inability to produce an environment
conducive to its populace's instinctive desires for selfknowledge
and community"
In T�e H�ngry G�osts, Oates draws upon the tenets of Eastern
religion in her effort to weave a satiric metaphor for the academic
self and its misplaced value system" An epigraph to the volume
explains Oates's motivation for the collection's title: "A preta (ghost)
is one who, in the ancient Buddhist cosmology, haunts the earth's
surface, continually driven by hunger - that is, desire of one kind
or another," she writes (6)" In this manner, Oates establishes a vi
able means for reading her tales about the academy and the ghostly
selves who roam its corridors" In the seven stories collected in T�e
H�ngry G�osts, Oates depicts a coterie of intellectuals - including
professorial faculty, creative writers, and graduate students - engag
ing in a range of selfindulgent activities" Oates's academic characters
"remain immobilized in the trance of the self," according to Stanley
Trachtenberg" "Their small successes are not only seldom satisfy
ing," he writes, "but always quickly overshadowed by the diffculties
resulting from an exclusive reliance upon intellect as a way of per
ceiving the world" (52)" This hyperintellectualized worldview
invariably ensures - at least in Oates's fctive universe - that aca
demics struggle to establish selfidentity in the shadows of the
academy's unfriendly environs" "Preoccupied with the spasmodic,
failed gestures of the ego," in the words of Eileen T" Bender, Oates's
intellectuals rarely emerge triumphant from her tales; indeed, they

rarely fall in love ("Autonomy," 49)" Instead, Oates depicts them in

the act of haunting the halls of their respective institutions of higher
learning, searching for yet another means to sate their desires for
the validation of their intellectual prowess"
As this chapter will demonstrate, an ethical reading of T�e H�ngry
G�osts underscores the ways in which Oates's academic characters

vie for infuence and prestige in an effort to assert their intellectual
dominion over their colleagues" In her essay, "New Heaven and
Earth," Oates observes that "in many of us the Renaissance ideal is
still powerful, its voice tyrannical" It declares: I will, I want, I demand,
I think, I am" This voice tells us that we are not quite omnipotent
but must act as if we were," she continues, "pushing out into the
world of other people or of nature that will necessarily resist us,
that will try to destroy us, and that we must conquer" (53)" For
Oates's academic characters, this abiding need to "conquer" one's
peers - this compulsion to establish a kind of intellectual "omnip
otence" - inevitably results in a series of problematic moral choices
that often leave them in a state of personal and professional crisis"
Murdoch writes that "the world is aimless, chancy, and huge, and
we are blinded by self" (100)" In Oates's fctive world, the academic
self's craving for validation blinds her characters to their innate
desires for interpersonal connection and community" For this reason,
many of her academic tales conclude with her intellectual protag
onists struggling in the throes of loneliness and selfconscious despair,
frantically searching for some form of goodness to transform their
socially vacuous lives" By depicting her academics in such a desul
tory state - predicated, of course, by their own egotistical quests for
selfvalidation - Oates succeeds in creating her own brand of a
pejorative poetics, a satiric mechanism for highlighting the ethical
contradictions inherent in the obsessive life of the mind"
When read as an aggregate text, the stories comprising T�e H�ngry
G�osts illustrate the hermetic lives of academics and their enduring
incapacity, at least in Oates's satiric schema, to establish human
interconnection in their competitive intellectual milieu" Subtitled
as "allusive comedies," Oates's tales in the volume share the titles
of several wellknown texts, including John Bunyan's T�e Pilgriias
Progress, Friedrich Nietzsche's T�e Birt� of Trage�y, Alexis de
Tocqueville's Deio�ra�y in �ieri�a, Booker T" Washington's Up froi
Sla�ery, and William Blake's Des�ripti�e Catalog�e" In "Democracy in
America," Oates renders a stunning portrait of a young academic,
Ronald Pauli, and his existential struggle to locate the scattered

pages of his manuscript in the decrepit apartment of his late copy

editor, Mr" Dietrich" Like many of the characters in Oates's aca
demic fctions, Ronald fnds his notion of selfidentity challenged
by the professional requirement to "publishorperish"" Determined
to retrieve the only extant copy of his book manuscript - a 385
page opus on Tocqueville, of course - Ronald visits Dietrich's squalid

quarters after the copy editor's death in an effort to recapture the
text that promises to ensure his employment security at a nearby
university" "My life seems so haphazard," Ronald complains, and
"having my book accepted by the Press was the one certain thing,
the one reality " " " and Dr" Mercer said he was sure I'd be kept on,
he was sure the Department's executive committee would be im
pressed with it, my having a book accepted" It means so much to
me" (19-20)" After receiving access to Dietrich's apartment from the
late editor's sympathetic neighbor, Mrs" Novak, Ronald bristles at
the remarkable scene of disarray that awaits him in Dietrich's di
sheveled residence:
What an odor! - and what a sight! He started" The room was a

jumble of chairs, boxes, bedding, books, magazines, and stray
papers" " " " Everywhere there was debris - empty tin cans, empty
milk cartons, and frozen food packages" The smell in the room
made Ronald's eyes water, it was so sharp and acrid" He looked
at the clutter for several long moments, in silence" He had never
anticipated anything like this" (13-14)
Ronald discovers himself even more perplexed when he realizes

that his manuscript lies strewn amidst the refuse of Dietrich's quarters"
"How could anyone live like this?" Ronald wonders (16)"
Although he initially registers concern over Dietrich's putrid
lifestyle, Ronald soon becomes enrapt in his own desires for self
suffciency and professional reward" "It's almost as if this all happened
on purpose," he exclaims to Mrs" Novak" "I realize it wasn't Mr"
Dietrich's fault that he died, I realize it was a tragic thing" " " " But
I've been very upset about many things, it wasn't certain until the
middle of the summer whether I still had a job here" (19)" As Ronald
searches through the debris in Dietrich's rooms, he discovers pages
of his manuscript tucked into the late editor's soiled bed, mixed
amongst old university leafets and memos, stuffed into drawers,
and lying crumpled on the flthy tiles of the bathroom foor" Ronald
even happens upon another, more scholarly forceful manuscript on

Tocqueville amidst the wreckage of Dietrich's apartment: "Though

he had no time to waste, he couldn't resist glancing through the
pages " " " he felt a strange lightheadedness, a bewilderment tinged
with envy," Oates writes" "Whoever had written these pages seemed
much more confdent of his argument than Ronald had been; his
own writing now struck him as weak and tentative" (22)" Con

sumed with the need to sate his own desires with little regard for
the miserable existence of his copy editor, Ronald pauses in his
search for the pages of his text only to stuff the offending leaves of
his mysterious rival's manuscript in a desk drawer, as well as to
glance lasciviously at Mrs" Novak, the wife of one of his senior
colleagues: "Ronald had the impulse to grab hold of her" She was
such a pretty woman," he thinks to himself, "even in this place!"
(19)" Yet as Ronald sifts through the sad, fnal residue of Dietrich's
life he becomes acutely aware of "the tattered pieces of his own
identity," Creighton writes (130)" Remarkably, Ronald begins to re
gret the manner in which he trampled through the disorder of
Dietrich's apartment on such a selffulflling mission, and, as the
story concludes, feels a kinship with Dietrich and their similarly
dismal prospects without the support and friendship of the larger,
caring human community" "It isn't fair," he sobs to Mrs" Novak as
he departs" "I'm so afraid" (30)"
Although Trachtenberg argues that "Democracy in America" re
veals "the indignity to which an academic will submit in attempting
to advance his career," the story illustrates, perhaps even more sig
nifcantly, the paltry rewards of a fragmented ethical system that
values personal achievement over communal goodness (41)" In this
way, Oates undercuts the academy and its elevation of text over
community, while also deriding the ways in which it reveres hol
low individual accomplishments and ignores the more meaningful
dividends of interpersonal connection" Along with three of the other
stories collected in T�e H�ngry G�osts, Oates situates "The Birth of
Tragedy" in the fctional campus setting of Hilberry University, located
in southwestern Ontario"4 Like "Democracy in America," this cam
pus vignette explores the woeful costs of intellectual selfindulgence"
Frequently read from the point of view of the story's protagonist,
graduate student Barry Sommer, "The Birth of Tragedy" in fact oper
ates as a satiric critique of the persona of Barry's faculty supervisor,
Professor Robinson Thayer, the English department's resident Re
naissance specialist"5 An Oxford graduate, Thayer achieved academic
stardom for publishing a wellreceived critical study devoted to

Shakespeare and legal imagery" After being hired at Hilberry to serve

as Thayer's teaching assistant, Barry learns that the university only
admitted him and his peers to maintain enrollment in a graduate
program that they ultimately intend to scuttle" The fedgling scholar's
university experience becomes even more problematic, however,
under Thayer's tutelage" The senior professor ostensibly takes Barry

into his gentle confdence, generously providing his assistant with
the opportunity to lecture on Hailet to his undergraduate Renais
sance drama course, in addition to sharing freely the fruits of his
academic experience with his new student: "It's a very complex,
sinister world here - but of course exhilarating, if you don't weaken,"
he tells Barry" "It's like a Shakespearean play - without the ffth act"
The fourth act just goes on and on, scenes of high tragedy alternate
with scenes of the most contemptible, gross comedy" (112)"
In this way, Oates establishes a metaphor between dramatic tragedy
and academic life" For Thayer, the "gross comedy" of his campus
experiences manifests itself in the ironic arrogance with which he
conducts his professional business" Although he presents himself as
an accomplished and confdent senior scholar, Thayer in fact labors
in mediocrity" In addition to staking his professional reputation on
a fimsy theory that Shakespeare plagiarized the works of Sturgess,
an obscure Renaissance dramatist, Thayer frets about the "spies"
that he believes the student newspaper sends to observe his lec
tures" The real tragedy of the professor's existence fnds its origins
in his abject loneliness" Despite his standing as the department's
most renowned scholar, Thayer rarely associates with his fellow
faculty members and confnes himself to his room at a local Hol
iday Inn, where he relocated after a mysterious dispute with his
landlord" The story's central moment of crisis occurs when Thayer
presumably invites Barry to his motel room to prepare for his
assistant's upcoming lecture" Consumed with anxiety over his as
signment, Barry arrives in desperate need of his senior colleague's
counsel" Instead, he encounters Thayer in all of the professor's tragic
loneliness" When Barry rebuffs Thayer's amorous advances and begs
him for advice regarding his impending lecture, the professor expels
the graduate student from his motel room and angrily remarks, "Now
you've taken your place among them, among my enemies" (122)"
Utterly ill prepared for his assignment, Barry delivers a lecture that
rivals the comic proportions previously established by Jim Dixon's
drunken speech on "Merrie England" in Kingsley Amis's L��ky Jii
(1954)" A catastrophic discourse comprised of false starts and prolixity,

Barry's lecture nevertheless posits the younger scholar's own theory

of tragedy" For Barry, tragedy only occurs - in dramatic contrast
with the jaded belief system of his paranoid superior - when people
neglect to avail themselves of the liberating possibilities of freedom"
"Hamlet's problem," in Barry's estimation, "was that he didn't run
like hell to some other country when the ghost showed up" (129)"

As Barry leaves the lecture hall, he encounters one of Oates's
most sinister incarnations of evil in her academic fctions, the de
ranged persona of Thayer grinning maliciously and tightly gripping
a tape recorder "as if prepared to defend himself" with it" Struck by
the tragedy of Thayer's emotional state, Barry determines at that
moment to leave - indeed, to liberate himself from - the academy:
"The hell with Thayer," he concludes, "the hell with all of them"
Something was dead but something else was living" " " " Barry with
an advanced degree or without an advanced degree, what did it
matter?" (130)" By opting for the possibilities of goodness that life
outside of Thayer's evil, insular world seems to offer, Barry strives
to elude the professor's lonely fate" As Trachtenberg astutely ob
serves, "The isolation of the individual from the community results
only in tragedy" (44)" While "The Birth of Tragedy" demonstrates
Oates's narrative denigration of the hermetic aspects of academic
life, "Up from Slavery" underscores the ways in which unsavory
campus characters use the university community as a means for
satisfying their own nefarious ambitions" As Ellen G" Friedman notes,
"Oates repeatedly describes the excesses of will, the excesses of the
isolated ego" (7)" In "Up from Slavery," Oates illustrates the destruc
tive power of personal will and its potential for mitigating the
community's capacity for ensuring justice and promoting universal
goodness"
Although much of the story purports to consider the marginalized
experiences of Franklin Ambrose as an AfricanAmerican professor
at Hilberry University, "Up from Slavery" also demonstrates the
many ways in which Frank, despite his racial distinction among
the university's predominantly white faculty, operates as an insider
within the ranks of the institution's political establishment" Hermann
Severin argues that this tale "is not very much concerned with the
specifc features and problems of the academic world, and therefore
adds little to Oates's general view of the intellectual" (121)" Yet "Up
from Slavery," when explored in terms of its depiction of the un
ethical proclivities of academic politics, seems to speak volumes
about university life and the selfsh propensity of individuals, in

this case, intellectual ones, to satisfy their own ambitions rather

than adhere to the community's desires for fairness and justice"
Severin incorrectly attributes Oates's satire in this instance to the
"rather narrow thematic scope" that he perceives in T�e H�ngry
G�osts (134)"6 Oates's campus tales interpret academic life as a social
microcosm, however, that embodies the same ethical dilemmas and

cultural ills that plague the larger human community" Her intellec
tual characters function in her analysis of the self, moreover, as
an express means for critiquing the academic condition and its
peculiar elevation of the needs of the individual over the notion of
a universal good"
In "Up from Slavery," Oates depicts Frank indulging the whimsy
of his preternatural ego instead of considering the more urgent needs
of a colleague in professional jeopardy" A Harvard graduate and a
Fulbright Fellow, Frank quickly establishes himself as Hilberry's most
popular professor of English" Bored with his routine existence in
the university's remote locale, Frank fnds solace in a series of affairs
with his coterie of fawning young undergraduates" In one instance,
Frank's extracurricular activities nearly erupt in scandal when the
parents of one of his students notify the Board of Trustees about his
behavior" After a fourhour conference in the President's offce, how
ever, Frank "managed to be forgiven" when he "promised not to be
'indiscreet' again" (67)"
Yet his ultimate crisis of the self occurs after he agrees to serve
on the Appointments and Promotion Committee, a powerful com
mittee that faculty members in the department privately refer to as
the Hiring and Firing Committee" Although Frank appears unim
pressed with candidates from Yale and Oxford, respectively, he fnds
himself transfxed by the University of Chicago's Molly Holt, the
candidate "who rushed in ffteen minutes late for her interview,
wearing a very short leather skirt and bright gold boots"" A divorcee
with a threeyearold son and the author of a dissertation entitled
"Crises of Sexual Identity in Trollope and Dickens," Molly espouses
her commitment "to the struggle for equality between men and
women" during her interview (67)" Although he deftly convinces
the other committee members to hire Molly as a Lecturer, Frank
becomes perplexed as she resists his numerous sexual advances"
After she angrily rebuffs his firtations, Frank implores the Head of
the department, Dr" Barth, to convene an emergency meeting of the
Appointments and Promotion Committee to consider Molly's em
ployment status" During the meeting, Frank falsifes a number of

accusations regarding her abilities as a teacher" In addition to argu

ing that her students disrespect her because she mispronounces words,
Frank tells the committee that she deliberately presents them with
misinformation in the classroom" "I wonder about her professional
commitment," Frank informs the committee (73)" After the com
mittee votes overwhelmingly for Molly's dismissal from the

department, Dr" Barth sanctimoniously remarks, "Frank, we belong
to a profession with extremely rigorous standards" " " " I'm sure Miss
Holt will be happier in another university, with less demanding
criteria of excellence" (75)" As the story closes, Frank pities himself
for enduring such a "draining emotional experience" and retires to
his study where he enjoys a "delicate, sensitive, almost poetic mel
ancholy" (76)" In this manner, Oates proffers a "satiric incarnation
of the academic egoist," according to Bender (Joy�e, 106)" Amaz
ingly, it is Frank who feels emotionally and ethically violated after
engineering Molly's dismissal when she refuses to satisfy the needs
of his egotistical academic self" When he maneuvers politically to
ensure Molly's nonrenewal in the department, Frank only succeeds
in eroding the qualities of fairness and communal good that the
academy ostensibly seeks to represent"
In addition to exploring the ways in which the academic self
sacrifces the prospect of goodness in order to sate its own desires,
Oates examines the creative writer's similarly desperate place in
the academy in such stories as "Rewards of Fame" and "Angst"" In
Oates's satiric vision of the academy, her characterization of writers
underscores the peculiar interconnections between pedagogy and
creativity, between the private and public lives of the mind" Her
writers initially long for the comfort and stability of academic life,
yet ultimately aspire to the selfindulgent qualities of fame and its
promises of success beyond the insular walls of academe" Greg
Johnson argues that "for Oates's academics, words replace a tawdry
but threatening external world and become the tools of their re
trenchment within the safety of institutional power" (32)" For this
reason, Oates's ghostly creative writers employ language as their
most dangerous weapon against their perceived enemies within the
academy" Frequently overwhelmed by the dysfunctionality of their
interpersonal relationships, Oates's writerprotagonists hunger for
the selfliberation of academic fame yet secretly covet "the triumphant
annihilation of [their] enemies," in the words of Ildik6 de Papp
Carrington (149)" By highlighting the interconnections between her
creative writers' scholarly duties and their artistic desires, Oates

underscores this perpetual state of fux in which her writerintellectuals

struggle to fnd their particular notions of selfhood"
In "Rewards of Fame," Oates traces the life of uncertainty en
dured by a middleaged poet, Murray Licht, as he attempts to provide
sustenance for an assortment of children and exwives through a
series of nonrenewable lectureships and poetry readings" Through

out the story, Murray desperately attempts to make contact with
Rosalind, the object of his current affections who presumably in
tends to marry him when he returns to New York from the latest
stop on his reading tour, a small midwestern college in Kitimit,
Iowa" Troubled by the apparently precarious state of his romantic
relationship as well as by his stagnating poetic reputation, Murray
stumbles through his visit to the campus in a daze of selfdoubt"
Murray's dismal emotional state becomes further exacerbated when
he learns the identity of the poetry weekend's keynote speaker, Joachim
Myer, Murray's rival and former schoolmate" Once an aspiring poet
himself, Myer achieved renown as one of the academy's rising stars
after publishing an infuential essay in the Net York Re�iet of Books
"that dealt in an elliptical manner with issues raised by Marshall
McLuhan and George Steiner and Wittgenstein; a masterpiece of
criticism and style" (168)" A remarkably successful poetry reading
in front of a packed auditorium allows Murray to forget tempor
arily about Myer's impending visit to the campus" Murray's venom
for Myer increases, however, when he learns that the critic will
earn $1,000 for his efforts, in dramatic contrast with the lowly
$300 that Murray receives for his poetry reading" Myer's lecture -
entitled "What Was Poetry?" - largely consists of a stream of vague
phrases about freedom and popular culture: "If the act be not ordained
with its imperishable wordimage, how shall it be experienced?"
Myer asks the audience" "I bring you freedom! total liberation! the
food of the polymorphousperverse cosmos denied you by your
parents and by our archoppressor, Poetry!" (169)" During his con
cluding remarks, Myer glibly refers to Murray as "the last, the very
last, of the famous poets" (173)" Rather than registering anger at
Myer's disparaging comment, Murray pathetically fnds solace in
the fact that anyone, even someone as repellent to Murray as Myer,
once thought of his verse as signifcant: "Had he been famous all
this time, without knowing it?" Murray wonders to himself (174)"
By depicting the poet in the act of chasing the vague threads of a
literary reputation that has already eluded him, Oates reveals the
remarkable power of words in the lives of her writerprotagonists"

Even the mere possibility of fame excites Murray into a dizzying

state of emotional chaos: "He felt razed, emptied, broken, beaten,
annihilated - exhausted and defeated, yes, and yet so eerily, so in
voluntarily happy," Oates writes (177)" In addition to demonstrating
the manner in which the academy values the artifcial linguistic
pyrotechnics of Myer's scholarship over the artistic substance of

Murray's verse, "The Rewards of Fame" illustrates the ways in which
Oates's writerintellectuals long for literary fame to the detriment
of their selfesteem and their possibilities for selfsuffciency" Like
"Rewards of Fame," "Angst" examines the precarious emotional state
of Oates's creative writers and their diffculties negotiating between
the requirements of fame and their obligations to the academy"
Murdoch notes that angst, "in the popular modern form, is a disease
or addiction of those who are passionately convinced that person
ality resides solely in the conscious omnipotent will" (39)" In Oates's
story, Bernadine Donovan travels to the annual Modern Language
Association convention, where she awaits a panel discussion de
voted to her fction that will convene the following morning" In
addition to the anxiety that she feels regarding the impending seminar
of "Donovan specialists," Bernadine nervously prepares for the arrival
of her lover, Herman Geller, also an academic (183)" Devoted to the
meticulous research and composition of her novels, Bernadine has
continually rejected Herman's proposals of marriage during the
previous seven years" She simply cannot interrupt her drive for
literary fame in favor of the interpersonal encumbrances that such
relationships invariably entail"
Bernadine harbors particular malice for her scholarly interpreters,
the academics who impress their critical wills upon her work and
threaten the autonomy of her aesthetic and the duration of her
fame" When she encounters Martin Stanley, one of her recent in
terviewers, at a cocktail party the evening before the panel, Bernadine
bristles at the mysterious will that the critic exerts over her" Although
Stanley described her "as one of t�e fnest of living American women
writers" in his concluding remarks to the interview, he completely
rewrote her dialogue and argued that she "had not yet located her
true subject or a style in which to express it"" As Bernadine gazes
upon the critic at the party, she realizes that she both "hated and
feared him" (191)" Her experiences at the panel the following
morning prove even more debilitating" Partially disguised in glasses
and donning a plastic badge that identifes her as "B" G" Sullivan,"
Bernadine watches in horror as the moderator, Sister Bridget of

St" Anne's College, and the three panelists prepare for the session"
After Sister Bridget praises the event as "a very very important date
in American letters," Erich Larson, a scholar from a small com
munity college in New Rochelle, delivers a virtually untenable paper
on "The Infuence of Woolf's Mature Style on the Fiction of Bernadine
Donovan" (196)" Bernadine feels even more insulted by the absurd

presuppositions made in the next paper, "Angst and Irony in Donovan,"
delivered by an unnamed female professor from San Diego State"
The scholar "read her paper without pause," Oates writes, "quoting
a number of reviewers and critics at great length, contemptuously,
pointing out how every one of them had erred" (197)" The panel
fnally concludes with an essay entitled "Donovan and Swift" by
Atlanta State College's Edna Corrington"7 Trembling nervously on
the brink of tears as the session mercifully comes to a close, Bernadine
watches in horror - like a ghost observing her corporeal self - as
an audience member jumps up to the dais and shouts: "All of you -
I know who you are! I knot! You're lying about me, aren't you -
lying about me, Bernadine Donovan - all of you telling nasty flthy
lies about me" (198)"
Suddenly transfxed by the manner in which her entire notion of
selfidentity crumbles before her eyes, Bernadine listlessly roams
the halls of the Palmer House, gazing at the ecstatic conventioneers"
"She walked aimlessly," Oates writes, "staggering as if exhausted" " " "
It had happened" Something had happened" (200)" In this manner,
Oates illustrates the ways in which the scholarly interpretation of
Bernadine's works and the audience member's spontaneous mas
querade contribute to the writer's emotional breakdown and the
subsequent usurpation of her self" In "A Descriptive Catalogue" and
"Pilgrims' Progress," the fnal two stories included in T�e H�ngry
G�osts, Oates investigates her intellectual characters' capacity for
destroying the ethical centers of their colleagues in order to sate
their scholarly egos" "A Descriptive Catalogue" specifcally explores
the competitive tensions propagated by the Hilberry University English
department's publishorperish policy" In the tale, Ron Blass, the
department's resident poet and its most published member with more
than 350 poems to his credit, faces charges of plagiarism leveled by
his ineffectual junior colleague, Reynold Mason, a former student
of Northrop Frye's at the University of Toronto" As Bender observes,
in Oates's fctions issues such as "plagiary assume moral and social
dimensions" (180)" Hired on the basis of his association with Frye,
Mason faces the prospect of an impending tenure review with only

a few relatively dated publications to his name" Rather than pursu

ing the scholarly research that may save his position at Hilberry,
Mason begins a careful investigation of the affable Blass's published
corpus" After completing his research, Mason confronts Ron in the
presence of the department's chair, Dr" Barth: "I accuse him of will
ful and gross plagiarism," Mason remarks, "possibly criminal

plagiarism" (84-5)"
During the initial hearing regarding Ron's alleged plagiarism, Mason
reveals his case before the department's senior faculty, a collection
of intellectuals whose own publications and scholarly activities hardly
comprise an adequate tenure case themselves" Dr" Barth, for example,
enumerates such accolades on his ��rri��l�i �itae as his memos to
the university senate and the speeches that he delivers before local
PTA meetings" After Mason demonstrates that a number of Ron's
poems seem little more than minor stylistic reconfgurations of verse
written by Gerard Manley Hopkins, among other luminaries, the
poet admits that his plagiarism fnds its origins in the prevailing
university pressure to publish or perish: "I wanted you to be proud
and happy that you had a poet," he tells the tribunal" "I was so
happy here, my teaching and my family and everything made me
so happy, oh Dr" Barth, I was so happy, I just didn't have anything
more to say" (94)"
Although the hearing initially results in Ron's incipient alcoholism
and the deterioration of his selfesteem, he later decides to research
the originality of his peers' published works before the committee
convenes for its second hearing to determine his punishment" Only
scant days before the meeting convenes, Ron places a collection of
bulky manila envelopes in the departmental mailboxes of his col
leagues, and his own detective efforts prove effective when the
committee unanimously votes to exonerate the poet rather than
face a tribunal themselves" As the hearing comes to its hasty close,
the angry and frustrated Mason attempts to justify his position: "All
I did was - I tried to maintain - I - I labored for weeks to present
my case - my ethical responsibilities" (100)"8 Remarkably, Mason
tries to mask his professional jealousy in the guise of his ethical
duties to the academy" Murdoch observes that "it is signifcant that
the idea of goodness (and virtue) has been largely superseded in
Western moral philosophy by the idea of rightness," and Oates's
plagiarism episode underscores the manner in which the intellectual
ego equates virtue with the notion of being correct (53)" "The secret
of this story's success," John Alfred Avant aptly writes, "is that Oates

knows how hilarious professional bitchiness can be" (37)" "A De
scriptive Catalogue" also reveals Oates's powerful cognizance of the
academic self and its propensity for celebrating the intellect - even
to the point of utter hypocrisy - over a colleague's efforts to achieve
goodness, no matter how dubious those efforts may be"
Finally, in "Pilgrims' Progress," Oates explores the ways in which

a charismatic intellectual leader carelessly destroys the lives of his
colleagues in order to satisfy his lust for power and infuence" Oates's
story largely traces the progress of two naIve junior faculty mem
bers at Hilberry University, Wanda Barnett and Erasmus Hubben"
When Wanda accepts a lectureship in the English department, she
falls under the spell of Saul Bird, a senior colleague whose "won
derfully energetic" voice "wound about her like fne ribbon" (34)"
While scanning the titles of the books in her offce - which he
nonchalantly dismisses as "dried crap" - Bird remarks to Wanda
that "if you love teaching, if you love working with young people,
you've certainly come to the wrong university" (33-4)" A nontradi
tional teacher who allows his students to formulate their own grades
at the end of each term, Bird proudly reveals to Wanda that the
university has given him notice of nonrenewal for the following
academic year"
As the story unfolds, Bird establishes an hypnotic stranglehold
over his disciplecolleagues after locating - and later, manipulating
- their emotional weaknesses" After Bird boldly chooses the loca
tion of Wanda's new apartment, for example, he demands that she
come to dinner with his other followers" "A wave of nausea rose in
Wanda," Oates writes, "but she could not protest" (39)" Erasmus
discovers himself similarly unable to resist Bird's charismatic charms"
An introverted and ineffectual new lecturer in philosophy at Hilberry,
Erasmus also agrees to dine with Bird after the senior professor
admonishes him into signing a petition calling for Bird's reinstate
ment" Wanda and Erasmus soon fnd themselves members of Bird's
exclusive clique of disciples that meets for hours each evening at
the professor's home" "Intelligent discourse between humanists is
the only means of bringing about a revolution," Bird tells his mes
merized followers, "until the need for violence is more obvious, I
mean" (44)"
Wanda and Erasmus subsequently become transfxed by the sense
of community that they enjoy as Bird's apostles: "I have friends
now" I have real friends," Erasmus thinks to himself "ffty times a
day, in amazement" (48)" "I was always lonely," Wanda likewise

admits" "I was always left out" (49)" Bird eventually convinces his
group of devotees to stage a brutal occupation of the Humanities
Building in order to protest his dismissal from the university" In
addition to proffering their resignations to university offcials, both
Wanda and Erasmus suffer injuries during the melee, a violent event
that Bird himself thought best to avoid" Following the rally, Bird

asks Wanda to watch over his son Philip while he and his wife
travel to Chicago" A few days later, Bird telephones Wanda and
requests that she drive his son to the airport because he has pro
cured another job there" "This has happened before," Philip admits
to the stunned lecturer" "But what will I do with the rest of my
life?" Wanda cries as the story concludes (59)" In this way, Oates
underscores the fragility of the academic self and its propensity for
manipulation by a charismatic, selfserving intellectual such as Bird"
Although Grant wisely observes that "selfidentity is not possible
without fraternity," Oates aptly demonstrates the remarkable power
of the false fraternity that Bird engenders among his loyal group of
disciples (65)" When Bird subsequently exits their lives after greed
ily securing a new position for himself in Chicago, he reveals the
chimerical qualities of their cause for political activism, in addition
to destroying the notions of selfidentity that Wanda and Erasmus
established as his followers" "Their surrender of ego has brought
these forlorn academics to the edge of violence," Trachtenberg writes,
"but without an ideological base of their own they are unable to
fnd in their actions a cathartic release" (42)" As the story comes to
its tragic close, moreover, Wanda and Erasmus fnd themselves un
employed as well as emotionally shattered" They willingly sacrifced
their notions of self for a cause that seemed to be rooted in goodness,
yet originated instead in the unchecked ambitions and selfindulgence
of Bird, their illusory "colleague""
In this way, Oates satirizes the slippery notions of goodness and
community that ultimately undermine her protagonists' quests for
selfhood among the haunted groves of academe" While her preta
characters unscrupulously scour the earth for the intellectual manna
with which they will temporarily sate their desires for power and
infuence, they simultaneously erode their community's possibilities
for fairness, goodness, and justice through their selfimportant moral
decisions" G" F" Waller argues that Oates's "main philosophical target
is, specifcally, the frightening plausibility yet spiritual inadequacy
of the modern phenomenological account of the self" (40)" In T�e
H�ngry G�osts, Oates implores us to observe the roles of goodness

and community in the construction of the academic self" By con

fronting her readers with the greedy transgressions of the academic
characters depicted in her stories, Oates demonstrates the immorality
and ineffcacy of an institution that rewards its members for intel
lectually dominating their colleagues to the point of emotional trauma"
Her irreverent critique of the academy enables her, moreover, to

underscore the remarkable power of satire - her pejorative poetics,
if you will - and its value for addressing the ethical disparities
between the professional ambitions of individuals and the often
more urgent needs of their communities" As Murdoch observes: "Art
transcends selfsh and obsessive limitations of personality and can
enlarge the sensibility of its consumer" It is a kind of goodness by
proxy," she writes (87)" By illustrating the wholesale mitigation of
goodness engineered by the intellectual characters in her academic
tales, Oates challenges us, then, to reconsider the interpersonal con
sequences of our rage for intellectual dominion and individual
achievement"

6
The Professoriate in Love: David
Lodge's Academic Trilogy and the

Ethics of Romance
"What is it to love another person, and is it ever a good

idea?"
- Annette Baier, "Unsafe Loves"
In addition to affording readers with the critical machinery for ex-

ploring the function of concepts such as truth and goodness in
narratives, ethical criticism provides us with a useful rhetoric for
examining the depiction of love in literary works. "Contemporary
philosophers frequently connect consciousness with virtue," Iris
Murdoch observes in The Sovereignty of Good, "and although they
constantly talk of freedom they rarely talk of love" (2). Because of
its abiding interest in establishing vital interconnections between
the reader and the text, ethical criticism devotes particular atten-
tion to highlighting the emotional transactions through which literary
characters indulge their desires to give and receive affection. The
investigation of their intimate motives and experiences likewise il-
luminates our own conceptions of the impulse for love and its role
in the interpersonal fabric of the human community. In The Therapy
of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994), Martha C.
Nussbaum argues that "in our time, when religious sources of indi-
vidual salvation are widely mistrusted, personal erotic love (along
with other secular sources of value) has come, even more intensely,
to bear the weight of many people's longing for transcendence, for
a perfection more than earthly, for mysterious union with that per-
fection" (142). By drawing upon the conclusions of contemporary
moral philosophy, ethical criticism reveals the ways in which love
operates both as a means for emotional fulfllment, as well as a
77

78 Postwar Academic Fiction
mechanism for subverting social and intellectual progress. In this

way, the ethical paradigm deepens our textual experiences through
its observation of the most sensitive regions of our quests for self-
knowledge.
Through an analysis of David Lodge's trilogy of academic novels
- Changing Places: a Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: an

Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1988) - this chapter will
underscore the role of erotic love in university fction as an emo-
tional transaction that provides its consumers with a diversion from
the intellectual rigors of the academy and its inability to satisfy
their desires for human interconnection.1 Lodge's academic trilogy
also demonstrates the manner in which this drive for romance sub-
limates the professional instincts and ambitions of his academic
characters. In his essay, "Crosscurrents in Modern English Criticism,"
Lodge describes the pleasures of academic life as "the rise and fall
of reputations, the interweaving of trends and movements, the alliances
and rivalries, feuds and conspiracies" (248). In his novels, Lodge
satirizes these nuances of academe with playful abandon, although
his academic characters augment their intellectual pursuits with a
dizzying array of sexual dalliances and clandestine romances. As
Terry Eagleton asserts, "Sex provides Lodge with a suburban substitute
for the high emotional currents which the careful comic distancing
of his fctions otherwise expels" (98). While sex also functions in
Lodge's aesthetic as a mechanism for relieving the scholarly woes
of his intellectual characters, it operates as a means for engender-
ing interpersonal communication between his often introverted
and hyper-intellectualized academics as well. In this way, the
pejorative poetics undergirding Lodge's fctions creates an ironic
construct: although Lodge's academic characters ostensibly possess
superior language skills, they remain virtually unable to communi-
cate among themselves without the beneft of their impersonal
scholarly jargon or the essentially physical nature of their erotic
assignations.
The precepts of contemporary moral philosophy generally sup-
port Lodge's fctive arguments regarding the paradoxical function of
erotic love as both a means for emotional transcendence and a
mechanism that often subverts the will of the self and ultimately
hinders self-realization and social progress. "The pursuit of love
provides meaning in life," Irving Singer remarks, "but the experi-
ence of it varies greatly in the quantity and quality of the happiness
that results. Though love may often make life worth living," he

The Professoriate in Love 79
continues, "no one can promise that any life - including a life of
love - will always be a rose-garden of delight." In fact, he con-
cludes, "it rarely is" (176). We often covet love, of course, because
it seems to offer us the promise of emotional transcendence and
self-awareness through the mutuality of a symbiotic relationship. In
The Ethics of Rendezvous: Morality, Virtues, and Love (1993), Maija-

Riitta Ollila postulates her useful ontology regarding the ethical
possibilities of rendezvous - the desire for interdependence that in-
spires individuals to avail themselves of the possibilities of human
interaction and communal interconnection. "The good life of indi-
viduals includes mutual love between people," she writes. "The reason
for loving," she elaborates, "is the commonly held view of the good
life, not only of the morally but also of the aesthetically good life:
in order to make life beautiful and full, love is a prerequisite for
the care and trust that characterizes good relationships between
people" (155). By allowing us to celebrate the possibilities of living
well and sustaining healthy interpersonal relationships, love estab-
lishes a vital locus for maintaining the life of the community while
intensifying the life of the individual.
Romantic love also functions as a social mechanism that extols
the value of the self and validates the very existence of lovers because
of the shared experiences that accompany their intimate associations.
As Robert M. Polhemus notes, "Men and women in the hold of
erotic faith feel that love can redeem personal life and offer a reason
for being" (1). Contemporary moral philosophers also contend that
love provides a means for exceeding the boundaries of the self and
fomenting self-suffciency and self-awareness. "A life directed toward
transcendence," Kathryn Pauly Morgan observes, "is a life open to
the future, a life self-originated rather than based on preexisting
identity. Transcendent subjects invent, act, make choices," she adds
(393). In this manner, love offers us the possibility of enlivening
our personal experiences as a result of our encounters with other
autonomous selves. As Alan Soble notes in The Structure of Love
(1990), "Love involves the desire to share intense and important
experiences; the intimacy of love is, or results from, the satisfaction
of the desire for shared experiences" (183). Although more prob-
lematic feelings of jealousy or inadequacy frequently accompany
these moments of romantic communion, love invariably imbues us
with the notion of self-worth that we so desperately desire. "Love
is always subject to frustration and rejection, and commonly bound
together with such dangerous emotions as jealousy, hate, and fear,"

Robert Brown writes in Analyzing Love (1987), "but this fact merely
emphasizes that the beloved can be valued as having inherent worth
even when giving pain and not simply when giving pleasure" (127).
In this way, moral philosophy accounts for the multifaceted nature
of erotic love and its simultaneous propensity for human intercon-
nection and social disruption.

Because romantic love - even in its healthiest incarnations -
inevitably mitigates the autonomy of the self, it necessarily threatens
the stability of both the individual and the community.2 As Nussbaum
remarks in The Therapy of Desire, love "is subversive of society: it
engenders anxious cares that distract the lover from politics and
community; and the relationship itself, with its instability and its
mutual sadism," she adds, "cannot be the basis for a marriage that
would, by raising children in an atmosphere of tender concern,
promote the ends of community" (185). For this reason, Julia Kristeva
describes erotic love as an "exquisite mixture of destructive possession
and idealization" (61). Romantic love demands, moreover, that
seemingly autonomous selves render themselves vulnerable to the
needs and desires of the object of their affections, an emotional
state that naturally threatens the independence and security of the
self that dares to love. As Robert C. Solomon observes, "The process
of mutual self-identifcation runs into confict with one of its own
presuppositions - the ideal of autonomous individualism" (513). In
this way, love challenges the individual's capacity for maintaining
self-assurance and self-suffciency during the passionate throes of
an intimate relationship. Although the tenets of contemporary moral
philosophy generally problematize erotic love as a subversive emo-
tional force, an ethical paradigm for reading must recognize,
nevertheless, the remarkable power of love as the essence of inter-
personal connection and a signifcant means for transcending the
boundaries of the self.3
In addition to demonstrating the ethical implications of erotic
love as a subversive narrative conceit, this chapter will examine
Lodge's satiric commentary on the romantic relationships enjoyed
by selected intellectual characters in his trilogy of Professorroman.
Essentially unable to communicate with each other without the
impersonal aid of scholarship, Lodge's academics engage instead in
a series of equally unsatisfactory love affairs. Challenged by pre-
vailing social conventions, the professional rigors of academic life,
and the prison-house of language, his intellectuals struggle and ulti-
mately fail in their efforts to establish meaningful interpersonal

connection. For this reason, the academic characters in Lodge's

university fctions eagerly divert themselves with the triviality of
departmental infghting, pedantic scholarly debate, and an unceas-
ing tide of international conferences and clandestine affairs. In The
University in Modern Fiction (1993), Janice Rossen astutely observes
that Lodge's over-arching "portrayal of promiscuity" in his academic

fctions provides him with a means for illustrating his characters
"reacting to their professional disappointments by engaging in sexual
pursuit instead" (152). In short, "screwing virtually replaces read-
ing" for Lodge's intellectuals, Rossen writes (150). Characterized by
their brevity and their propensity for failure, the erotic dalliances
depicted in Lodge's academic narratives underscore his intellectual
characters' inability to foster and sustain interpersonal relationships,
particularly because of their anxieties about the indeterminacy of
language. In this way, Lodge offers a satiric appraisal of erotic love's
function in university life as a desperate means for establishing
intimate communication among academics who fnd themselves
emotionally silenced by the rigid constraints of scholarly discourse.
In Changing Places, Lodge traces the intellectual and sexual lives
of Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp, the academic characters whose
professional and social intersections grace each of the narratives in
Lodge's academic trilogy. An introverted and ambitionless lecturer
at an English redbrick university, Swallow distinguishes himself among
his peers at the University of Rummidge because of his superior
skills as an examiner, rather than because of his reputation as a
literary scholar. "He is a mimetic man," Lodge writes, "unconfdent,
eager to please, infnitely suggestible" (10). In sharp contrast with
Swallow's ineffectual scholarly career, Zapp enjoys considerable schol-
arly renown for his numerous well-received studies of Jane Austen.
A full professor of English at the State University of Euphoria in
the United States, Zapp plans to embark upon an ambitious critical
project that would treat each of Austen's novels from every con-
ceivable hermeneutic perspective: "historical, biographical, rhetorical,
mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist,
Christian-allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomeno-
logical, archetypal, you name it." In this way, Zapp plans to exhaust
Austen's canon of novels for future critical study. "There would be
simply nothing further to say," Lodge remarks, "periodicals would
fall silent, famous English Departments [would] be left deserted like
ghost towns" (44-5). Swallow and Zapp's lives collide in 1969 when
they agree to participate in an annual professorial exchange scheme

that exists between their respective institutions. During their trans-

atlantic experiences, the two scholars not only exchange their students
and colleagues, but their wives and families as well. The manner in
which they literally swap their entire worlds with one another
underscores Lodge's satiric critique of his academic characters and
the ease and alacrity with which they exchange the emotional and

sexual discourses of their respective lives.
As with Small World, Lodge liberally employs the literary devices
of coincidence and Romance in the narrative of Changing Places.
The conventions of the Romance provide him with the narrative
freedom to imbue his novel with the exaggerated qualities of paral-
lelism that mark Swallow and Zapp's textual adventures.4 Lodge "uses
ironic juxtapositions and rich coincidences to expose the human
frailties of the academics," Merritt Moseley observes, and his work
"is romantic in its freedom from the laws of probability which
would otherwise rule out the extensive play of coincidences; it is
romantic in being plot-rich, character-diffuse, multifarious, and
multifoliate" (85). In Changing Places, Lodge employs the forces of
chance in order to synchronize the parallel experiences of his pro-
tagonists as they simultaneously search for love in all of its variant
forms. Lodge depicts Swallow and Zapp concurrently venturing
into topless bars, for instance, while also synchronizing their air-
plane fights, as well as their participation in student-protest
movements on their respective surrogate campuses. Lodge further
unites their exploits through an epistolary chapter, the Joycean dis-
course of newspaper headlines, and a concluding section written in
the form of a dramatic play text.5 These narrative devices allow
Lodge to highlight further the commonality of Swallow and Zapp's
intellectual and interpersonal experiences, particularly their erotic
indulgences.
After ensconcing himself as a visiting member of the Department
of English at the State University of Euphoria, known locally as
Euphoric State, Swallow embarks upon a sexual progress away from
the comfortable inroads of his previous life with his wife Hilary
and the stagnating industrial environs of Rummidge. Euphoria's sunny,
Edenic clime lends itself to the exhilaration of Swallow's awaken-
ing, and he soon fnds himself enrapt with the casual, erotic demeanor
of Melanie Byrd, an undergraduate at Euphoric State, and, unbe-
knownst to Swallow, Zapp's daughter by his frst wife.6 After a brief
sexual encounter with Melanie, Swallow discovers himself wracked
with guilt over his betrayal of Hilary, particularly after Melanie

calls him "Daddy" as she sleeps beside him (103). His guilty con-
science further deteriorates when he learns the identity of Melanie's
father from Zapp's estranged second wife, Desiree. In a letter to an
understandably irate Zapp, Desiree describes Swallow's stunned
response when he ascertains Melanie's lineage: "He went white,
Morris," she writes. "I mean if he'd just discovered that he'd screwed

his own daughter, he couldn't have looked more shocked. I suppose,
on refection," she concludes, "there is something kind of inces-
tuous about sleeping with the daughter of the guy you've exchanged
jobs with" (144). Swallow's guilt eventually subsides, however, when
he realizes "how needlessly he had complicated it [the affair with
Melanie] with emotions and ethics" (116).
By choosing to divest himself of the emotional and moral obliga-
tions of his previous life in England, Swallow avails himself of a
radically different system of ethical values, opting for the erotic
possibilities of adultery over the quiet stability of his marital com-
mitment to Hilary. In Adultery and the Novel: Contract and Transgression
(1979), Tony Tanner argues that the rigid boundaries of the marriage
contract inevitably lead to disruption of the union via transgression.
"The breaking of a marriage must suggest a collapse back into a
state of severance and separateness in which bonds and contracts
do not hold," he observes (60). "The problem is," Tanner adds, "that
by defnition you cannot transform transgression and profanation
into a regular way of life" (376).7 Swallow continues in his own
quest for erotic self-liberation - his "quest for intensity of experi-
ence," in the words of Daniel Ammann (120) - after he meets Desiree
at a faculty cocktail party. Although he initially recoils at the brooding
presence of his counterpart's wife, Swallow soon engages her in an
intriguing conversation about the American and British cultural
obsession with education. Assisted by the convivial ambience of
the party and several mixed drinks, Swallow fnds himself unusu-
ally verbose in Desiree's company. His uncharacteristically extroverted
behavior underscores Tanner's contention that "adultery can pro-
voke an excessive loquacity, to the point of a rampant spillage of
words, something like language as nausea" (40).
Liberated temporarily from the rigid boundaries of his marriage
and the institutional requirements of his lectureship in Rummidge,
Swallow transcends his ineffectual persona through the personal
freedom that his new adulterous lifestyle promises. After Swallow
meets Desiree at yet another faculty party, she offers him a place to
stay when a torrential rainstorm and a subsequent landslide destroy

his lodgings. Although their arrangement quickly evolves into an

erotic affair, neither Swallow nor Desiree desire to temper their
romantic bliss with the social and legal obligations of marriage.
While Swallow readily admits that he has "no experience in adul-
tery," he also recognizes the liberating aspects of his relationship
with Desiree: "I have felt very free these last few weeks," Swallow

remarks, "freer than I've ever felt in my life" (175). Unlike Swallow,
Zapp agrees to their professorial exchange in an explicit attempt to
emancipate himself from the growing tensions in his marriage, as
well as in his career. Having already achieved the rank of full pro-
fessor of English while amassing numerous scholarly accolades, Zapp
fnds himself unsatisfed with the status quo that inevitably follows
such a period of extraordinary professional success. The enormity
of the literary critic's ego, moreover, leaves his marriage to Desiree
in a desultory state. "Being married to you is like being slowly
swallowed by a python," she tells Zapp. "I'm just a half-digested
bulge in your ego. I want out. I want to be free. I want to be a
person again" (40). Desperately attempting to divert her pleas for a
divorce, Zapp agrees to travel to Rummidge so that Desiree might
reconsider her position during his absence.
In sharp contrast with Swallow, whose experiences away from
home dramatically alter his senses of self-awareness and self-
suffciency, Zapp discovers a previously unrealized ethical component
of his persona during his stay in England, a country which he once
held in absolute disdain. Before his trip to Rummidge, Zapp reserved
particular disgust for English scholars and their prejudices against
American literary critics. Lodge writes that Zapp
had neither affection nor respect for the British. . . . Their publi-
cations were vapid and amateurish, inadequately researched, slackly
argued, and riddled with so many errors, misquotations,
misattributions, and incorrect dates that it was amazing they
managed to get their own names right on the title page. They never-
theless had the nerve to treat American scholars, including even
himself, with sneering condescension in their lousy journals. (47)
Yet Rummidge provides Zapp with a quiet forum for personal

refection, not only about his English scholarly counterparts, but
also regarding the unethical manner in which he conducts his
personal life and career. As James Acheson notes, "The small world
of Rummidge has a morally enlarging effect" on Zapp, Lodge's most

acerbic of academic characters (88). Zapp establishes his English

lodgings in the enormous house of Dr. O'Shea, an Irish physician
with a large family with whom the scholar eventually shares his
rented color television. Zapp initially seems alarmed about his in-
cipient state of generosity and goodwill: "Some creeping English
disease of being nice, was it?" he wonders to himself (93).

Although Zapp temporarily falls out of favor with O'Shea after he
good-naturedly loans a pornographic magazine to the doctor's niece,
his most extraordinary moments of ethical renewal occur, rather
ironically, during his love affair with Hilary. During his frst visit
for dinner in the Swallow household, Zapp cheerfully entertains
Philip's children with humorous stories and assists Hilary with the
dishes. The evening ends disastrously, however, after Zapp fnds a
well-annotated copy of a Festschrift including one of his essays in
the Swallows' lavatory. Zapp storms out of the house without a
word after concluding that Swallow must be the critic responsible
for a malicious review of his essay years before in the Times Liter
ary Supplement. "This guy [the reviewer] really wanted to hurt," Zapp
remarks. "I mean, he wasn't content merely to pour scorn on my
arguments and my evidence and my accuracy and my style, to make
my article out to be some kind of monument to imbecility and
perversity in scholarship," he continues, "no, he wanted my blood
and my balls too, he wanted to beat my ego to a pulp" (127). Zapp
and Hilary begin their romantic relationship after she generously
provides him with a room during the renovation of O'Shea's house.
When subsequently consulted by the University of Rummidge's vice-
chancellor about Swallow's possible promotion to senior lecturer,
Zapp recommends his counterpart's advancement despite his belief
that Swallow authored the TLS review: "It wasn't, after all, only
Swallow's happiness and the prosperity that were at stake here,"
Lodge writes. "Hilary and the children were also involved, and for
their welfare he felt a warm concern" (222). Although he later learns
that Gordon Masters - the psychotic former chair of Swallow's depart-
ment - actually wrote the unfavorable TLS review, Zapp never-
theless derives a genuine ethical satisfaction from his unselfsh efforts
on behalf of Swallow and his family.
In this way, Zapp and Swallow's radically divergent experiences
in Changing Places underscore the conficting conclusions of moral
philosophers regarding the ethical possibilities of erotic love. In
addition to releasing him from his marital obligations to Desiree,
love imbues Zapp with a sense of ethical renewal and the selfess

propensity for acting favorably on behalf of his community. For

Swallow, however, love provides a mechanism for emancipating
himself from the rigid boundaries of his personal and professional
lives. In short, love reaffrms his sense of self. Although adultery
and the liberating distance of the professorial exchange program
allow each scholar to experience an obscure periphery of their selves,

it offers limited possibilities for the future. Again, as Tanner argues,
"by defnition you cannot transform transgression and profanation
into a regular way of life" (376).
As the narrative of Small World unfolds, we fnd Zapp and Swallow
once again ensconced in the comfortable scholarly and interpersonal
inroads of their respective worlds. While their private lives seem to
follow a rather predictable course - Swallow returns to married life
with Hilary and Desiree delivers on her promise to divorce Zapp -
the worldwide reinvigoration of their profession in the late 1970s
irrevocably alters their academic experiences through the auspices
of international conferences and global scholarly trends. "The day
of the single, static campus is over," Zapp triumphantly announces
in Small World, and with its demise arrives a new generation of
globe-trotting scholars equally beset by the professional and inter-
personal contradictions inherent in academic life (72). In Small World,
Lodge again draws upon the narrative freedom of the Romance in
order to illustrate his intellectual characters' global search for erotic
fulfllment and human interconnection. "Romance is a genre depicting
the search to gratify desire," Blake Morrison argues, "and the academic
questers in Small World are profoundly restless and ungratifed. . .
There's a deep disenchantment at the heart of Lodge's fction," he
concludes (293). This disenchantment fnds its origins in the inability
of Lodge's academic characters to sustain intimate relationships in
a discipline that questions the communicative properties of lan-
guage and celebrates those scholars who defeat their colleagues
intellectually in the often brutal rites of academic competition.
In the novel, Lodge traces the international scholarly and roman-
tic exploits of Zapp, Swallow, and a wide range of other intellectuals
bent on exerting their professional and erotic wills upon one another.8
"A mock metaromance," in the words of Siegfried Mews, Small World
explores the ways in which a multinational selection of literary
scholars relentlessly pursues the self-gratifying rewards of romance
and desire (723). A rousing keynote address delivered by Zapp at a
conference hosted by Swallow at the University of Rummidge inau-
gurates the novel's thematic exploration of erotic love and its narrative

possibilities for interpersonal fulfllment. Entitled "Textuality as Strip-

tease," Zapp's lecture discusses the inadequacy of language and
scholarship as mechanisms for communication. Because it funda-
mentally encourages the act of interpretation, language necessarily
denies itself the capacity to articulate any singular meaning with
precision and exactitude. Scholarship suffers from a similar inter-

pretive malady. As Zapp astutely remarks, "Every decoding is another
encoding" (29). Like the text, which contains so many convoluted
layers of unattainable meaning, the striptease, Zapp argues, entices
the viewer with elements of curiosity and desire while ultimately
defying possession. This struggle for erotic authority motivates the
quests for love embarked upon by Lodge's academics in Small World,
and its consummate elusiveness challenges their capacity for fnd-
ing self-satisfaction in the competitive community of scholars.
For this reason, Lodge presents a wide variety of intellectual
characters engaged in a seemingly inexhaustible search for love
and power among the increasingly international groves of academe.
In his essay, "The Reader as Discoverer in David Lodge's Small World,"
Frederick M. Holmes unreasonably contends that "Lodge's novel is
peopled by one-dimensional, morally polarized characters caught
up in improbable sequences of events heavily dependent upon pre-
posterous coincidences" (49).9 Although Lodge clearly avails himself
of the exaggerated narratological vestiges of the Romance in Small
World, several of his erotic protagonists in fact operate as multidi-
mensional, fully realized literary characters in the novel's dynamic
narrative terrain. In addition to detailing once again the sexual and
professional exploits of Swallow and Zapp, Lodge traces in Small
World the erotic quests of such fctive critical luminaries as Arthur
Kingfsher and Fulvia Morgana, as well as the romantic experiences
of the naIve lover and scholar, Persse McGarrigle, a fedgling young
academic from University College, Limerick. In the novel, Persse's
search for the elusive independent scholar, Angelica Pabst, func-
tions as a framing device for the erotic quests of Lodge's other
intellectual characters. He crisscrosses the globe, exhausting his sav-
ings in a wild international pursuit of the evasive Angelica while
sporadically encountering Lodge's other protagonists in such dis-
parate locales as Rummidge, Amsterdam, Geneva, Los Angeles, Tokyo,
Honolulu, Jerusalem, and fnally, New York, where Lodge's entire
coterie of academics reconvenes for the annual meeting of the Modern
Language Association.
Persse frst encounters Angelica at Swallow's conference at the

University of Rummidge. Dazzled by her keen critical intellect and

her engaging "smile of complicity," Persse falls deeply in love with
her during the conference's early stages and proposes to her shortly
thereafter (13). Although she quickly rebuffs his offer because of her
belief that the marital contract mitigates personal and professional
freedom, she nevertheless hoodwinks Persse into sneaking into her

bedroom like Keats's dreamy suitor in "The Eve of St. Agnes": "You
could hide in my room and watch me go to bed," she tells him,
"then I might dream of you as my future husband" (47). After Persse
naIvely complies with her ruse, he discovers an empty bedroom,
save for the presence of Robin Dempsey, a linguist also duped by
the charms of the deceptive Angelica. Her artifce inspires Persse to
follow her across the globe as she travels from one academic con-
ference to another. Cheryl Summerbee, a skillful Heathrow ticket
agent, functions as Persse's de facto guide - his "agent of fate," ac-
cording to Wenche Ommundsen (137) - throughout his international
search for the mysterious Angelica. After pursuing Angelica unsuc-
cessfully throughout the summer conference season, Persse temporarily
suspends his quest on the advice of Zapp. "Don't despair, Percy,"
the critic tells him, "come to the next MLA. Anybody who's a con-
ference freak is sure to be at the MLA" (350).
Persse fnally locates Angelica in an "Ad hoc Forum on Romance"
at the MLA convention in New York. In her paper, a feminine counter-
part to Zapp's overtly masculine discourse on the striptease, Angelica
muses on the multiple orgasmic qualities of the Romance, a genre
whose textual pleasures offer "not one climax but many. . . . No
sooner is one crisis in the fortunes of the hero averted than a new
one presents itself," she argues, "no sooner has one adventure been
concluded than another begins. The narrative questions open and
close, open and close, like the contractions of the vaginal muscles
in intercourse, and this process is in principle endless," she con-
cludes (366). After subsequently spending an afternoon of tumultuous
lovemaking with the woman whom he perceives to be the elusive
object of his affections, Persse learns that Angelica has deceived
him yet again when the person in bed with him identifes herself
as Lily, Angelica's twin sister. "You're not really in love with Angelica,"
Lily observes. "If you can't be sure whether the girl you just screwed
is Angelica or not, how can you be in love with her? You were in
love with a dream" (371). In this way, Lily - through the literally
disembodied voice of Angelica - instructs Persse on the indeter-
minacy of language, particularly romantic discourse, as a chimerical

means for communicating the reality of our experiences. After the

conference concludes, Persse returns to the Heathrow ticket counter
in search of Cheryl, who, much to his surprise, no longer works
for British Airways and has embarked on world travels of her own.
Gazing at Heathrow's massive Departures board, Persse begins his
romantic adventures anew as he wonders "where in all the small,

narrow world" he should start searching for Cheryl (385).
As Robert A. Morace observes, "Persse's demystifcation decrowns,
liberates, and restores, curing those who are present of their vari-
ous forms of impotence - sexual, literary, and intellectual. It helps
bring about the renewals, rebirths, and reconciliations that proliferate"
in Small World (206). Likewise, Swallow and Zapp learn similar
lessons about the slippery nature of love and language during their
sporadic intersections with Persse. Now chair of Rummidge's English
department, Swallow languishes once again in the quiet domestic
routine of his marriage with Hilary, an increasingly listless state
interrupted periodically by Swallow's frequent travels to academic
conferences. During one such sojourn in Genoa a few years before
the narrative of Small World begins, Swallow takes an "irrevocable
leap into moral space" when he enjoys a one-night stand with Joy
Simpson, the wife of an English diplomat, after narrowly escaping
disaster in an airplane fre over the Italian countryside (83). "It was
as if, having passed through the shadow of death, I had suddenly
recovered an appetite for life that I thought I had lost for ever,
since returning from America to England," he confdes to Zapp (82).
Although his brief affair with Joy provides him with a profound
sense of erotic renewal, Swallow learns of her death in an airplane
crash in India during the following year.
In the narrative fabric of Lodge's hyper-exaggerated Romance,
however, reality becomes transfgured by the demands of improb-
ability, and Swallow discovers Joy alive and well in Ankara during
a Turkish lecture tour after sharing his secret with Zapp. When Joy
and Swallow rekindle their earlier romance, Swallow fnds that "he
was not, after all, fnished, washed up, ready for retirement. He was
still capable of a great romance," Lodge writes (247). Yet their erotic
association, like the other rendezvous in Lodge's academic trilogy,
never progresses beyond the simulacrum of a committed relation-
ship. Although they travel together from Ankara to another conference
in Jerusalem, a chance encounter with Swallow's son during an
excursion to the Dead Sea brings a hasty conclusion to their romance.
As Eva Lambertsson Bjork correctly argues in Campus Clowns and

the Canon: David Lodge's Campus Fiction (1993), "These brief epi-
sodes of transgression always end in a renewed commitment to
marriage, a commitment that is anticipated and consistently
foregrounded in the texts through the treatment of the adulterous
relationship as a state of mental intoxication that can only last
while concealed from the actuality of society" (104). Feigning

Legionnaire's Disease, Swallow likewise leaves the conference and
returns home to the comfortable inroads of his life with Hilary. "I
failed in the role of romantic hero," Swallow later remarks to Persse.
"I thought I wasn't too old for it, but I was" (381).
Although Zapp claims that he too no longer desires the erotic
interconnection that romantic relationships offer, his experiences
in Small World challenge his vow of celibacy at every turn. As he
comments to a stunned Hilary during his visit to Rummidge:
I gave up screwing around a long time ago. I came to the conclu-

sion that sex is a sublimation of the work instinct. The nineteenth
century has its priorities right. What we really lust for is power,
which we achieve by work. When I look around at my col-
leagues these days, what do I see? They're all screwing their
students, or each other, like crazy, marriages are breaking up
faster than you can count, and yet nobody seems to be happy.
Obviously they would rather be working, but they're ashamed to
admit it. (68)
The publication by Desiree of her best-selling feminist autobiography,

Diffcult Days - an unfattering expose of her marriage to Zapp -
also understandably sours him on love. A devotee of jogging - "it's
very fashionable these days in American academic circles," he tells
Persse - as well as the author of Beyond Criticism, Zapp nevertheless
has a chance encounter with Fulvia, a renowned Marxist critic from
the University of Padua, on an airplane bound for Milan (48). Dur-
ing their fight, Fulvia informs Zapp about the upcoming UNESCO
Chair of Literary Criticism, a $100,000 annual, tax-free appoint-
ment to be chosen by Kingfsher, the doyen of international literary
criticism. For Zapp, the UNESCO chair represents his fnal profes-
sional ambition - to be the highest paid literary critic in the world.
After their arrival in Milan, Fulvia arranges for Zapp to spend the
night at the luxurious Milanese home of herself and her husband, a
professor of Italian Renaissance literature. Fulvia soon convinces
Zapp to go to bed with her despite his oath of celibacy, although he

suddenly halts their erotic encounter when she produces a set of

handcuffs and her husband eagerly joins them in Fulvia's elabo-
rately mirrored bedroom. 10
When he later learns of Swallow's reunion with and "love" for
Joy, Zapp responds with incredulity: "Hasn't he learned by now
that this whole business of being 'in love' is not an existential

reality," Zapp wonders to himself, "but a form of cultural produc-
tion, an illusion produced by the mutual refections of a million
rose-tinted mirrors: love poems, pop songs, movie images, agony
columns, shampoo ads, romantic novels?" (281). Ostensibly moti-
vated only by the prospect of obtaining the salary and prestige that
the UNESCO chair promises for its holder, Zapp ironically fnds
time - once again, despite his latest vow of celibacy, as well as his
kidnapping by Italian extortionists - to enter into yet another ro-
mantic relationship, in this instance with Thelma Ringbaum, the
estranged wife of Howard Ringbaum, a former colleague of Zapp's at
Euphoric State who lost a tenure-track position there after admit-
ting during a parlor game to having never read Hamlet. Zapp's hopes
for receiving the UNESCO chair lie in the expert hands of King-
fsher, the "king among literary theorists," according to Zapp. In
Lodge's satire, moreover, Kingfsher functions as the ultimate example
of academic dysfunctionality. Secluded in his penthouse suite high
above Chicago, Kingfsher lies naked in bed with a scattered selection
of critical quarterlies and his delectable Korean research assistant,
Song-Mi Lee, by his side. An emeritus professor of Columbia and
Zurich Universities, Kingfsher spends his days writing reviews of
the latest monographs of hermeneutics while watching pornographic
movies on television. "A man who has received more honorary
degrees than he can remember, and who has at home, at his house
on Long Island, a whole room full of the (largely unread) books
and offprints sent to him by disciples and admirers in the world of
scholarship," Kingfsher, Lodge writes, can unfortunately no longer
"achieve an erection or an original thought" (105).
Lodge's unsavory depiction of Kingfsher consuming pornography
while simultaneously engaging in the act of literary criticism under-
scores Lodge's often debilitating critiques of the academy and one
of its most cherished mechanisms for professional advancement. As
Mews notes, "There is behind the satire and hilarity of Lodge's
global campus novel in the guise of romance a serious questioning
of the purpose of literary studies and of the institution of academic
criticism itself" (726). Kingfsher suddenly emerges from his intellectual

and physiological stupor, however, after breathing the fresh air pro-
vided by an open window in his hotel suite in New York.
Reinvigorated and fnally able to consummate his relationship with
Song-Mi, Kingfsher resumes his throne as the leading international
literary critic by choosing himself as the UNESCO chair over a
host of other applicants, including Zapp, Swallow, and Fulvia. Yet

as the novel comes to a close, Lodge invokes the narrative latitude
of the Romance and concludes Small World on an optimistic note
through a series of impending marriages and romantic reunions. As
Bernard Bergonzi notes, "The novel ends in a mood of general rec-
onciliation: marriages which have been coming apart are put together
again, and other people announce their intention of getting mar-
ried" (22). In this manner, Lodge employs the residue of love as an
all-purpose curative for the interpersonal failures of his intellectual
characters. Yet Lodge's novels consistently demonstrate the ineffec-
tuality of love - particularly in its adulterous manifestations - as
nothing more than a temporary diversion from the social and pro-
fessional ills that problematize the efforts of his academics to achieve
selfhood.
Although Lodge dispenses with the Romance in the narrative
design of Nice Work, the fnal selection in his academic trilogy, he
continues his exploration of his academic characters and their in-
ability to fnd solace in romantic relationships, particularly because
of the inadequacy of language as a vehicle for communicating their
desires. Loosely based on Victorian industrial novels such as Elizabeth
Gaskell's North and South (1855), Nice Work examines the uneasy
relationship that often exists between the academy and the "real
world," between the competitive forces of the intellect and the free-
market forces of industry. In addition to questioning the relevance
of literary theory to the problems that plague the world beyond the
walls of the academy, the novel attempts to provide readers with a
sense of reconciliation regarding the tenuous relationship between
industry and academe through the medium of an erotic affair between
the novel's protagonists, Victor Wilcox, the managing director of
an engineering frm, and Robyn Penrose, a temporary lecturer at
the University of Rummidge. The dramatic consummation of their
relationship seems to offer the possibility of mutual understanding
between these remarkably disparate characters, yet the instability
of love and language depicted in the novel's closing pages ulti-
mately undermines their genuine attempts at ideological compromise.
Robyn agrees to participate in the "Shadow Scheme" that eventually

draws her into Vic's orbit on the advice of Swallow, still chair of
the department at Rummidge, although he is beginning to succumb
to incipient deafness. The brainchild of the university's vice-chancellor,
the Shadow Scheme endeavors to enhance the university's under-
standing of the commercial world by requiring a faculty member to
"shadow" a senior managerial fgure in the local manufacturing

industry. Swallow believes that Robyn's participation in the exercise
might allow her to keep her Rummidge lectureship beyond her current
three-year allotment. A gifted and well-published scholar, Robyn
remains unable to secure a position in England's depressed academic
job market, despite her extraordinary professional credentials. A
specialist in the industrial novel of the Victorian era, Robyn possesses
a curriculum vitae that already lists two forthcoming monograph
publications, her thesis, The Industrious Muse: Narrativity and Contra
diction in the Industrial Novel, as well as a second volume, Domestic
Angels and Unfortunate Females: Woman as Sign and Commodity in
Victorian Fiction. Well versed in the parlance of contemporary literary
theory, particularly deconstruction, Robyn currently languishes in
a virtually sexless relationship with her "lover," Charles, himself a
lecturer at the University of Suffolk. For Robyn and Charles - as
devotees of poststructuralist poetics - "sexual desire was a play of
signifers," Lodge writes, "an infnite deferment and displacement
of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signifeds
temporarily interrupted" (33).
By reducing their erotic needs into emotionless linguistic con-
structs, Robyn and Charles likewise diminish their desire for one
another, evinced in the novel by their regular attempts at a number
of "trial separations." Vic, Robyn's industrial counterpart, lives in a
similarly celibate state with his wife, Marjorie, whom Lodge con-
spicuously depicts in the act of falling asleep beside her captain of
industry while clutching a copy of Enjoy Your Menopause. Although
the monetary rewards of his position as Marketing Director of J.
Pringle and Sons Casting and General Engineering allow Vic and
his family to live comfortably, like Robyn, his employment lacks
permanence, for Vic's success depends entirely upon the whimsy of
the marketplace. A skillful manager and engineer, Vic's greatest
moments of pleasure occur during his daily commute to and from
the factory. During these moments of "musical masturbation," Vic
listens to his cherished collection of tape-recorded works by female
jazz and soul vocalists. "The subtle infexions of these voices," Lodge
writes, "honeyed or slightly hoarse, moaning and whispering of

women's love, its joys and disappointments, soothe his nerves and
relax his limbs." Emotionally estranged from his wife and children,
Vic harbors disdain for the value of higher education and views
the university as a "small city-state" characterized by its "air of
privileged detachment from the vulgar, bustling city in which it is
embedded" (14-15).

Robyn possesses a similar distrust for members of the private sec-
tor and their commercial activities. Her ideological and social
differences with Vic likewise manifest themselves on a number of
occasions throughout their association during the Shadow Scheme.
Robyn reacts in horror, for example, when she visits the factory's
dark, inner recesses: "It was the most terrible place she had ever
been in her life," Lodge writes. "To say that to herself restored the
original meaning of the word 'terrible': it provoked terror, even a
kind of awe" (90). Her revulsion at the squalid conditions in the
factory later result in a spontaneous strike after she warns one of
the laborers of his imminent dismissal. In addition to a number of
instances in which Vic and Robyn disagree on the role of semiotics
in culture, Robyn causes further dissension in the factory after ob-
jecting to the array of pornographic pin-ups that adorn the plant's
walls. While Vic and Robyn come into confict over a variety of
ideological and moral issues during the Shadow Scheme, they also
discover, much to their mutual surprise, that their ethical standards
are not so dissimilar. When a hired stripper interrupts Vic's speech
to the factory personnel, for instance, Robyn hastily comes to his
assistance and leads the woman, one of her tutorial students, away
from the factory foor. Her experiences as Vic's shadow in the world
outside of the academy allow her to realize, moreover, that critical
theory - which literary theorists "argue about and read about and
write about endlessly," she remarks to Charles - remains meaning-
less in the world beyond the ivory towers of academe (152). In this
way, Ammann notes, "Lodge not only refers to and explains Robyn
Penrose's deconstructionist approach to literature, but questions its
viability by contrasting it with Victor's pragmatic attitudes" (84).
The Shadow Scheme reaches its dramatic climax when Robyn
agrees to accompany Vic on a business trip to Frankfurt, where her
knowledge of German allows Vic to negotiate the purchase of a
machine for the factory at an exceptional price. Absorbed with the
success of their cooperative effort as business negotiators, Robyn
and Vic retire to her suite for a sexual encounter: "The captain of

industry at the feet of the feminist literary critic - a pleasing tab-

leau," Robyn muses to herself (207). When Vic admits to Robin
that "I've been in love with you for weeks," she quarrels with the
semiotics of erotic love. "There is only language," she tells him,
and "the discourse of romantic love pretends that your fnger and
my clitoris are extensions of two unique individual selves who need

each other and only each other and cannot be happy without each
other for ever and ever" (210). Although Vic defers to her interpre-
tation of their erotic association for the duration of the encounter,
the following morning he reaffrms his love for her. "Love, that sort
of love," she tells Vic before traveling back to Rummidge alone, "is
a literary con trick" (213). Back in England, their relationship con-
tinues to deteriorate rapidly. "When Wilcox screwed you, it was
like the factory ravished the university," Robyn's friend Penny ob-
serves (212). Robyn and Vic only achieve reconciliation after he
visits the university as her "shadow," as well as after the factory
discharges Vic from his position as managing director. Using the
proceeds of her inheritance from the estate of a recently deceased
relative in Australia, Robyn salvages their relationship when she
good-naturedly offers to invest in Vic's plans to design a revolu-
tionary spectrometer.
In this manner, Vic and Robyn opt for a working relationship
over the semiotic and interpersonal struggles of romance. Robyn's
own professional fortunes eventually soar after Zapp fortuitously
arrives in Rummidge - about to embark upon his annual European
conference tour, of course - and negotiates the American rights of
her second monograph for Euphoric State's university press. The
novel's deus ex machina conclusion reaches its fruition when Swallow
fnally, almost predictably, locates the funding to extend Robyn's
contract for another year at the University of Rummidge. Although
Nice Work's rather pat ending allows Lodge to establish a state of
reconciliation between industry and academe, a number of critics
object to the improbability of the novel's serendipitous conclusion.
Bjork argues, for example, that the rapprochement between indus-
try and the university seems merely "superfcial" because the
"ideological coming to consciousness here necessitates a rejection
of feminism and radical theory, together with an acceptance and
assimilation of the politics of compromise" (109, 112-13). Ian Carter
also problematizes Lodge's deus ex machina conclusion in Ancient
Cultures of Conceit: British University Fiction in the PostWar Years:

"Lodge restates the Victorian debate about culture and utility," Carter
observes, "but ends with each still in its own box" (256). Finally,
Eagleton contends that "theory and practice can no more combine
politically than they can sexually: at the sexual climax of the work,
there is no real alternative between Vic's Romantic hermeneuticism
- his pathetic over-investment of the event with meaning - and

Robyn's blank postmodernist insistence on its brute, meaningless
factuality" (102).
Each critic astutely recognizes the incapacity of erotic love as a
mechanism for bridging, even metaphorically, the ideological gap
that exists between industry and the academy. As Robert S. Burton
observes: "The title Nice Work might appear to be a self-congratulatory
compliment by the author, in recognition of the fact that he has
manipulated his characters in such a way as to bring them, and
everything they represent, together in a symbolic act of physical
union" (239). But as the novels in Lodge's academic trilogy consist-
ently reveal, romantic love simply lacks the interpretive durability
for mitigating the ideological dilemmas that its semiotic construc-
tion necessarily entails. For Lodge's academic characters, language
lacks the capacity - because of its fundamental indeterminacy - for
communicating desire and establishing genuine interpersonal con-
nection. Consequently, like Swallow, Zapp, and Robyn, the intellectuals
in Lodge's academic novels inevitably choose the professional di-
versions of their vocation over the semiotic contradictions of love.
As Zapp remarks in Small World, "Sex is a sublimation of the work
instinct" (68). While they may dabble temporarily in the discourse
of erotic love, Lodge's academics invariably return to their respec-
tive ideologies and to the composition of scholarly products that
nobody, save for their colleagues, reads or takes seriously. Indeed,
"There are millions of people out there who haven't the slightest
interest in what we do," Robyn pessimistically laments in Nice Work
(151). The intellectual characters in Lodge's novels recognize with
equal cynicism the inadequacy of scholarship as a means for inter-
personal communication among themselves, much less with their
industrial counterparts. For Lodge's academic characters, then, love
functions as a desperate attempt to establish community, no matter
how feeting, with the immutable world that surrounds them. "Love
is neediness, longing, awareness of incompleteness," Allan Bloom
observes in Love and Friendship (1993). "It is a passion of the soul
that palpably and visibly engages the body and points to the union,
however uneasy, of the two" (547). Although erotic love only briefy

sates their desires for romantic connection before the prison-house

of language inevitably traps them in the walls of ineffectual dis-
course, Lodge's scholarly characters nevertheless reach out, time
after time, for the interpersonal nirvana that love promises, yet
never seems to deliver.

7
Performing the Academy: Alterity
and David Mamet's Oleanna

"All one can say of communication and transcendence is
their incertitude""
- Emmanuel Levinas, "Substitution"
In dramatic contrast with David Lodge's academic characters who

engage in seemingly endless quests for romance, the protagonists
in David Mamet's Oleanna (1992) have little use for love within the
more tenuous boundaries of their own, much smaller world" Ut
terly unable to communicate on nearly any meaningful level, Mamet's
characters retreat into their own situational ethos and cede respon
sibility for their predicaments outward to their academic others"
Mamet's pejorative poetics reaches its satirical zenith when he forces
his characters, in the play's fnal act, to confront their expectations
about the intellectual - and, in many instances, social - manna
that they feel the academy s�o�l� be obligated to provide them"
The resulting tension between each of the protagonist's expecta
tions and their inevitable power struggle allows Mamet to establish
the premise for his academic satire in Oleanna" Simply put, the
play illustrates his contention that the ethical dilemmas inherent
in the academy's various hierarchies fnd their origins in a fawed
system for distributing knowledge and creating genuine learning"
While many critics correctly read Oleanna as Mamet's brutal musings
on what he perceives to be the vagueness of sexual harassment and
the ineptitude of political correctness, the play's title pointedly di
rects us to the sacred groves of higher education, the playwright's
principal satirical target"
Oleanna's title originates from a folk story that refers to Ole, a
98

Perforiing t�e ��a�eiy 99
man who purchases swampland with his wife Anna and then sells
it as farmland to unsuspecting buyers willing to risk their life savings
in the transaction" By the time that the wouldbe farmers realize
that Ole and Anna have duped them, the culprits have vanished" 1
Known as the "Oleanna swindle," the couple's shenanigans inspired
the composition of a folk song, which Mamet excerpts as his play's

second epigraph: "Oh, to be in Oleanna,/That's where I would rather
be"/Than be bound in Norway/And drag the chains of slavery" (7)"
The metaphor itself is fairly simple to decipher" For Mamet, the
academy functions as a kind of "Oleanna swindle" in which unsus
pecting consumers literally risk their life savings - or, at the very
least, their intellectual lives - in order to procure a fallacious and
perhaps useless product" Richard Badenhausen astutely reads Mamet's
satire as "a play about teaching, reading, and understanding: how
to do those things well and the consequences of doing them poorly"
As such," Badenhausen adds, "Oleanna offers an ominous commen
tary on education in America and more particularly functions as a
dire warning both to and about those doing the educating" (2)"
For the purposes of this chapter, however, Mamet's frst epigraph,
a quotation from Samuel Butler's T�e Way of �ll Fles� (1903), seems
to imbue Oleanna's satire with perhaps even more signifcance when
understood in terms of the playwright's ethical imperatives: "Young
people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting them
selves to circumstances" Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy
- it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from fnding it
out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their
own sinfulness" (v)" The passage refers to Butler's Pontifex family,
who had - in a line that Mamet slyly omits from his epigraph -
"the best education that could be had for money"" This phrase in
itself offers a fairly obvious indictment of higher education" Yet
Butler's words refer to a more compelling ethical issue, for Mamet
at least, that involves the vagaries of human discourse and the ways
in which we imagine our responsibilities and ethical obligations to
one another" The very fact that young people "can be prevented
from fnding out" - that they can be denied knowledge and that
this act of denial can be carried out by sustaining their own ignor
ance and ceding them the blame for their own lack of knowledge -
occasions a variety of intriguing ethical conficts regarding our
conception of responsibility and obligation" In short, Mamet's play
asks us to consider the ethical roles of these issues in the academy's
economic distribution of knowledge" Are professors required explicitly

to disseminate knowledge or merely to provide direction for their

students' own selfdriven pathways to learning? What, moreover,
are the student's obligations in the educational enterprise? Should
students simply genufect to higher education's wellestablished hi
erarchies or demand that their educators furnish them, in Butler's
phraseology, with "the best education that could be had for money"?

Such philosophically vexed issues as obligation and responsibil
ity are perhaps most usefully considered via Emmanuel Levinas's
conceptions of alterity, contemporary moral philosophy's sine q�a
non for understanding the nature of our innate responsibilities to
our human others" In "Is Ontology Fundamental?" Levinas discusses
the ethical signifcance of other beings in relation to the needs and
desires of ourselves" Our ethical obligations to others, Levinas reasons,
fnd their origins in our inability to erase them via negation" Sim
ply put, unless we succeed in negating others through violence,
domination, or slavery, we must comprehend others as beings par
e��ellen�e who become signifed as "faces," the Levinasian term that
refers to the moral consciousness and particularity inherent in others"
This "primacy of ontology," in Levinas's words, demonstrates the
nature of the collective interrelationships that human beings share
with one another (10)" In "The Trace of the Other," Levinas argues
that "the relationship with the other puts me into question, empties
me of myself" (350)" More importantly for our purposes here, Levinas
describes the concept of the face as "the concrete fgure for alterity"
(qtd" in Robbins, 23)" The notion of alterity itself - which Paul
Laurent Assoun characterizes as "the primal scene of ethics" (96) -
refers to our inherent responsibilities and obligations to the irre
ducible face of the other" These aspects of our human condition
fnd their origins in the recognition of sameness that we fnd in
others" This similarity of identity and human empathy establishes
the foundation for our alterity - in short, the possibility of being
"altered" - and for the responsibilities and obligations that we afford
to other beings"
In Tiie an� t�e Ot�er (1979), Levinas identifes the absolute
exteriority of alterity, as opposed to the binary, dialectic, or recipro
cal structure implied in the idea of the other" Hence, alterity implies
a state of being apprehended, a state of infnite and absolute other
ness" In "Philosophy and the Idea of Infnity," Levinas writes that
"we can say that the alterity of the infnite is not canceled, is not
extinguished in the thought that thinks it" In thinking infnity the I
from the frst t�inks iore t�an it t�inks" Infnity does not enter into

the i�ea of infnity, is not grasped; this idea is not a concept," he

continues" "The infnite is radically, absolutely, other" (54)" Alterity's
boundless possibilities for registering otherness, for allowing us to
comprehend the experiences of other beings, demonstrates its ethical
imperatives" Its exteriority forces us to recognize an ethics of differ
ence and of otherness" Such encounters with other beings oblige us,

then, to incur the spheres of responsibility inherent in our alterity"
When we perceive the face of the other, we can no longer, at least
ethically, suspend responsibility for other beings" In such instances,
Levinas writes in "Meaning and Sense," "the I loses its sovereign
selfconfdence, its identifcation, in which consciousness returns
triumphantly to itself to rest on itself" Before the exigency of the
Other (��tr�i), the I is expelled from this rest and is not the already
glorious consciousness of this exile" Any complacency," he adds,
"would destroy the straightforwardness of the ethical movement" (54)"
In the 1994 flm version of Oleanna, Mamet, as writer an� direc
tor, examines what transpires when his academic characters allow
themselves to comprehend the face of the other" By examining the
nature of the "altered" relationship that exists between his befuddled
protagonists John and Carol, Mamet establishes a kind of ethical
tension between the sense of responsibility inherent in their alterity,
as well as the limits of their capacity for empathizing with - radi
cally or otherwise - the subjective experiences of their counterpart"2
In a far more strident fashion than in the sparse text created for
the original play production of Oleanna, Mamet's flm employs mu
sic and larger theatrical spaces to deliver his ethical pronouncements
upon what he clearly perceives to be the academy's moral failings"
In a number of instances, Mamet's characters seem on the verge of
truly registering the subjective experiences of the other and taking
responsibility for their places in their altered relationship" Yet
Mamet's pejorative poetics - his satiric interest in revealing the
various ways in which his characters ultimately choose the needs
of the self over the perhaps more ethical desires of the other -
underscores his obvious contention that alterity can hardly sustain
itself in an academic world driven by insularity, ideology, and self
interest" By allowing his characters to recognize alterity and then
to replace it once more with their seemingly larger personal or
political ends, Mamet illustrates the ways in which higher education
functions as an "Oleanna swindle" in which its participants eschew
ethics, genuine intellectual growth, and cultural improvement in
favor of their own, ostensibly more urgent desires"

The flm mimics the play via the tripartite structure that separates
each of the three, increasingly volatile encounters between John
(William Macy) and Carol (Debra Eisenstadt)" Drawing upon a wist
ful choral score that laments the passing of an era that is now
"long ago and far away," Mamet's flm establishes an intriguing tex
tual disjunction between a seemingly more innocent past and the

ethically vacant present" The play and flmic versions of the text
take place almost entirely in John's unbelievably spacious offce,
easily the largest of its kind in the history of the professoriate" Yet
Mamet employs nearly every nook and cranny of John's quarters in
order to exploit the various hierarchies that exist between John
and Carol as professor and student, respectively" A junior professor
on the verge of a favorable tenure announcement, John plans to
purchase a new home for himself and his family to celebrate his
expected promotion" As a struggling young student who is failing
one of his courses, Carol surely represents an unlikely obstacle along
John's route to nearly certain scholarly success" Already the author
of a monograph that describes higher education as the "virtual
warehousing of the young" (11), John seems destined for approval
when the tenure committee meets, despite the fact that he despises
them and admits to Carol that he "wouldn't employ [any of the
committee's membership] to wax my car" (23)"
John effects a similarly condescending attitude toward Carol via a
series of hierarchical gestures that he uses during their frst, pro
tracted conversation" In addition to impinging frequently upon Carol's
sense of personal space, John manipulates the scene's power dy
namics in a variety of ways, from his constant refrain of "sit down"
to his multiple interruptions of her questions and even her answers
to questions that he himself poses" The design of John's offce itself
affords him with an assortment of power constructions, including
the institutional capital inherent in the old portraits that adorn the
walls, his array of gilded, timeworn books, and the desks from
which he can sit behind and judge his visitors" In addition to paus
ing occasionally to read during Carol's remonstrations about her
confusion in his class and throughout campus life in general, John
takes numerous phone calls during their (largely oneway) discus
sion and, when he fnally seems to engage in a truly intellectual
exchange with Carol, evinces pity for her with curt, unemotional
and unconvincing remarks such as "I'm sorry for you" and "every
one has problems" (21)" John's condescension for Carol is only
surpassed by his contempt for the academic world itself, especially

in terms of its grading procedures and its "ritualized" place in so

ciety as a form of professional entitlement" In addition to describing
higher education as "somethingotherthanuseful" (28), John views
the academy as a kind of "prolonged and systematic hazing" (35)"
He seems to reserve special contempt for the manner in which it
judges others via exams, grades, and other forms of arbitrary assess

ment: "The tests, you see, which you encounter, in school, in college,
in life, were designed, in the most part for idiots" By idiots," he tells
her" "There is no need to fail at them" They are not a test of your
worth" They are a test of your ability to retain and spout back
misinformation" Of �o�rse you fail them" They're nonsense" (23)"
Rather than removing the communicative barriers that exist be
tween himself and Carol, John's condescending moments in many
ways make it even more diffcult for them to create a rapport" Their
various opportunities for enjoying an altered relationship - for es
tablishing a genuine sense of empathy with one another - evaporate
in Mamet's flm almost as quickly as they arise" Mamet employs a
ringing telephone for precisely this purpose, both in the play and
perhaps even more so in the flm" Clearly meant to signify John's
more signifcant connections with the outside world, the ringing
telephone serves as a device that periodically interrupts John's ca
pacity for communing intellectually with Carol" Their conversations
in the frst segment rarely rise above the level of small talk; much
of the dialogue concerns John's vacillation between leaving to meet
his wife at the house that they are attempting to buy and staying
behind, almost out of a guilty sense of professional duty, to allay
Carol's fears about the course and her larger concerns about aca
demic life" In one notable instance, the ringing telephone interrupts
as a distraught Carol attempts, fnally, to explain the very source of
her fears and confusion: "I always " " " all my life " " " I have never
told anyone this " " " All of my life " " " " (38)"
In other moments, a desperate John chooses poorly in his efforts
to console his student and often sends contradictory signals to Carol
that only function to render her even more confused" At one point,
for example, he tells her, rather sternly, that "I'm not your father"
(9)" When he later places a paternal arm around her shoulder as a
gesture of comfort, Carol is understandably fustered and apprehen
sive" In this manner, one of his rare attempts at comprehending
alterity - although clearly inappropriate in its physicality - is ulti
mately fruitless" Carol's similar attempts on John's behalf prove to
be ineffectual, including her various questions, which go largely

unanswered, about the progression of his tenure process and the

diffculty of his realestate negotiations" Mamet concludes the scene,
rather deftly, with John and Carol sitting in silence moments after
she at last registers genuine empathy for his urgent need to be with
his family: "You have to go" " " " They're proud of you" (40-1)" Al
though their interpersonal relationship has fnally become "altered"

in the Levinasian sense of the phrase, they have nevertheless pierced
the boundaries of the studentteacher relationship on a variety of
occasions, including an awkward moment in which John tells an
inappropriate joke in order to explain the provocative demeanor
that he employs on occasion in the classroom as a rhetorical de
vice: "When I was young somebody told me, are you ready, the
rich copulate less often than the poor" But when they do, they take
more of their clothes off" Years" Years, mind you, I would compare
experiences of my own to this dictum," he continues, "saying, aha,
this fts the norm, or ah, this is a variation from it" What did it
mean? Nothing" It was some jerk thing some school kid told me
that took up room inside my head" (32)"
The silence that concludes the scene, then, seems rather apt, given
John and Carol's various failed attempts at empathy and at altering
their perspectives of one another beyond the more rigid require
ments of the studentteacher relationship" In the wordless montage
that bridges the frst and second segments of the flm, John point
edly sits alone in the new house and sips a warm glass of champagne"
His tenure victory and the purchase of his family's new home seem
to be hollow victories in Mamet's innocuous academic world" In
the flm's second segment, John and Carol appear in more formal
attire" Defending his teaching style, John remarks that "when I found
I loved to teach, I swore that I would not become that cold, rigid
automaton of an instructor which I had encountered as a child""
John quickly shifts the discussion to an allout defense of his drive
for tenure, of which he admits to being "covetous" (43)" He re
marks that "tenure, and security, and yes, and �oifort, were not, of
themselves, to be scorned; and were even worthy of honorable pur
suit" (44)" �iewers - indeed, readers of the text of Mamet's flm -
soon learn that Carol has lodged a formal complaint with John's
tenure committee, alleging that her instructor's behavior includes
inappropriate sexist, elitist, and, by virtue of his aforementioned
joke, pornographic manifestations" Mamet deftly conceals the fact
of Carol's complaint, thus allowing his audience to recognize the
subtle power shifts that have occurred in the interim between

Oleanna's frst and second segments" The effect, although brief in

duration, momentarily destabilizes the viewer's comprehension of
the scene's revised social and gender frameworks"
With the power dynamics in their relationship suddenly skewed,
John attempts to coerce Carol into retracting her complaint by ap
pealing to her sense of empathy" In short, he plans to "alter" her

point of view by asserting his otherness, by forcing Carol to con
front the subjectivity inherent in his Levinasian "face," if you will"
John attempts to accomplish this end by entreating her, at least
initially, to think about the potential damage to his family, as well
as to herself" The process of hearing her complaint, he tells her, is
"l��i�ro�s" Don't you know that? It's not ne�essary" It's going to ��
iiliate you, and it's going to cost me my �o�se" (48)" Her response,
which marks the flm's most signifcant tonal shift, almost irrevo
cably redraws the boundaries of their relationship: "I don't care
what you feel" Do you see? DO YOU SEE? You can't �o that any
more" You" Do" Not" Have" The" Power" (50)" Moments later, John
attempts to reestablish their teacher-student relationship by sug
gesting that their dilemma is nothing more than the byproduct of
spirited academic debate: "You don't have to fght with me," he
tells her" "I'm not the subject" (53)" In concert with the thrust of
Mamet's more implicit critique of the academy, John retreats to his
institutional role in the professoriate as Carol's arguments become
ever more strident and credible"
Yet, tellingly - and every time he seems on the verge of winning
back her sense of empathy - John shortcircuits Carol's capacity for
showing compassion for his increasingly perilous situation via a
variety of rhetorical miscues, particularly through his sexist refer
ence to the tenure committee as "good men and true" - and despite
the fact that the committee includes a female faculty member" The
offhanded and demeaning manner in which John dismisses Carol's
feminist colleagues - "everyone needs advisers" (55) - proves even
more disastrous as it forces her to defend her ideological position
with even greater resolution" Alterity, quite obviously, can hardly
emerge in such an entrenched environment of dogmatism and mis
trust" The second segment concludes, rather aptly, with John once
again invading Carol's personal space as he attempts to restrain her
from leaving in a desperate attempt to compel her to confront the
Levinasian face of his ostensibly altered persona" All the while, he
scarcely begins to glimpse the face of Carol's own being" As the
scene comes to a close, Carol stumbles from John's grasp and escapes

into a hallway flled with passersby who witness - whether rightly

or wrongly, accurately or inaccurately - what appears to be a mem
ber of the college's faculty in the midst of a physical altercation
with a student" In the montage between the flm's second and third
segments, Mamet treats the audience to the image of a forlorn John
accepting room service in a hotel, with all of the attendant impli

cations regarding the state of his married life and the potentially
dismal outcome that awaits his professional career" Meanwhile,
Mamet's camera shifts to Carol, whom we observe in the act of
confdently manufacturing and posting political banners for her
group"3
In sharp contrast with Oleanna's frst scene, in which a wellgroomed
and genteel John sips lazily from an elegant teacup, the flm's fnal
segment depicts the professor as unshaven, disheveled, and ner
vously smoking a cigarette" Conversely, a reserved and resolute Carol
sits before him; clearly, the text's power shift from teacher to stu
dent is complete" In the frst scene, Carol barely spoke, and when
she did, it was merely to evince her confusion" During Oleanna's
fnal segment, Carol controls the pace of much of their conversa
tion, which largely concerns John's imminent dismissal from the
institution" As with the flm's earlier scenes, John eschews the promise
of alterity and blames Carol for various intellectual faws in her
thinking every time that she seems ready to sympathize, if only on
a strictly human level, with his position" Forced, yet again, to de
fend her complaint against him, Carol challenges the academy's
fundamental precepts regarding tenure and its most sacred vestiges
of academic freedom:
Why do you question your suspension? You believe in what yo�

�all freedom of thought" Then, fne" Yo� believe in freedomof
thought an� a home, and, an� prerogatives for your kid, an� tenure"
And I'm going to tell you" You believe not in "freedom of thought,"
but in an elitist, " " " protected hierarchy which rewards you" And
for whom you are the clown" And you mock and exploit the
system which pays your rent" You're wrong" I'm not wrong" " " "
You think that I'm full of hatred" I know what you think I am"
(67-8)
In a maelstrom of language, Mamet's narrative fnally arrives at the

core of his pejorative poetics, which contends that the concept of
academic freedom exists as a pretense upon which functionaries

such as John make their dubious livings" Thunderstruck by the clarity

of her position, John admits that he despises her for causing his
"misfortune" and for effecting the power shift in their institution
ally devised relationship" Moved by his sudden respect for her, Carol
suggests that her group might withdraw their complaint if he would
agree to removing certain books, including his own, from the

university's curriculum"
John's fery response - "You're �angero�s, you're trong, and it's
my job " " " to say no to you" (76) - precipitates the flm's conficted
and complex conclusion in which each character belatedly recog
nizes the extent of the other's being" Wearing the metaphorical robes
of academic freedom, John champions, if only briefy, the rites of
academic freedom against what he perceives to be a cultural on
slaught of political correctness, clearly one of Mamet's satirical targets
in Oleanna" When Carol discovers that John has been living in a
hotel for two days, she fnally empathizes with his predicament
and entreats him to answer his eternally ringing telephone: "You
haven't been home in two days" " " " I think that you should pick up
that phone" (76-7)" Yet once again John and Carol fnd themselves
unable to see the face of the other when larger ideological con
cerns impede their capacity for genuinely communicating" John
subsequently learns that Carol has charged him with attempted rape
because of the altercation that concluded the second segment" Later,
when she scolds him for referring to his wife as "baby" during yet
another telephone call, he erupts in a fury of anger at her ideological
power over him: "You vicious little bitch" You think you can come
in here with your political correctness and destroy my life?" (79)"
In the melee that follows, John attacks Carol physically, verging
upon doing much more serious harm to her" As she cowers on the
foor, Carol repeats, as if in a trance, "Yes" That's right" (80)"4
While Carol's fnal words in the flm and John's subsequently
stunned reaction at his own, terrible capacity for violence seem to
suggest a belated recognition of each other's otherness, Mamet's
pejorative poetics surely argues for a more damning conclusion about
higher education's penchant for political correctness and its ram
pant intellectualism in a world that so often demands more nuanced
and pragmatic solutions" Perhaps more signifcantly, as an academic
satire, Mamet's Oleanna seeks to depict the university as an ethi
cally problematic environment in which alterity ceases to be possible"
How, indeed, could the bifurcated world of his text ever hope to
establish a frmament of hope, empathy, and reconciliation? Oleanna

posits no easy answers to the fractious issues that it proposes" Rather,

Mamet's narrative dares us to consider our own obligations and
responsibilities in the context of Oleanna's overtly drawn portrait
of academic disjunction" In S�a�ots of �t�i�s� Criti�isi an� t�e J�st
So�iety (1999), Geoffrey Galt Harpham observes that "ethics does
not solve problems, it structures them" (37)" In his own, fairly un

subtle fashion, Mamet attempts in Oleanna to construct new dialogues
about what amount to remarkably old problems regarding elitism,
gender dynamics, and ideological entrenchment"5

8
Campus Xenophobia and the
Multicultural Project: Ishmael

Reed's Japanese by Spring
"Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and

useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as
healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment."
- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
Although ethical criticism offers a valuable discourse for exploring

concepts of community, goodness, and love and their centrality in
the moral construction of literary works, it also provides us with a
useful methodology for considering the function of these philo
sophical constructs in regard to the most fractious issues that confront
the academy today, the especially divisive notions of culture and
race. As Samuel Fleischacker perceptively observes in The Ethics of
Culture (1994), "Writers on culture usually show little understand
ing of what makes an argument or decision ethical, while writers
on ethics have rarely done much serious thinking about culture"
(ix). Because issues associated with racial prejudice and cultural div
ision continue to plague our postsecondary institutions, they merit
particular attention in any study of contemporary academic fction.
The ethical interpretation of these enduring social dilemmas in novels
about university life also underscores the tremendous ideological
gulf that exists between monoculturalism and multiculturalism,
the two disparate schools of thought that dominate the intellectual
conversation regarding these subjects. The controversial emergence
of the multicultural project in recent decades - as well as the ensu
ing "culture wars" that bifurcated the national debate over higher
109

110 Posttar Academic Fiction
education during the late 1980s and early 1990s - demonstrates the
incendiary nature of the scholarly and media response to the
multiculturalist agenda for engendering an atmosphere of pluralism
and racial and cultural inclusiveness in our institutions of higher
education.
In Japanese by Spring (1993), Ishmael Reed satirically illustrates

the social and intellectual rancor that accompanied the localization
of the culture wars during the early 1990s. In addition to depicting
the divergent nuances of the scholarly response to multiculturalism,
Reed's novel offers a blistering attack upon the various cultural and
racial factions of the academy and the bankrupt value systems that
he critiques from within its hallowed corridors. Reed's academic
satire intersects a number of signifcant intellectual issues, more
over, including the ethics of multiculturalism, the dangers inherent
in the monoculturalist position, and fnally, the fundamental no
tions of authorship and narrative authority. By approaching his text
from so many disparate perspectives, Reed demonstrates the ways
in which racism and cultural exclusion infect our institutions of
higher learning from a wide range of often unexpected locales. In
this manner, Reed posits his own notion of a pejorative poetics
because his narrative in Japanese by Spring consistently problematizes
the ethical stances of his academic characters in the novel, espe
cially those fgures who champion the tenets of monoculturalism.
In his essay, "Soyinka among the Monoculturalists," for example,
Reed reveals his particular antipathy for academics who deride the
pluralistic intentions of the multicultural project: "I distrust the
monoculturalists' point of view so much that when they praise some
thing I become suspicious," he writes, "and when they condemn
something, I feel that there must be something praiseworthy about
it" (211). In his Introduction to Multi-Ethnic America: Essays on Cul-
tural Wars and Cultural Peace (1997), Reed describes monoculturalism
as an "antiintellectual coalition" that frequently employs dubious
phraseology about a "common culture" in order to resist the ethical
mandates of multiculturalism (xvii).
Reed's caustic misgivings regarding monoculturalism typify his
satiric attacks on the academy in Japanese by Spring, likewise under
scoring his implicit support for the multicultural project and its
socially and racially inclusive agenda for higher education. Multi
culturalism fnds its particular scholarly roots in the academic desire
to broaden our approach to a wide range of national cultures and
literatures, to represent the diversity of humankind rather than simply

Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project 111
validating the cultural achievements of its most powerful and re

sourceful progeny. In this way, the multicultural project attempts to
undo the insular shackles of ethnocentrism, a cultural phenomenon
"rooted in the impossibility of escaping from one's experience,"
Jaime S. Wurzel writes (6). Adopting the values of a multicultural
education, however, allows us to recognize the array of cultural

nuances that comprise the human community and its artistic and
historical accomplishments, thus, as Wurzel observes, "expanding
our cultural vision to provide us with the ability to become multi
cultural individuals in a multicultural world" (3). Multiculturalism
also seeks to reshape our pedagogical approach to cultural studies,
an educational domain once exclusively perceived in terms of the
hegemony of Western culture and history. "The prose and poetry,
the narratives and theories, the conceptual structures and method
ologies of Western Culture that the curriculum was expected to hand
down to future generations," Jane Roland Martin argues, "were
authored by the educated white man, for the educated white man,
and about the educated white man and his world or, if about other
people and other worlds, from his perspective" (151). By endeavoring
to operate from a broad perspective, the multicultural project - with
its express emphasis upon the pluralistic needs of a human culture
that fnds its origins in diversity and difference - resists the politics
of cultural exclusion to embrace instead a policy of inclusiveness
and tolerance.
Like the ethical paradigm, multiculturalism - in its effort to
provide readers with a textual approach that allows for the hetero
geneity that characterizes the human community - operates from a
critical stance marked by its desire for celebrating pluralism and
universalism. As David A. Hollinger remarks in Postethnic America:
Beyond Multiculturalism (1995): "The oncepopular notion that there
might be an American character or even culture was widely dis
credited as a nationalist equivalent of a universalism understood
to deny diversity" (64). By acknowledging such a vast range of
cultural differences, multiculturalism addresses the notions of indi
viduality and autonomy that distinguish our experiences. "Di
versity of cultures is exactly what is most distinctive about
the human species," Michael Novak observes, because "it fows
from human freedom; it expresses human sociality" (451). Inter
preted in this manner, multiculturalism seems peculiarly ethical. Like
ethical criticism, it attempts to provide readers with a means for
establishing vital interconnections between texts and the heterogeneous

community in which we live. As David B. Wong astutely notes:

"One need not be a skeptic or relativist to recognize moral accom
modation as an important value that has frequent application to
our lives" (22).
Although an affnity for pluralism undergirds the moral philoso
phies of both multiculturalism and ethical criticism, Jeremy Waldron

reminds us that pluralism functions as the expansive mindset that
makes the multicultural project possible. "To say that a society is
pluralistic is not the same as saying it is multicultural: pluralism
may relate to individual lifestyles, vocations, religious faiths, ethics,
politics, and experiences, with no assumption that these differences
coalesce into the shared and abiding entities we call Icultures,'"
Waldron remarks. "Pluralism is the genus," he adds, while "cultural
diversity is a species of it" (96). Multicultural education, then, pro
vides teachers with a valuable avenue for underscoring the merits
of pluralism and the humanistic benefts of exploring cultural differences.1
"Multicultural education," David T. Abalos writes in Strategies of
Transformation totard a Multicultural Society (1996), "seeks to restore
the integrity of the curriculum by taking seriously the scholarship
of all groups in our nation" (98). Furthermore, a pedagogy that avails
itself of the merits of multiculturalism necessarily sanctions the
celebration of cultural identity and diversity.2 "Multiculturalism,"
Fleischacker notes, "is an ideal that requires going beyond one's
own position" (216). Like the proponents of the ethical paradigm,
multiculturalism's advocates recognize the humanistic value of plu
ralism and the selfrefexive manner in which autonomous individuals
approach works of literary art. Similarly, multiculturalists comprehend
the ethical dimensions of literary studies and their signifcance to
our understanding of the human community.
Reed's efforts in support of the multicultural project manifest them
selves in his satiric novels directed toward the American institutions
that, at least in Reed's estimation, bear the responsibility for the
nation's bankrupt cultural value systems.3 Yet Reed's narratives fre
quently confound readers because of his intentional elevation of
ideology over character in his fctions. The unusual brand of satire
that marks Reed's narratives fnds its roots in his aesthetic of Neo
HooDooism, which, in the words of Jay Boyer, "refers to those forces
which do not lend themselves to an understanding through reason"
(8). A complex amalgamation of historical, cultural, and artistic
elements, HooDoo perceives the dangerous ways in which social
institutions invariably displace, and ultimately control, individual

identity through their collective power. In a 1972 interview with

John O'Brien, Reed describes his narrative approach:
When I say that I am working on a "hoodoo" aesthetic I know

I'm serious and I know what I'm talking about and this falls in
line with that. They have in Voodoo a thing they call gros-bon-

ange, and the gros-bon-ange is that which separates from the person
after death. It carries all of his essential elements, the qualities
that make him unique from other individuals. And this is what I
try to do. I'm not interested in rendering a photograph of a person.
I'm interested in capturing his soul and putting it in a cauldron
or in a novel. (35)
In this manner, Reed attempts to reinvigorate fctionally the cultural

and moral life of the individual in the face of an omnipresent Western
culture. Yet "the evils Reed attacks are not just AfricanAmerican
problems," Kathryn Hume writes, because "his focus on control
demonstrates that he belongs to a group of bitter satirists - female
and male, black and white - whose experience with cultural lies
appalls them" (516). Reed's especially volatile form of satire seeks
to expose the ways in which institutions, particularly academic and
governmental bodies, abuse their missions in order to maintain their
circles of power and fulfll the personal ambitions of their leaders.
"A selfproclaimed saboteur of historical orthodoxy," according to
Julian Cowley (1236), Reed explores a variety of satiric targets in
Japanese by Spring, a novel that traces Benjamin "Chappie" Puttbutt's
quest for tenure on the campus of Jack London College, a den of
racism and monocultural education in Oakland, California. Puttbutt
encounters racial and cultural prejudice in nearly every quarter
of the institution, from the jingoistic student newspaper and the
monolithic administration to the exclusionary Department of African
American Studies and the ironically named Department of
"Humanity." In Ishmael Reed and the Net Black Aesthetic Critics (1988),
Reginald Martin writes: "As satire is usually based on real types,
Reed draws from history and the news as nonfctional events to
satirize America's monocultural arrogance and the price paid in
the face of that arrogance by those who are not Ivital people,' that
is, a member of the dominant culture or the moneyed class" (108).
In Japanese by Spring, however, institutional power infuses the policy
makers and intellectual gatekeepers of Jack London College with
the "vitality" of which Martin speaks, although this state of affairs

suddenly ends with the purchase of the college by a Japanese con

glomerate that subsequently initiates a devastating program of cultural
redefnition on campus.4
As this chapter will show, Reed's depiction of Jack London College's
existing racial problems - later compounded by the cultural dilemmas
that accompany the Japanese occupation of the institution - reveals

his interest in highlighting the ways in which any monoculturalist
ideology ultimately results in racist and culturally exclusive policies.
In this way, Reed offers a scathing commentary on the insular, self
serving philosophy of multiculturalism's opponents. An ethical reading
of Japanese by Spring demonstrates the manner in which Reed
implicitly composes a moral corrective for the cultural infractions
of the monoculturalist agenda. Because of its emphasis upon repairing
the cultural and social injustices of the human community, ethical
criticism possesses the capacity for producing meaningful critiques
of narratives such as Reed's Japanese by Spring that confront the
moral challenges inherent in contemporary academic life. Because
of Reed's own interest in satirizing monoculturalism and the unethical
manner in which ideological regimes enforce compliance with their
political and cultural agendas, ethical criticism provides a particularly
useful method for reading Japanese by Spring.
Ethical criticism offers a powerful mechanism, moreover, for ex
plaining the manner in which Reed's HooDoo aesthetic operates in
his fctions as an unconventional means for capturing a given
character's essence in order to satisfy the novelist's satirical aims.
Reed's commitment to the HooDoo aesthetic - and its emphasis
upon ideology over character - produces many of the reading
diffculties that often antagonize and alienate his audience. In con
trast with many practitioners of the academic novel, Reed employs
his characters as onedimensional vessels for his critiques of
monoculturalism and university life. Unlike David Lodge's Philip
Swallow - one of the multidimensional characters from Lodge's trilogy
of academic novels, Changing Places: a Tale of Tto Campuses (1975),
Small World: an Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1988) -
Puttbutt functions as the onedimensional vehicle for Reed's satire
in Japanese by Spring. While Lodge revels in his characters' inter
personal experiences and satirizes academic life via their adventures
at scholarly conferences and as they pursue the latest intellectual
trends, Reed manipulates the deliberately fat characters of his fctions
in order to achieve his narrative objectives. For Lodge, academic
characters such as Swallow and Morris Zapp provide him with

opportunities for satirizing academic life as they eagerly divert them

selves with the triviality of departmental infghting, pedantic scholarly
debate, and an unceasing tide of international conferences and clan
destine affairs. In Japanese by Spring, Reed employs his literary
characters as ideological types - or, in the case of Puttbutt, as ideo
logical ciphers via which the novelist can contrast the exclusionary

politics of monoculturalism with the pluralist aims of multiculturalism.
Because Reed eschews conventional characterization in favor of the
depiction of the HooDoo essences of his characters, the symbolic
representations of his protagonists and the ideological impact of
the rhetoric and images that they encounter take on greater
signifcance in his fctions.
In Japanese by Spring, Puttbutt - an AfricanAmerican junior pro
fessor at Jack London College and a product of the affrmativeaction
era - adopts an accommodationist attitude in order to secure tenure
from the institution's predominantly white power structure. In
addition to questioning the ethical stances of the institutional forces
that seek to derail Puttbutt's campaign for tenure at Jack London
College, Reed critiques Puttbutt's selfeffacing motives when the
Japanese regime engages in its own monocultural power play with
his apparently eager support. A former Black Panther, erstwhile
chairperson of the black caucus at the Air Force Academy, and the
author of a Master's thesis in which he traces instances of racism
in Shakespeare's Othello, Puttbutt abandons his progressive racial
agenda when he arrives at Jack London College in an effort to curry
the favor of the institution's largely white administration, a coterie
of rightwing intellectuals led by President Bright Stool, allegedly
hired by the Board of Trustees "because he vowed to put an end to
capricious demands for a global university" (41). As the narrative
of Japanese by Spring unfolds, Puttbutt enjoys a substantial inter
national reputation as the author of the recent bestseller, Blacks,
America's Misfortune, a volume in which he inaugurates his persona
as an AfricanAmerican apologist. "We blacks must buckle down
so that the whites will respect us," he tells a television reporter.
"Unless we do so, we will become like some of our less fortunate
brothers and sisters; part of a permanent underclass." In this
way, Puttbutt registers his racially stylized image as a "team player."
"He hoped that those who were about to reward him lifetime
security were listening," Reed writes of Puttbutt's television inter
view, and that they "would read these quotes. Would respect
him. Would award him tenure" (18-19). Despite the publication of

numerous critical articles and frequent invitations to participate in

European speaking engagements - lectures that, remarkably, account
for more than twenty percent of his income - Puttbutt seems un
able to earn tenure among his less prolifc, and often less celebrated,
colleagues.5
As the meeting of Puttbutt's tenure committee approaches, he

intensifes his efforts to win support from the college's largely white
establishment, as well as from the powerful chairman of the
Department of AfricanAmerican Studies, Dr. Charles Obi, and Jack
London College's most generous alumnus, Robert Bass, Sr. Although
Dr. Jack Milch, chairman of the Department of Humanity, reassures
Puttbutt about the prospects of his upcoming tenure hearing, the
junior professor becomes concerned during his visit with Milch
because of his senior colleague's overt feminist posturing. While in
Milch's offce, "Puttbutt noticed that the entire walls were covered
with photos of Anita Hill," Reed writes. "Every inch. Covers of
magazines with Anita Hill's picture. Newspaper clippings" (22). Puttbutt
also sees volumes of verse on Milch's desk by April Jokujoku, a
prominent AfricanAmerican feminist rumored to be considering a
lucrative position at Jack London College. While Puttbutt prepares
for his visit with Dr. Obi, Effe Singleton, one of the chairman's
numerous secretaries, warns Puttbutt about impending budget cuts
and the fragility of his position on campus: "The word is," she tells
him, "that they're going to bring in April Jokujoku to take your
job" (27). During his visit with Dr. Obi, a monoculturalist prac
titioner of Afrocentrism and an advocate of the African language of
Yoruba, Puttbutt endures a lecture from the senior professor regard
ing his "counterproductive" behavior. "Man, you one serious
motherfucker," Obi observes; "you never come to the black faculty
cocktail parties, and the liberals in the Humanity department say
that you don't mix with them. How do you expect to get ahead if
you're not collegial�" Obi exclaims (31). Rather than merely focusing
on Puttbutt's response to his senior colleagues' remonstrations, Reed
concentrates our attention instead upon the monoculturalist parallels
between Milch's accommodationist rhetoric - evidenced most
notably by the conspicuous images of Hill and the prominently
placed volume of Jokujoku's poetry - and Obi's strident Afrocentrism.
By highlighting these signifers of academic power and acceptance
against the fat contrast of Puttbutt's onedimensional character, Reed
succeeds in demonstrating the junior professor's tenuous position
in the academy.

In his abiding effort to win tenure at any cost, Puttbutt also tacitly
contributes to the college's racial malaise through his regressive
accommodationist persona. In the classroom, for example, he only
tolerates the outrageous, white supremacist behavior of Robert Bass,
Jr., so as not to antagonize his student's father, the powerful owner
of Oakland's multinational Caesar Synthetics and the college's most

spirited patron. Sporting a shaved head and wearing a swastika
armband, Bass, Jr., frequently disrupts Puttbutt's lectures with racial
diatribes. He also irritates the junior professor through his prejudicial
caricatures of Puttbutt in the college's rightwing newspaper, �oons
and �ikes. Yet the administration of Jack London College remains
"reluctant to discipline some of the rightwing students," Reed notes,
"because the students received full backing from rightwing corpor
ations and law frms" (14). Reed's depictions of student racism in
the postcivilrights era fnd their origins in the cultural and political
realities of contemporary postsecondary institutions. As Shelby Steele
observes: "What has emerged on campus in recent years - as a
result of the new equality and of affrmative action and, in a sense,
as a result of progress - is a politics of difference, a troubling, volatile
politics in which each group justifes itself, its sense of worth and
its pursuit of power, through difference alone" (178).
Yet Puttbutt's singleminded drive for tenure prompts him to
remain silent regarding Jack London College's own "politics of differ
ence," to operate instead as an apologist for racial unrest on campus.
During his television interview, for instance, the junior professor
effects a frown of concern to underscore the gravity of the college's
racial conficts, while simultaneously undermining the progressive
efforts of AfricanAmerican students in order to bolster his personal
crusade for job security by currying the favor of the white campus
power structure:
"The black students bring this on themselves," he said, sucking

on a menthol cigarette. . . . "With their separatism, their inability
to ft in, their denial of mainstream values, they get the white
students angry. The white students want them to join in, to par
ticipate in this generous pie called the United States of America.
To end their disaffliation from the common culture. Black students,
and indeed black faculty, should stop their confrontational tactics.
They should start to negotiate. They should stop worrying these
poor whites with their excessive demands. Affrmative action.
�uotas. They get themselves worked up. And so it's understandable

that they go about assaulting the black students. The white students
are merely giving vent to their rage." (6)
By coldly accepting the white students' racist behavior as the natural

product of their anger and racial animus, Puttbutt abdicates his ethnic
identity for the express purpose of securing lifetime employment

among the culturally and ethically fractured environs of Jack London
College, as well as for the possibility of someday having the fnancial
capacity to live among the college elite in posh Oakland Hills, the
predominantly white neighborhood overlooking the campus. Yet
community, Lawrence Blum warns, "should not come at the ex
pense of racial justice and cultural identity" (200). In Puttbutt's
ethically challenged world, however, the interpersonal consequences
of his rage for professional acceptance seem insignifcant in com
parison with his desire to align himself with the prevailing ideology.
Puttbutt supplements his tireless enthusiasm for tenure with his
study of the Japanese language, an enterprise that he began in Colo
rado Springs during his tour of duty with the Air Force. He believes
that knowledge of Japanese will provide him with the key to his
future, although he sycophantically tells Dr. Marsha Marx, the head
of the Women's Studies department, that he wants to learn Japanese
in order to translate the verse of "some medieval women court
poets" (58). In fact, "Puttbutt fgured that with Japanese under his
belt he would adjust to the new realities of the coming postsettler
era," Reed writes, "a time when the domination of the United States
by people of the same background would come to an end" (47). In
this way, Reed demonstrates Puttbutt's secret accord with the
multicultural project, despite his monocultural public persona. While
awaiting the college's tenure decision, Puttbutt travels weekly to
downtown Oakland, where he studies Japanese with Dr. Yamato,
the tutor who introduces the junior professor to Japanese by Spring,
Puttbutt's textbook for his language studies, as well as the Urtext of
Reed's novel. 6 Puttbutt feels that he can acquire Japanese as easily
as he had once mastered the artifce of literary criticism: "All you
had to do was string together some quotes from Benjamin, Barthes,
Foucault, and Lacan and you were in business," Puttbutt muses (49).
Despite the assurances from the chairpersons of the AfricanAmerican
Studies, Women's Studies, and Humanity departments, the college,
fulflling Effe's covert prophecy, ultimately denies Puttbutt the
tenure that he so covets, although "they hoped that he would
continue on the yeartoyear basis and that they felt him to be an

asset to the department" (69). His anger reaches a fever pitch as

he recounts his recent, blasphemous activities on behalf of job
security - "denouncing affrmative action, criticizing blacks for
exploiting white guilt." He remembers writing an editorial against
divestment in South Africa; he also recalls arguing that "racism was
an illusion" (70). He becomes further outraged when he learns

that the administration has utilized the savings from his chimerical
promotion in order to procure the services of Jokujoku, who will
be appointed full professor in the departments of Women's Studies
and AfricanAmerican Studies at the dazzling sum of �150,000 per
semester. The college also promises her an array of computer equip
ment, two secretaries, a bodyguard, and a mountain retreat - fringe
benefts awarded to Jokujoku in spite of the fact, Reed ironically
observes, "that her whole pitch was about the oppression of underclass
females in the ghettos" (32).7 Puttbutt's own accommodations at the
college amounted to a poorly lit offce that he shared with the other
lecturers and two teaching assistants. After learning about Jokujoku's
appointment, Puttbutt drowns his sorrows, appropriately enough,
in several bottles of sake. Again, such scenes resonate - not because
of Reed's deliberately indifferent narration of Puttbutt's supreme
moment of emotional crisis - but rather, because of the novelist's
overt description of the symbolic nuances of cultural power and
ideology. By contrasting Jokujoku's astonishing fringe benefts
with the junior professor's lowly professional accommodations, Reed
highlights the power discrepancies engendered by policies of
monoculturalism.
When Puttbutt returns to Jack London College after a long night
of turmoil in which he symbolically tries on his old Black Panther
beret, he discovers an institution at sea in its own identity crisis.
During the night, an unidentifed Japanese organization purchases
the college for �100 million. The Japanese occupation of Jack London
College and their subsequently radical redefnition of its mission,
its culture, and its curriculum provides Reed with a valuable means
for demonstrating the dangerous results of a monoculturalist agenda.
The cultural redefnition of the college by the Japanese also allows
Reed to underscore the awesome capacity of racial difference as a
mechanism for effecting cultural change. "Race is, by any standard,
an unprincipled source of power," Steele notes, "and on campuses
the use of racial power by one group makes racial, ethnic, or gender
difference a currency of power for all groups" (182). By depicting
the Japanese in the act of reshaping the institution in their cultural

and historical image, moreover, Reed underscores the derogatory

core of racism and its penchant for asserting the superiority of one
race over another. As Mitchell Silver observes: "Racism holds that
some human groups, defned by their nationality, language, culture,
ancestry, or belief systems, are biologically incapable of certain cultural
achievements or certain forms of social life" (53). As practitioners

of biological racism, the Japanese in Reed's satire reveal the ways
in which a monocultural ideology must reconfgure both the historical
past and the political landscape of the present in order to implement
their program of cultural redefnition.
Capitalizing on his anger against the existing administrative
establishment of Jack London College, the Japanese cleverly choose
Puttbutt as the vehicle for their monocultural ideology. After being
mysteriously summoned to the president's house, Puttbutt discovers
the identity of the college's new president, Dr. Yamato, his language
tutor. Having forced President Stool into early retirement, Yamato
shares with Puttbutt his agenda for "civilizing" the faculty and
students of Jack London College. "The reason that the Americans
are so backward is because of what they call their core curriculum,"
he tells Puttbutt. "We will help them. . . . Show them that there are
some things that all educated people must know in order to be
culturally literate," he continues. "�et them to realize that there's
more to life than Captain Video" (89). After appointing Puttbutt as
his second in command and rewarding him with a spacious offce,
Yamato outlines his plans for altering the college's cultural philoso
phy. In addition to proposing the dismissal of many of Puttbutt's
colleagues, Yamato intends to shut down the Department of
Humanity, while collapsing the departments of African Studies, Chicano
Studies, AsianAmerican Studies, NativeAmerican Studies, and
AfricanAmerican Studies into a single unit, the Department of
European Studies. Yamato also wishes to eliminate the study of Plato,
Milton, and, most notably, Hegel - "This ignorant man maintained
that the Chinese had no philosophy. What rubbish," he bellows.
"The entire history of Western philosophy could be covered in one
week" (90-1). By concentrating our attention upon the manner in
which the culturally insular practices of one regime beget those of
another, Reed demonstrates the ways in which unregulated bastions
of power quickly avail themselves of monoculturalism's politics of
hegemony.
Puttbutt engages in the process of culturally redefning Jack Lon
don College with unchecked, vengeful glee. He revels in delight,

for example, as he informs Dr. Obi and Dr. Milch of the new status
of their departments on campus. He particularly enjoys demoting
Professor Crabtree, whom he correctly credits with undermining
his tenure case, to a lectureship in freshman composition. "Chappie
was so happy," Reed writes, "that he was beside himself" (132). As
he informs each faculty member about their altered professional

status on campus under the Japanese regime, Puttbutt cheerfully
presents each stunned employee with a copy of Japanese by Spring.
In one instance, Puttbutt fnds special satisfaction in a visit from
Robert Bass, Sr., who apologizes for his son's white supremacist be
havior and indentures Bass, Jr., into functioning as Puttbutt's servant.
As a New Critic, Puttbutt takes particular pleasure in the dismissal
of Jack London College's a�ant-garde literary theorists:
He had sent a letter to the campus deconstructionists, informing

them of their termination. The letters said you're fred. Those
who believed that the words "you're fred" meant exactly that
could fnish the semester. Those who felt that the words only
referred to themselves would have to leave immediately. (132)
In addition to satirizing the unethical ways in which Yamato's

regime implements the tutor's monocultural program of Japanese
acculturation on campus, Reed clearly questions the spiteful man
ner in which Puttbutt effects his revenge upon the former elite of
Jack London College. Reed further underscores the dangers of
monoculturalism by illustrating Puttbutt's enthusiastic absorption
of Yamato's cultural doctrine for the express purpose of possessing
institutional power.
In addition to renaming the institution after a Japanese war criminal,
Yamato disbands the college newspaper and removes the giant statue
of Jack London from its esteemed place in the center of campus. He
also changes the name of the Student Union building to Isoroku
Yamamoto Hall in honor of the mastermind behind the Japanese
invasion of Pearl Harbor. As one faculty member remarks about the
new profle of Jack London College, "It's become nothing but an
indoctrination center for Japanese propaganda" (153). Yamato later
institutes a culturally skewed I� test for the college's faculty and
students, while also expelling all Americanborn Chinese and Japa
nese students because he believes that they might act as agents for
American interests. Rumors also persist that Yamato tortures student
dissenters and drafts attractive coeds into service as geisha girls. 8

After most of the college's faculty and student population fail the
I� test, Yamato considers hiring an entirely Japanese professoriate.
"Maybe Americans should be put to work at things that will not
strain their capacities," Yamato argues, "wrapping packages and opening
doors for their betters, or ladling out ice cream, taking hotel reser
vations lest they become a permanent underclass among developing

nations" (145). Even Puttbutt fnds himself increasingly unable to
fathom the rightwing fanaticism of Yamato's rage for a Japanese
culture unadulterated by the excesses of Western life and thought.
"Homogeneous," Reed writes, "Puttbutt was having a humongous
pain from this word" (108).
As Yamato's radical monoculturalist agenda becomes even more
pronounced on the former campus of Jack London College, the
national news media and the American intelligentsia begin to respond
to the tutor's despicable campaign against pluralism and diversity.
Yamato's culturally regressive antics particularly vex the multicultural
sensibilities of the public persona of Ishmael Reed, who appears as
a character within his own narrative. As the antithesis of Roland
Barthes's late author who "enters into his own death" when "writing
begins" (142), Reed appears in Japanese by Spring as a fully realized
representation of his biographical self. "Remember," Reed playfully
remarks, "the author was dead in the age of theory" (129). Reed not
only undermines traditional conceptions of authority, but also pro
vides himself with yet another voice for registering his disgust with
any culturally exclusive program, especially one as derisive and
unsettling as Yamato's.9 Reed's narrative self operates, moreover, as
the author's personal forum for undergirding his satire with several
useful anecdotes regarding the value of the multicultural project,
while also providing readers with an ethical corrective for Puttbutt's
perfunctory efforts on behalf of Yamato's monocultural redefnition
of Jack London College.
Reed's narrative counterpart makes his most dramatic appearance
during a visit to the college's Faculty Club, where he encounters an
ebullient Puttbutt at the height of his powers as Yamato's right
hand man. Puttbutt had once written a book review of one of the
fctive Reed's novels during his era as an AfricanAmerican apolo
gist. "For those looking for plot, character development, and logic,
skip this one," Puttbutt writes about Reed's work. In addition to
observing the fawning manner in which Puttbutt's colleagues
parade about him, Reed's visit to the Faculty Club allows him to
report on the evolution of the junior professor's formerly polemical

cultural mindset. "I'm not taking sides anymore," Puttbutt informs

Reed; "from now on my policy is one of enlightened selfinterest."
Puttbutt later tells the novelist about his dream of someday owning
a palatial estate in Oakland Hills, while also regaling Reed with his
cultural vision of the future. "This is the book that got me to where
I am now," he tells the novelist after giving him a copy of Japanese

by Spring. "You'd better get with it brother," Puttbutt continues,
because "the twentyfrst century is going to be a yellow century."
Reed's fctive counterpart departs the Faculty Club in a state of
confusion regarding Puttbutt's cultural development: "This man who
was a oneman black public relations department on behalf of Western
civilization was now a big Asia booster," the bewildered novelist
muses (131).
Reed's fctional visit with Puttbutt underscores the wide spectrum
of the junior professor's cultural state of mind, an intellectual progress
that catapults Puttbutt from Black Panther to AfricanAmerican apolo
gist to, fnally, a selfinterested, ethically vacant capitalist. Reed's
appearance as a character in the novel also allows him, as author,
to extol the humanistic benefts of multiculturalism, while simulta
neously demonstrating what he considers to be the antipluralistic
agendas of women's studies, Afrocentrism, and Eurocentrism, among
other biological and cultural biases. Yet, as Robert Elliot Fox argues
in Conscientious Sorcerers (1987), the "danger for Reed" in presenting
his public self in his fctions "is that of selfcaricature" (6). A number
of instances in the novel indeed seem to lend credence to Fox's
assertion. At one juncture, for example, Reed writes: "Ishmael Reed
was wondering was there no end to the sacrifces he would be
called upon to make on behalf of Western civilization" (200). In
other moments he refers to himself as "a real Ishmaelite" (46) and
"Dear I. R." (187). Unfortunately, Reed's fctional appearance in
Japanese by Spring threatens to dilute his very meaningful message
regarding the dangers of monoculturalism. As Tsunehiko Kato astutely
remarks: "What troubles me about Reed's position is not that he
criticizes Eurocentrists, Afrocentrists, or accommodationists among
black intellectuals, but rather the way in which he creates the
impression that he is the only one doing the right thing" (127).
Reed's activities as a literary character allow him, as a matter of
course, to privilege his multicultural agenda over the ethically and
culturally questionable voices, at least in his estimation, that he
wishes to critique, particularly those of the feminist movement. Like
Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, Reed vilifes feminism for the exclusive

nature of what he believes to be its monocultural cause. Reed's attacks

upon feminist ideology receive special attention in Sandra M. �ilbert
and Susan �ubar's �etters from the Front (1994). �ilbert and �ubar
object to the ways in which the protagonists of Reed's fctions "re
taliate against ferocious, predatory feminists who appear to have
abrogated the pacts between the sexes and the generations" (357-8).

Reed's acerbic characterization of Jokujoku, her outlandish appoint
ment at Jack London College, and the marginalization of Puttbutt
in order to satisfy her staggering fnancial demands seem to truly
support �ilbert and �ubar's conclusion. In his review of Japanese by
Spring, Kato similarly admonishes Reed for failing "to do justice to
black women writers who deserve credit for raising the level of
current debates" (127). Yet Reed ascribes his satire of the feminist
movement to his express interest in challenging what he perceives
to be its demonization of the AfricanAmerican male. "I have always
had a suspicion," he remarks in a 1993 interview with Bruce Dick,
"that black men have been singled out by the white feminist move
ment to bear the burden of misogyny" (345). In addition to describing
the feminist treatment of AfricanAmerican male culture as "barbarism,"
Reed defends his enduring battle with the feminist movement as an
effort "to try and keep an AfricanAmerican male heritage intact"
(348-9). Reed's elevation of ideology over character in his fctions
in order to deliver his cultural salvos clearly succeeds in alienating
various social and ethnic factions of his potential readership. Yet
his scathing depiction of the powerful trappings of cultural hegemony
allows him to underscore the tenuous spaces inhabited by charac
ters like Puttbutt who - despite his overt willingness to accommodate
the whims of any dominant ideology in Japanese by Spring - never
truly succeed in walking amongst the privileged corridors of cultural
and institutional power.
In this way, Reed reminds us of the inherent dangers of any agenda
that neglects to avail itself of the values of inclusiveness and plu
ralism. While the harshness of Reed's critiques of feminism often
results in his own vilifcation as a misogynist, his skepticism about
the feminist movement's neglect of the culture of AfricanAmerican
men emerges from his distaste for any even remotely monoculturalist
ideology. For this reason, Reed consistently challenges the agenda
of Afrocentrism in Japanese by Spring. In addition to mocking Dr.
Obi's adoption of the Yoruba tongue, Reed infuses the latter half of
his narrative with liberal doses of Yoruba phraseology reproduced
without the beneft of English translation. Through his depiction of

the Yoruba language, Reed implicitly demonstrates the exclusionary

nature of any unfamiliar dialect, and likewise, what he believes to
be the monoculturalist ideology of Afrocentrism.10 Although Reed
clearly problematizes the cultural singularity of the Afrocentric
movement, he recognizes nevertheless the precarious social status
of African Americans in the present day - an uncertain social position

that Reed illustrates through his intentionally fat characterization
of Puttbutt. As Lucius T. Outlaw cautions, "The increasing social
diversity and complexity in America being played out in the debate
and efforts regarding multiculturalism present the challenge of once
again having to work out what it means to be African and American
in the late twentieth century" (48). Reed also laments the separatism
that continues to divide the races in contemporary American culture.
While he notes somewhat despondently in Airing Dirty �aundry (1993)
that "America is a land of distant cousins" (273), Reed offers a re
markably optimistic vision of the future in Japanese by Spring.
Although Puttbutt ultimately fees the racially hostile environs
of Jack London College as United States military forces descend
upon Yamato's regime and the posh real estate of Puttbutt's beloved
Oakland Hills burns in an apocalyptic effgy, he chooses the dis
tant shores of Japan as the next destination on his progress away
from the monocultural ideals that plagued his youth and the pro
fessional crises of his middle age. In this manner, Reed creates a
surprising accommodation in his narrative between the nation of
Yamato's ethically bankrupt ideological machine and the Japan of
the historical present, with its own possibilities for the inclusive,
multicultural future of Reed's vision. Reed's powerful denunciation
of monoculturalism in Japanese by Spring also underscores the ethical
potential of multiculturalism as a means for establishing community
and embracing difference. As Manthia Diawara notes: "Cultural
studies, in its attempts to draw attention to the material implica
tions of the worldviews we assume, often delineates a literal and
candid picture of ways of life that embarrass and baffe our previous
theoretical understanding of those forms of life" (202). For this reason,
Patricia S. Mann adds, "The academy must transform itself in response
to the culturally diversifed community of students" (208). In his
forceful satire of modern American academic life, Reed champions
the ethics of multicultural education through his disturbing illus
tration of the devastating aftermath of an extremist ideology's rise
to power. In a 1990 interview with �eorge Paul Csicsery, Reed notes
that "in the twentieth century we've seen a lot of disasters happen

because of people who thought that they were right and everybody
else was wrong" (338). In Japanese by Spring, he implicitly chal
lenges us to consider the possible validity of another point of view,
to attempt to understand and embrace racial difference, and to re
alize, fnally, the ethics of cultural studies.

9
Academic Nonfction and the
Culture Warriors: "Teaching the

Conficts" in Gilbert and Gubar's
Masterpiece Theatre
"Who are these homegrown enemies, more dangerous even

than Saddam Hussein with his arsenal of chemical weapons?
The answer: professors of literature" You know, the kind of
people who belong to that noted terrorist organization, the
Modern Language Association""
- Stephen Greenblatt, "The Politics of Culture"
Because ethical criticism necessarily recognizes the vital intercon

nections between readers and the larger human communities in
which they live, it functions as an equally useful paradigm for inter
preting the humanistic foundations of nonfctional texts, in addition
to the ethical properties of literary works" While academic novels
such as Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring (1993), illustrate the local
ized fallout of the "culture wars" during the early 1990s, Sandra M"
Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Masterpiece Theatre: an Academic Melo
drama (1995) considers the national and international implications
of the controversy over higher education during this era" Known
throughout the academy and beyond as the "culture wars," this
ideological struggle fnds its origins in the multicultural project,
particularly regarding the efforts by academic pluralists to broaden
the reading canon to include works by previously disenfranchised
literary voices" In the mid1980s, William J" Bennett, President
Reagan's Secretary of Education, and Allan Bloom, a distinguished
professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at
the University of Chicago, fred the opening monoculturalist salvos
127

in the highly publicized academic debate over canon revision" Their

booklength arguments on behalf of the sanctity of the Western
cultural tradition and the ensuing intellectual crisis begat a stream
of attacks on the curricular policies of higher education from such
fgures as Lynne �" Cheney, the former director of the National
Endowment for the Humanities, as well as E" D" Hirsch, Jr", Charles

J" Sykes, Dinesh D'Souza, and Roger Kimball, among a host of others"1
Essentially a work of nonfction, Gilbert and Gubar's melodrama
explores the ethical dimensions of the culture warriors' assault
on the contemporary issues of canon revision and the effcacy of
the theoretical project, while also assessing their attacks on the
personalities and critical proclivities of a number of celebrated
academics" Gilbert and Gubar's pejorative poetics exposes - through
their wideranging and often lacerating use of satire and popular
culture - the ethical contradictions inherent in the culture warriors'
antiegalitarian ideology" In addition to demonstrating the false logic
that motivates many of the attacks on multiculturalism and the
drive for canon revision, Gilbert and Gubar's nonfctional drama
tization of the culture wars reveals the paranoia and insularity that
undergird the conservative critique of higher education" As they
remark in their Introduction to Masterpiece Theatre, "The fate of the
text and of aspiring teachers of English hangs in the balance" " " "
Will the humanities," they continue, "endure as a recognizable disci
pline, transform itself, or slide toward extinction in the future world
of letters?" (xxiii)"
Their "academic melodrama" focuses special attention upon the
movement that they describe as the "Back to Basics" squad, the
contingent of largely conservative voices who argue that the educa
tional establishment should celebrate the cultural truths embodied
by the texts of such canonical stalwarts as Shakespeare, Milton,
Plato, and Homer" The proponents of the Back to Basics movement,
according to Gilbert and Gubar, fnd the politicization of the hu
manities by contemporary academics to be reprehensible, and further,
dangerous to the survival of what they generally perceive to be the
collective wisdom inherent in the Western intellectual and artistic
tradition (Introduction, xiv-xv)" Although students of the culture
wars typically attribute the inauguration of the intellectual crisis in
higher education to Bennett's 1984 governmental report on the
humanities, To Reclaim a Legacy, the former Secretary of Education
further outlines his arguments in his 1992 commercially published
volume, The DeValuing of America: the Fight for Our Culture and Our

Academic Nonfction and the Culture Warriors 129
Children"2 In this often abrasive formulation of the conservative

position on multiculturalism and the canon, Bennett laments the
imposition of a "radical leftwing political orthodoxy" and "a drop
in the quality of teaching as professors fee the classroom for their
research projects"" According to Bennett, the modern academy suffers
from a "loss of moral and intellectual purpose" (156)" Bennett reveals

his inability to comprehend the inclusive objectives of the multi
culturalist agenda, moreover, when he asks: "Does anyone doubt
that selecting works based on the ethnicity or gender of their authors
trivializes the academic enterprise?" (171)"3
While the power and publicity concomitant with Bennett's cabi
net post provided him with the public voice necessary to strike
such a strident initial chord within the American public, Bloom's
The Closing of the American Mind: Hot Higher Education Has Failed
Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students imbued the
culture wars with the intellectual cachet of a scholarly voice" Bloom
derides the contemporary state of the humanities as an "almost
submerged old Atlantis"" In the humanities, he writes, "there is no
semblance of order, no serious account of what should and should
not belong, or of what its disciplines are trying to accomplish or
how" (371)" In addition to arguing that higher education wallows
in a state of chaos with little evidence of a scholarly or an ethical
agenda, Bloom descries the pluralistic motives of canon revisionists,
pausing only occasionally to sneer at the artistic blasphemy of rock
and roll music" Like the cultural warriors who follow the ideologi
cal lead of The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom champions the
literary touchstones of Western culture because of the sacred truths
that these works would ostensibly, perhaps even magically, impart
to the minds of young readers" Remarkably, Bloom - himself a veteran
of a lifetime's worth of teaching - neglects to account for the roles
of educators in the interpretation and dissemination of these great
works of literature and culture" Bloom also attacks the "furious effort
to make them uptodate, largely by treating them as the matter
formed by some contemporary theory - cultural, historical, economic,
or psychological" (375)" Bloom's insistence upon the atemporality
of literary works characterizes much of the Back to Basics attack
upon contemporary efforts to widen the cultural and political scope
of the canon"
As Michael Berube remarks, "From the Right's perspective, inquir
ing into the historical production and reception of cultural artifacts
is the most subversive enterprise of all, for it threatens to undo the

very notion of artistic autonomy and timelessness" (148)" Indeed,

the conservative critique of higher education during the 1980s and
early 1990s refuses to acknowledge the powerful roles of historical
and cultural production in the actual postulation of these great works
of Western civilization" In addition to sharing in Bloom's inaugura
tion of a rhetorical tradition of elongated subtitles, Hirsch's Cultural

Literacy: What Every American Needs to Knot (1987) offers a sus
tained attack upon our "curriculum of cultural fragmentation and
illiteracy" (144)" Like Sykes in ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of
Higher Education (1988), Hirsch scolds modern instructors for abdi
cating what he believes to be their institutional responsibilities for
the maintenance of Western culture and values" Sykes's scathing
assault upon the professoriate includes his principal contention that
its "relentless drive for advancement " " " has turned American uni
versities into vast factories of junkthink, the byproduct of academe's
endless capacity to take even the richest elements of civilization
and disfgure them into an image of itself" (7)" In addition to call
ing for the broad abolition of tenure, Sykes refuses to address the
multicultural project's wisdom of tolerance when he demands the
unequivocal restoration of a Eurocentric canon and curriculum:
"Without apology," he writes, "the undergraduate curriculum should
be centered on the intellectual tradition of Western civilization"
Quite simply," he adds, "there are certain books and certain authors
that every college graduate should read if he is to be considered
truly educated" (260)"
As the culture wars advanced into the present decade, proponents
of the conservative position continued the culture warriors' on
slaught against canon revision, while also increasingly objecting to
the manner in which contemporary scholars resort to the
politicization of literary and cultural studies" In Tenured Radicals:
Hot Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education (1990), Kimball laments
what he perceives to be a concerted Leftist effort "to dismantle
the traditional curriculum and institutionalize radical feminism,
to ban politically unacceptable speech and propagate the tenets
of deconstruction and similar exercises in cynical obscurantism"
(167)" Kimball also trivializes the theoretical project as a type
of professional selfaggrandizement motivated solely by the pro
fessoriate's desires for selfpromotion and job security, rather than
any interest in developing our understanding of literary works and
their social and ideological impacts upon our lives" 4 In his strangely
belligerent and often racially unsettling volume, Illiberal Education:

The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991), D'Souza challenges

the politicization of literary studies by contemporary scholars, in
addition to echoing Bennett and Bloom's tired dictum regarding the
apparently tenuous future of the Western canon" "The problem is
that many of the younger generation of faculty in the universities
express lack of interest, if not contempt, for the Western classics,"

he writes" "Either they regard the books as fawed for their failure
to endorse the full emancipation of approved minorities," he con
tinues, "or they reject their metaphysical questions as outdated and
irrelevant" (255)"
Perhaps even more amazingly, D'Souza argues that the contem
porary academy, with its ubiquitous mantra of pluralism, provides
American students with "an education in closedmindedness and
intolerance" (229)" Yet, as Berube reminds us, "as it so happens,
very little canon revision is launched at anything so large and pon
derous as Western Civilization" Instead," he adds, "canon revision
is today most likely to involve redesigning and reshuffing the English
department's standard 'period' courses" (145)" If nothing else, aca
demic proponents of canon revision and multiculturalism espouse
openmindedness and tolerance, not only for the marginalized works
of previously disenfranchised writers, but also for the literary touch
stones of Western culture that they reinvigorate through the auspices
of historical criticism and gender studies, among a host of other au
courant interpretive methodologies" In Telling the Truth: Why Our
Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense - and What We
Can Do about It (1995), Cheney amplifes, like D'Souza and Kimball
before her, Bennett and Bloom's attacks on canon revision and the
politicization of academic scholarship"5 In addition to nearly over
dosing on a succession of ominous Orwellian quotations, Cheney's
volume admonishes the academy for its institutionalization of theory,
particularly deconstructionist and postmodernist projects, and assails
the Modern Language Association, an organization "whose policy
statements, publications, and conventions," Cheney writes, "had
epitomized the politicization of teaching and learning" (60)"
Although contemporary hermeneutics unquestionably relies on
ideological critique as a fundamental means for contextualizing many
of its debates over literature and literary theory, Cheney hardly
begins to concede the political components of her own remarkably
partisan discourse" In the conclusion to her study, for example,
Cheney remarks: "The virtues that we have increasingly come
to believe we must nurture if we are to be successful as a culture

simply make no sense if we turn away from reason and reality"

(206)" To whose virtues does Cheney refer? Whose sense of reason
and whose reality does she represent? While conservative commen
tators such as Bennett and Cheney often bristle at the academic
jargon that they encounter in contemporary scholarship, the above
excerpt from Telling the Truth surely demonstrates the function of

political code words in the discourse regarding the culture wars"
"We face the outraged reactions of those custodians of Western culture
who protest that the canon, that transparent decanter of Western
values, may become - breathe the word - politici�ed," Henry Louis
Gates, Jr", observes" "That people can maintain a straight face while
they protest the irruption of politics into something that has always
been political," Gates continues, "says something about how re
markably successful offcial literary histories have been in presenting
themselves as natural objects, untainted by worldly interests" (195)"
Gates's arguments underscore the manner in which ideology, despite
the cultural warriors' vehement claims to the contrary, invariably
infuences the selection and historical survival of cultural artifacts,
even great Western ones"
As this chapter will show, Gilbert and Gubar's Masterpiece Theatre
interrogates the various theoretical premises of the cultural warriors
in order to demonstrate the political nature of their own attacks
upon higher education" By undermining the logic of their cultural
opponents, Gilbert and Gubar implicitly defend the merits of plural
ism and intellectual inclusiveness" An ethical reading of Gilbert
and Gubar's melodrama, moreover, will reveal the ways in which
they satirize the cultural warriors' polemics regarding Western and
nonWestern literary texts and the pursuit of knowledge, the poli
tics of canon revision and multiculturalism, and the effcacy of the
theoretical project" In addition to exploring the surprising benefts
of the culture wars to contemporary educators, this chapter will
also examine the ethically dubious manner in which Gilbert and
Gubar depict themselves in Masterpiece Theatre, as well as the other
personalities that populate the academic star system of their melo
drama, including such fgures as Harold Bloom, Helen �endler, Jacques
Derrida, Frank Lentricchia, and Julia Kristeva, among others" Although
their satire ultimately challenges the ethically questionable premises
of the culture warriors in a very meaningful way, Gilbert and Gubar's
volume regrettably fulflls their opponents' contention that works
of scholarship inevitably privilege the critical self over the agenda
of the text"

While Gilbert and Gubar ostensibly present their narrative as a

dramatic text, Masterpiece Theatre derives its nonfctional origins from
the authors' utilization of quotations from published books and
articles in their construction of many of the characters' lines" A
kind of postmodern closet drama, Gilbert and Gubar's satiric and
often hilarious volume pits the Back to Basics group described

above in confict with what they call the "Forward into Instability"
group, a coterie of wellknown scholars characterized by their
interest in establishing a broader, multicultural canon" Motivated
largely by their desires for inclusiveness and critical diversity, these
academics nevertheless harbor serious skepticism, in the words of
Gilbert and Gubar, about "monolithic, fxed interpretations of the
cultural past"" Although this critical school of thought defnes itself
in terms of its pluralistic intentions and its cultural tolerance,
Gilbert and Gubar caution us, somewhat ironically, that "many prac
titioners within this school privilege theory and metacriticism
over serious textual interpretation" Not only do artist and art get
lost in the critical shuffe," they add, "but critical selffetishization
is often cast in an uncommonly jargonridden, even incomprehensible,
idiom" (Introduction, xvii)" Divided into three acts, Masterpiece Theatre
examines the intellectual skirmishes between the Back to Basics
and Forward into Instability groups in Act I, "The Perils of the
Text," while Act II, "Foreign Intrigues," focuses on the theoretical
conficts between conservative critics and the contemporary post
structuralist contingent"6 Act III, "The Final Deletion," traces the
media response to academe and the culture wars in the contemporary
literary marketplace"
Narrated, naturally, by Alistair Cooke, the plot of Gilbert and
Gubar's Masterpiece Theatre unfolds after a mysterious villain ties an
unnamed Text, itself a character in the melodrama, to a stretch of
railroad track near the campus of Boondock State University in
Boondock, Indiana" Unidentifable within the imaginative bound
aries of Gilbert and Gubar's narrative, the Text functions as a form
of pliable wisdom, a seemingly signifcant cultural artifact that re
quires a team of specialists to interpret both its identity and its
meaning" Replete with the intellectual treasure of what Foucault
calls the "a priori authority of knowledge," the Text in Gilbert and
Gubar's melodrama represents the metaphorical grail in the culture
wars mounted by the Back to Basics and Forward into Instability
groups" After being discovered by two Boondock State University
students and the appropriately named Offcer Friendly, the Text and

its tenuous plight come to the attention of a young, untenured pro

fessor of English at Boondock State, Jane Marple, the detective cum
intellectual in Gilbert and Gubar's narrative" When Offcer Friendly
proves unable to assist her in the search for the Text's identity and
the interpretation of its contents - "We're up to our ears in sexual
harassment cases down here," Friendly complains to the professor

as he withdraws from the affair - Marple seeks the advice of her
learned, and eminently more celebrated, critical colleagues (11)"
Gilbert and Gubar underscore their arguments regarding the divi
sions between the respective factions of the culture wars during the
nationwide alert that follows the discovery of the nameless Text in
Boondock" They depict an embattled Bennett in Washington, DC,
for example, as he receives word about the Text near Boondock
State University and its impending interpretation by a group of radical
literary specialists" "Rumor has it that a text - title unknown - has
been singled out for assassination or deconstruction," the directive
reads" "Recommend that you take special measures to safeguard all
touchstones, masterpieces, and monuments of unaging intellect," it
continues (7)" As Bennett scans a list of proposed works for the
Western canon, Gilbert and Gubar portray him in the act of pre
serving works by Aristotle, Jane Austen, and T" S" Eliot, while
simultaneously deleting texts by Aeschylus, Charlotte Bront�, Emily
Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Sigmund
Freud" Meanwhile, Robert Scholes, a professor of semiotics and an
advocate of multicultural education, receives an urgent message from
a doubleagent at the National Endowment for the Humanities: "Most
texts suspected of subversion of American Way of Life! Mass execu
tion expected soon," it reads (8)" As Scholes scans the list of writers
under canonical consideration, he never presses the delete key, in
contrast with Bennett, and, in addition to preserving the works
previously eliminated by the former Secretary of Education, he accepts
texts by Umberto Eco, Ursula Le Guin, Michel Foucault, Louis
L'Amour, Danielle Steel, Alfred Hitchcock, Alex Haley, Hirsch, and
even works by Bennett himself"
In this way, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate their principal issue
of contention regarding the culture wars and the debate over canon
revision, the effcacy of the multicultural project, and the value of
interdisciplinary literary study" Their pejorative representation of
Bennett, for instance, reveals what they believe to be the principles
of exclusiveness and monoculturalism that inform the Back to Basics
approach to the Western canon" Gilbert and Gubar's characterization

of Scholes, however, argues that the academy, for all its politicization
and selfpromotion, operates from a position of inclusiveness and
pluralism" Hence, Scholes readily accepts each text for canonical
inclusion regardless of its cultural, racial, or ideological origins"
Similarly, Gilbert and Gubar present Bennett and Cheney in ani
mated conversation over the perilous future of "endangered texts,"

while Marple concomitantly seeks the sympathetic advice of Phyllis
Franklin, the executive director of the Modern Language Associa
tion" Unable to convince her department chair about the seriousness
of the Boondock Text's plight - "He says every text he can think of
is safe and sound in the Norton anthologies," an exasperated Marple
remarks - the young professor enlists Franklin to act on the
unidentifed Text's behalf: "This is bad," Franklin observes" "This
may call for a task force or a commission, perhaps even a confer
ence," she continues (12)" Back in Washington, DC, however, Bennett
worries that the endangered Text "might ask some of 'the perennial
questions of human life"' It might have been written by one of the
'great souls,'" he adds" Concerned that it might be a text written by
"Milton or Shakespeare," Cheney and Bennett fy to Boondock in
order to protect the Text from the "leftwing ideologues" and "the
narrow research specialists" (14)"
As the aforementioned examples once again demonstrate, Gilbert
and Gubar's narrative representation of the culture wars questions
the ethical foundations of the Back to Basics group's interest in
academic and canonical issues"7 Why, indeed, do the notions of
textual inclusiveness and canon revision so trouble them? George
A" Kennedy ascribes the rage for canon formation to "a basic human
instinct, perhaps related to selfpreservation: the assertion of control
over chaos, the marking out of one's turf" (229)" Stemming confusion
and protecting the sanctity of those cultural and literary works that
endorse their values provides movements such as the Back to Basics
group with a form of intellectual power" Speaking for the realworld
forces that comprise Gilbert and Gubar's imaginary Forward into
Instability group, Richard Rorty argues that canon expansion, rather
than exclusively looking backward to those works that espouse the
norms and values of another historical moment, might prove benefcial
in terms of the cultural and sociological dilemmas that confront
readers in the present day: "My hunch is that certain specifc changes
in the canon - those that will help students learn about what it has
been like (and often still is like) to be female, or black, or gay -
will be the chief accomplishment of the contemporary cultural left"

It will not amount to a transformation of society," he warns, "but it

will make life much less cruel for a lot of people, and will make
America into a more decent place" ("Two Cheers," 239)"
In Masterpiece Theatre, Gilbert and Gubar devote special attention
to lampooning the cultural warriors' emphatic response to the ca
nonical apotheosis of Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), a Pulitzer

Prize and American Book Award winning novel" The Back to Basics
group's interest in the status of Walker's novel fnds its genesis in a
1986 editorial by Christopher Clausen, the current chair of Penn
State's Department of English, in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
"I would bet that The Color Purple is taught in more English courses
today than all of Shakespeare's plays combined," Clausen allegedly
wrote in jest (A52)" The cultural warriors subsequently appropriated
Clausen's words as a rallying cry both against diversity as well as
the ostensibly radical ways in which English specialists intend to
reconfgure the Western canon" In addition to remarking upon the
incident several times within their melodrama, Gilbert and Gubar
even employ Walker herself as a character in their satire" In yet
another instance in Masterpiece Theatre, Bennett calls texts such as
Walker's "handmaiden[s] of ideology" and exclaims that "it's well
known that 'The Color Purple is taught in more English courses today
than all of Shakespeare's plays combined,' " thus parroting and
distorting Clausen's infamous line (14)"8 Although Gilbert and Gubar
clearly take this opportunity to poke fun at the Back to Basics
contingent's repeated usage of Clausen's words, their sarcastic treat
ment of Bennett in this instance also challenges his argument that
professors of English make their pedagogical selections lightly and
without any set of ethical imperatives"
Paul Lauter discovered otherwise, however, while collaborating
on the compilation of the culturally progressive Heath Anthology of
American Literature" "We found that our primary task involved re
constructing our own standards of value," he reports (186)" By
establishing ethical standards of selection, scholars such as Lauter
ensure that their literary choices refect the diversity of cultures
and values that mark their student populations" As Gregory Jay notes,
the inclusive editorial choices made by Lauter and other scholars
offer the possibility of a wide range of social and cultural benefts"
"For marginalized groups," Jay writes, "an appreciation of their culture
can improve student performance and so reverse the effects of bigotry
and discrimination" (117)" Gilbert and Gubar also explore the Back
to Basics group's skeptical response to multiculturalism and the

usefulness of its application to literary studies" In one instance, Gilbert

and Gubar depict Kimball and Sykes seated across the aisle from
Marple and the Text in a jumbo jet bound for Europe, where the
professor hopes to locate the identity of the still unidentifed narra
tive" Sipping champagne and staring greedily at the Text that they
intend to "liberate from the 'obscurantists, sorcerers, and witch doctors

of profthink,' " Kimball and Sykes contemplate the commercial rewards
that surely await them after they publish books about "this latest
academic scandal"" Meanwhile, Kimball pejoratively attributes the
academic motivation for the multicultural project to "liberalism's
belief in meritocracy" and "intellectual tyranny" (67)"
In yet another instance, Gilbert and Gubar depict Bennett in the
act of interrogating the Text" Speaking in a "sinister tone," Bennett
unfurls the Back to Basic group's ideology regarding multiculturalism
and its policy of textual inclusiveness:
Do you know what happens to texts that pretend to be more

important than they really are? They are exiled from the library
and go to �ook Depositories" There they are shelved by size, in
two ranks on each shelf, and catalogued not by title, not by
subject, not by author, but only by accession number! No one
will ever fnd you in such a place" The temperature is kept low
and the lights are dimmed" In short, you will be in cold storage
and in darkness perpetual! As my colleagues are no doubt aware,
there just isn't enough room in our libraries for all the books
that have been published" Information glut" (114)
In addition to trivializing the frightened Text's contents and ident

ity, Bennett's fctive persona in Masterpiece Theatre castigates the Text's
future and attributes, at least metaphorically, the Western canon's
infexibility to an apparent lack of adequate storage space" Gilbert
and Gubar's fctional representation of D'Souza espouses similar fears
about the possibility of a multiculturalist agenda lurking behind
the scholarly interest in the identity of the Text" "That text must be
expunged," he remarks to Camille Paglia at one juncture" "I'm sure
it's a new syllabus or curriculum - multicultural, postcolonial,
deconstructionist rot - that will be inficted as an 'illiberal educa
tion' on our best and brightest student minds," he adds (129)" In
this manner, Gilbert and Gubar satirize the Back to Basics group's
incapacity for recognizing the pluralistic motives of the multicultural
project, an intellectual program that its proponents ascribe, often

incorrectly, to shameless academic desires for tenure and advance

ment" Yet, as Kathryn Mohrman remarks, "In both scholarship and
education, questions of diversity are moving from the periphery to
the center of the university, not from a sense of noblesse oblige or
political correctness, but because attention to diversity is increas
ingly linked to academic excellence in research and teaching"

(199-200)"
Critics of the theoretical project, like the advocates of the Back to
Basics agenda, also attribute what they perceive to be the academic
rage for tenure and selfpromotion to the advent of poststructuralism
and other theoretical projects in recent decades" In American Literature
and the Academy (1986), Kermit �anderbilt grimly describes critical
theory's gathering storm above the previously sacrosanct realm of
literary studies: "Over the horizon beyond the '60s, a gathering
smorgasbord of interpretive theories awaited the professor alert to
movements and fads - semiotics, grammatology, audience response,
structuralism, deconstruction, a newly seasoned Freud and Marx,
and more" (539-40)" �anderbilt's words, like the arguments of the
Back to Basics platoon, admonish the politicization and institution
alization of the theoretical project" In Masterpiece Theatre, Gilbert
and Gubar lampoon the stalwarts of literary theory, while at the
same time they underscore the manner in which the act of inter
pretation will always remain decidedly political" "Obviously," Gilbert
and Gubar write in their Introduction to the melodrama, "the work
we ourselves do, like the work of our antitraditionalist cohorts, is
based on a consciousness of the politics of reading, writing, and
canon revision" (xviii)" In their narrative, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate
the project's penchant for jargon and political commentary" In one
instance, a grimfaced Fredric Jameson reveals his Marxist colors
while chatting with punk author Kathy Acker and others regarding
the fate of the Text" "In a culture of appropriation, commodifcation,
and specious unifcation, we mustn't just thematize incoherence,
we must enact it," says Jameson" "Originality is a bourgeois capitalist
plot," Acker adds, and "so is narrative" (135)"
On numerous occasions throughout their melodrama, Gilbert and
Gubar satirize the lofty pretensions of their theoretical colleagues,
in addition to illustrating the wide range of critical debates that
mark the theoretical project" They demonstrate the disparate ideo
logical stances of Paglia and Andrea Dworkin, for example, in an
effort to underscore the manner in which literary critics - in this
case, feminist ones - become entrenched in the radical critiques

that they espouse" As the literary world of Gilbert and Gubar's

narrative frantically searches for the Boondock Text, Paglia enters
the narrative at various junctures and revels in her regressive, anti
feminist rhetoric" "Feminists are really deluded, with their heads
up their ass," she explains to her very receptive companions, Bennett,
Cheney, and D'Souza (130)" Later, during a debate with Robert Bly,

Paglia reasons that "if civilization had been left in female hands,
we'd still be living in grass huts" (156)" Gilbert and Gubar counter
Paglia's antifeminism with Dworkin's own radical antimasculinist
and antipornography stance" "Don't kid yourself," Dworkin tells
her colleagues, including Gilbert and Gubar themselves, "the male
body is the word and it is the word as weapon" 'Intercourse re
mains a means,' " she continues, "'of physiologically making a woman
inferior'" (163)"
By illustrating Paglia and Dworkin's divergent ideological stances
regarding current feminist thought, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate
the ways in which disparate ideologies invariably critique each other
during the throes of literary criticism" Proponents of the Back to
Basics group, with their principal interest in maintaining a static
curriculum, have no other recourse but to problematize the Forward
into Instability movement's progressive, albeit chaotic, drive toward
an intellectual unknown" As Gerald Graff observes in Professing Litera
ture (1987), "The age of theory that seems to be superseding the age
of criticism has stimulated a promising critique of the very routin
izing processes to which it has been prone"" By constantly engaging
in a form of selfcritique, Graff argues, the critical project propels
itself into "generating further theoretical awareness" (242)" Gilbert
and Gubar's narration of the act of criticism in Masterpiece Theatre
proves instructive, moreover, because of the manner in which it
highlights the political machinations that inevitably confgure any
school of thought" "Political ideologies and ethnocentric tradition
alism of one kind or another have never stopped shaping the
discipline," Franklin E" Court remarks in Institutionali�ing English
Literature (1992)" "Since English literary study has been politically
and racially centered all along, there is nothing inherently threat
ening in admitting that it continues to be politically and racially
centered today," Court adds (164)"
In addition to combating the cultural warriors' concerns over the
politicization of higher education, Gilbert and Gubar's melodrama
satirizes their attacks on academic professionalism and tenure" The
Back to Basics group's disdain for avantgarde literary theory and

what it perceives to be the academy's overarching rage for promotion

and job security receive particular attention in Masterpiece Theatre"
In his study of the modern university, Henry Rosovsky defnes aca
demic research as "an expression of faith in the possibility of
progress," as well as the product of the "belief that new things can
be discovered, that newer can be better, and that greater depth of

understanding is achievable" (89)" In their melodrama, however,
Gilbert and Gubar undermine those scholars who seem to revel in
the rhythms of their theoretical prophecies instead of postulating
any meaningful discoveries" Gilbert and Gubar's fctive representations
of Derrida and Kristeva, for instance, satirize the ways in which
critical theorists often become recognizable merely for the manner
in which they postulate their supposedly revolutionary ideas, rather
than for the ideas themselves" Because both theorists often employ
double columns in their respective critical discourses, Gilbert and
Gubar depict Derrida and Kristeva in the act of literally speaking in
double columns (92, 103)" Although this method of narration obvi
ously hinders the performative aspects of their melodrama, it also
allows Gilbert and Gubar to poke fun at the discursive techniques
that academics utilize in order to set themselves apart from the
more conventional textual practices of their peers"
In such moments in their narrative, Gilbert and Gubar satirize
the institutional commonplace of professionalism, or the means by
which members of a given profession distinguish themselves within
their discipline" In Professional Correctness (1995), Stanley Fish also
questions the effcacy of the academic drive for professionalism"
Because academics largely produce their discoveries within the
shadows of their respective institutions, Fish reasons, they remain
virtually unable to impact the lives of anyone but their equally
isolated colleagues" Such a scholarly vacuum, according to Fish, di
minishes the professoriate's capacity for producing what he calls
"public intellectuals," or those individuals who "reach out to the
inhabitants of other public spaces" beyond the university (117)"
Ironically, when Marple chooses to venture outside of Boondock
State University in order to save the Text - on a mission, moreover,
with broad cultural implications - she receives notifcation of her
dismissal" In his letter to Marple, Boondock's Dean Petty writes:
"Unfortunately your misguided activism in behalf of a single aberrant
text appears to have prevented you from making signifcant contri
butions in the three key areas of Research, Teaching, and Service as
outlined on page 24 of The Faculty Handbook's 'Rules for Retention,

Tenure, and Promotion' " (131)" By implicitly valorizing Marple's

decision to champion the Text's cause, Gilbert and Gubar succeed
in problematizing the existing framework for tenure review and
promotion" Unlike their Back to Basics opponents, however, Gilbert
and Gubar's critique of the ethics of academic employment standards
falls well short of the culture warriors' demand for the termination

of academic tenure" Instead, their satire questions, like Fish, a pro
fession that limits its members' capacity for impacting the larger,
nonacademic world in which they live"9
Although Gilbert and Gubar's critique of the culture wars registers
a number of meaningful jabs at the ethics of the Back to Basics
group's assault on higher education - while also, incidentally, under
mining some of the academy's own questionable practices - their
melodrama loses its considerable satiric force when they privilege
the personalities of themselves and their celebrated academic cohorts
over workaday intellectuals like Marple, their beleaguered protagonist"
As Terry Caesar notes, even the name of Marple's institution, Boondock,
seems somehow insignifcant" "Boondock exists to be negated," Caesar
writes (226)" Rather than attempting to interpret the Text herself
after she discovers it strapped to the railroad track near Boondock,
Marple opts instead to deliver it to the learned hands of her more
celebrated peers" It would seem that in Gilbert and Gubar's narra
tive, Marple must inevitably defer to the stars of PMLA and Critical
In�uiry" For Gilbert and Gubar, Caesar adds, Boondock could never
exist "other than for the edifcation of far loftier and more prepos
sessing institutions, where morepoliticallycorrectthanthou critics
can war agreeably among themselves" (228)" Their attempt at self
parody only seems to bolster Caesar's criticism" In their narrative,
for example, Gilbert and Gubar depict themselves as "SG1 and SG2,"
nameless collaborators who fnish each other's sentences" Unfortu
nately, the manner in which they dramatize the personality quirks
and ideological nuances of themselves and their wellknown col
leagues merely validates the culture warriors' contention that
academics fnd their only motivations in selfpromotion and their
quests for job security, rather than in teaching and celebrating cul
tural achievement"
Conversely, Masterpiece Theatre fnds its greatest strengths when
Gilbert and Gubar address the ethical implications of the culture
wars, when they attempt to "teach the conficts," in the words of
Graff, in lieu of simply vilifying their Back to Basics opponents"10
"Instead of pretending we can eliminate political confict from teaching,"

Graff argues in �eyond the Culture Wars (1993), "we should start
making use of it" (170)" In Masterpiece Theatre, Gilbert and Gubar
deploy the broad strokes of their satire both in an effort to combat
the culture warriors' rhetoric of antipluralism, as well as to self
consciously critique the academy and its own offenses against its
cultural and humanistic mission" Although their desire to promote

the interests of the humanities occasionally lapses into uncomfort
able arenas of selfindulgence, Gilbert and Gubar's narrative largely
adheres to Graff's meaningful dictum for "making confict the basis
of community" (188)" Because they assess the ethics of all of the
competing factions that engage in the intellectual crisis regarding
multiculturalism and canon revision - the Back to Basics group, as
well as the Forward into Instability movement - Gilbert and Gubar
employ their text as an instructive means for sustaining useful debate
over the future of the academy and the ways in which it might
better serve students, faculty, and the community at large that make
higher education possible" "Ethical imperatives inform political
change," Jay astutely notes, "since concepts of justice and of right
include a moral dimension" (126)" By entreating us through their
satire to recognize the cultural and ethical ramifcations of the culture
wars, Gilbert and Gubar challenge us to consider the possibility of
bridging our ideological differences and engaging in a truly inter
disciplinary exchange"

10
Jane Smiley's Academic Carnival:

Rooting for Ethics at Moo U.

"I cannot recall a time when American education was not
in a 'crisis.'"
- John Searle, "The Storm over the University"
In Moo (1995), Jane Smiley focuses a sharp, satiric eye upon the
political machinations and ambitions of the administration and faculty
of Moo U., a large midwestern university well known for its agri-
cultural department. Rife with social and scholarly intrigue, Smiley's
narrative admonishes the bankrupt value systems of a powerful in-
stitution of higher learning obsessed with its agenda for technological
and fnancial superiority. Smiley allots conspicuous attention to all
of the competing voices that comprise Moo U.'s political maelstrom
- from the contentious professoriate in the Horticulture and English
departments to the institution's dubious administration, an often
bemused and vacant student population, and a giant hog named
Earl Butz who resides in an abandoned building in the middle of
Moo U.'s campus. In Moo, Smiley's pejorative poetics - her satire of
contemporary higher education's rampant consumerism - functions
on a variety of narrative levels. In addition to her penetrating critique
of university life's economic circle - an endlessly negating system
of consuming and being consumed - Smiley addresses the interpersonal
motivations and imperatives exhibited by her array of administra-
tive, professorial, and undergraduate characters. Smiley devotes
particular emphasis to the notion of academic freedom and its
sacred and revered place in higher education. In short, how will
her characters comport themselves after being afforded with the
considerable institutional freedom and power inherent in the
university's bureaucracy?
143

One of academic fction's few genuine best-sellers, Moo offers a

thinly veiled portrait of life at a modern land-grant institution. While
Smiley dismisses suggestions that Moo U. fnds its origins in her own
experiences as a faculty member at Iowa State University, the simi-
larities between the novel's fctive locale and the economic
expectations and activities of large state universities are readily ap-

parent at nearly every turn.1 Of particular interest to this study is the
manner in which Smiley deftly replicates Moo U.'s roots in the land-
grant university system established in July 1862 via the passage of
the Morrill Act. Devised by United States Congressman Justin Smith
Morrill as a means for donating public lands to state governments
for the creation of colleges that beneft the agricultural and mechani-
cal arts, the Morrill Act - along with the G. I. Bill during the twentieth
century - effectively ended the elitism previously inherent in the
American university system. As Coy F. Cross writes in �ustin Smith
Morrill: Father of the LandGrant Colleges (1999), "Before 1862, America's
university students were affuent, white males. Land-grant colleges
opened the door of higher education to women, blacks, the working
classes, immigrants, and other minorities" (88). The First Morrill Act
of 1862 - in concert with the Second Morrill Act of August 1890,
which allowed for the fnancial endowment and support of the land-
grant university system - irrevocably altered the face of academic
life. Simply put, the Second Morrill Act provided the land-grant col-
leges with the economic means for competing with existing
institutions of higher learning in the intellectual, cultural, and tech-
nological marketplaces. Commemorating the centennial of the act's
passage, Harvard University Professor W. K. Jordan observed that "it
was responsible for the democratization of education and for the
establishment of a healthy diversity in our whole structure of higher
education" (Morrill Land-Grant Centennial Committee, 13).2
For land-grant institutions such as Smiley's fctive Moo U., the
concept of academic freedom is inextricably bound with the uni-
versity's capacity for asserting intellectual and economic dominion
over (or at least in favorable comparison to) its scholastic competitors.
As Neil Nakadate writes, "Particularly in ambitious, research-conscious,
'second-rate' schools such as Moo U. - striving, after all, to achieve
fallibility at a frst-rate level - there is plenty of evidence for con-
sidering the university one of the most curious enclaves of American
cultural life" (187). In the novel, Smiley replicates this drive for
scholarly and economic superiority by depicting the assortment of
divergent voices that account for Moo U.'s virtual chorus of aca-

�ane Smiley's Academic Carnival 145
demic consumerism. The chapters themselves function as variations

on such themes as love, sex, secular humanism, deconstruction,
and the ubiquity of university memoranda, among a host of other
topics that serve as unifying mechanisms that coalesce Moo's en-
semble of disparate characters. In her perceptive review of the novel,
Lorrie Moore likens the narrative to a richly nuanced Ars Nova

painting:
As portraiture, perhaps Moo is more Van Eyck than, say, Goya.

Instead of the quicker, satirical strokes of the Spaniard, we have,
with Moo, the fantastically overstudied picture: Giovanni Arnolfni
(with his tricky mirror), his bride, his tenure, his chairman, the
chairman's family, students, staff, lovers, the departmental votes,
administrative memorandums, text from student catalogs, furnish-
ings, restaurant menus, all the campus plants and animals, plus
the press - local and national. It is a little like the author as
clipping service. The book bulges and spins. It throbs and fzzes.
It is a plethora. But it remains a skillful depiction of the current
American university as deal maker, money grubber, corporate sib-
ling, and government client; it is a portrait of the Midwestern
research institution - "Moo University" - which, in moving into
the future (what other way?), is not only leaving its ivory towers
behind but detonating them before it goes. (135-6)
By affording readers with such a concentrated and immersed repre-

sentation of a thriving contemporary research university, Smiley
reveals the many ways in which institutions such as Moo U. attempt
to navigate the increasingly stormy seas of education, consumer-
ism, and economics.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin's narratological theories of heteroglossia and
carnival provide a particularly valuable scholarly framework for
reading the hybrid nature of Smiley's novel, especially in terms of
the various ways in which she attempts to account for the university's
fragmented and ideologically fractious identity. Bakhtin's concep-
tion of heteroglossia assists us, for example, in understanding the
manner in which Moo functions on a microlinguistic level by in-
tersecting a wide variety of competing utterances and speech acts.
In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (1975), Bakhtin writes that
heteroglossia involves "specifc points of view of the world, forms
for conceptualizing the world in words, specifc world views, each
characterized by its own objects, meanings, and values" (291-2).

Heteroglossia refers to the centripetal (or offcial) and centrifugal

(or unoffcial) forces that permeate the rhythms of daily life, and
these forces register our responses to the events that mark our worka-
day worlds. Our interaction with them, according to Bakhtin's astute
expositors Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson in Mikhail Bakhtin:
Creation of a Prosaics (1990), subsequently reinscribes the nature of

our cultural institutions, our various languages, and ourselves.3 Draw-
ing upon Bakhtin's notions of heteroglossia and carnival, this chapter
will demonstrate that the resulting cacophony of institutional voices
establishes a carnivalesque atmosphere of sorts in the novel that
imbues Smiley's characters with the freedom to engage in a variety
of revelatory social, cultural, and political transgressions.
Bakhtin's postulation of carnival as a narratological phenomenon
fnds its origins in Ra�elais and His World (1968), which includes
Bakhtin's analysis of various aspects of carnivalesque folk-culture
in the Renaissance-era writings of French humanist Fran�ois Rabelais.
For Bakhtin, carnival refers to the celebratory period in which off-
cial hierarchies and texts become inverted by populist, utopian notions
of society and festivity. In short, low culture replaces high culture
as the primary determinant of social structure and language; exuber-
ance, scatology, and excess trump decorum, etiquette, and restraint.
In Ra�elais and His World, Bakhtin writes: "As opposed to the offcial
feast, one might say that carnival celebrates temporary liberation
from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked
the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and pro-
hibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time," he adds, "the feast
of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was
immortalized and completed" (10). Characterized by the suspension
of hierarchical precedence, carnival establishes equality and elevates
the roles of communication and experience in human interrela-
tions. Carnival consists, moreover, of a "continual shifting from
top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and traves-
ties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings,"
Bakhtin writes. "It is to a certain extent a parody of the extra-
carnival life, a 'world inside out'" (11). Carnival, in the Rabelaisian
sense, devotes particular attention to the body's various experiences
and transformations during the carnivalesque moment. How does
the body assert itself among other bodies? How does it transgress
offcial channels of communication and effect cultural, intellectual,
and economic commerce with other, equally transgressive bodies?4

Smiley's skillful satire in Moo - her creation of a pejorative po-

etics that ridicules the offcial languages and value systems of the
dominant culture in order to posit, if only implicitly, a more ethi-
cal vision of higher education - involves a carnivalesque rendering
of university life and all of its competing voices and ideologies.
Rather amazingly, a number of Smiley's critics object to the mere

notion of Moo as either a form of satire or as yet another entry in
the burgeoning genre of academic fction. In her review of the novel,
for instance, Cathleen Schine writes that "as a metaphor for the
intrinsic corruption of the modern university, not to mention so-
ciety at large, a pig [Moo's Earl Butz] is about as crudely satirical as
you can get. But, incredibly, Moo is not a satire. Smiley's subverts
satire, making it sweeter, and ultimately more pointed" (38).5 Yet a
novel with a giant, 700-pound hog as its centerpiece - not to mention
an executive secretary who functions as the university's shadow-
president, an elusive administrator known only as "Chairman X,"
and a paranoid farmer-inventor who still believes in the spirit of
the institution's land-grant mission - smacks of satire at nearly ev-
ery turn. Schine's suggestion that Moo functions as a sentimental
paean to university life yields little, if any, scholarly force. Indeed,
the novel's conclusion, despite its nearly epidemic weddings and
quirks of fate, leaves little doubt about the manner in which con-
sumerism and recrimination have infected the academy's educational
and social imperatives. Nakadate also suggests that Moo transcends
the satiric pretensions of academic fction as a literary genre: "Smiley's
point is precisely that Moo U. is of rather than separate from the
culture at large" (187). Yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, the
novel pointedly underscores the social idiosyncrasies and cultural
quirks endemic to Moo U. and its particularized academic environs
at almost every juncture.
In the novel, Smiley's ethical critique of higher education con-
verges, rather literally in the thematic climax of Moo's narrative,
around Earl Butz, the enormous Landrace boar who resides in Old
Meats, an unused agricultural building and former slaughterhouse
in the center of Moo U.'s campus. Part of a secret experiment being
conducted by a faculty member in order to ascertain just exactly
how large a boar can become when it is allowed to do nothing but
consume his massive daily allotment - a diet of corn, alfalfa, wheat,
peanuts, soybeans, barley, and skim milk - Earl functions in the
novel as the university's ultimate insider in a campus populated

largely by outsiders for whom Moo U. exists as an economic and

intellectual engine of consumption.6 As Moore perceptively observes,
"At a university, as with a large city or any place of demographic
variety or institutional democracy, no one particular group or per-
son is in charge; no one really owns the thing. . . . All academics
are outsiders of a sort. And so a culture of community complaint,

artful vying, caustic comment, witty self-loathing, operatic head-
shaking, kvetching, and general wringing and throwing up of hands
pervades such a place," she adds, "and no one, fnally, is particu-
larly threatened or surprised" (139). Smiley's coterie of perennial
outsiders ranges from the campus elite - including Chairman X, Dr.
Lionel Gift, and Mrs. Loraine Walker - and the enduringly disen-
franchised faculty community, particularly evidenced by the
interrelationship between Tim Monahan and Cecelia Sanchez, to
various members of the student body and the enigmatic local farmer
and inventor Loren Stroop.
The discrepancy between the offcial and unoffcial voices of Moo
U.'s outsiders, each with their own peculiar worldviews, social pro-
clivities, and ethical imperatives, underscores the manner in which
Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia enhances our understanding of
Smiley's satirical aims in the novel. As interlopers of a sort who
operate, somewhat ironically, within the university's hallowed cor-
ridors, Smiley's characters slyly manipulate the campus's offcial and
unoffcial channels of communication and privilege - the centrip-
etal and centrifugal forces of Bakhtin's critical parlance - for their
own, largely self-driven ends. Their feeding frenzy, if you will, func-
tions as one of the novel's most signifcant central crises. Indeed,
what does transpire when a substantial group of often highly edu-
cated and evolved individuals, with their own divergent needs and
desires, attempts to devour the cash cow that provides them with
social, economic, and cultural sustenance?
The offcial hierarchy of Smiley's academic community is led by
Chairman X and Dr. Gift. The head of Moo U.'s horticulture depart-
ment, Chairman X evinces many of the novel's few genuinely ethi-
cal motivations. Perhaps most importantly in terms of Smiley's ethical
schema, Chairman X dutifully tends a garden on the sloping grounds
of Old Meats, the campus's moral center. Unlike his more self-serving
counterparts, Chairman X thoughtfully remembers the university's
less-heralded place in the natural world, where it merely exists as
yet another nuance of geography and landscape: "The campus
tempted most of its denizens to nest - to crawl into their books and

projects and committee work and pull their self-absorption over

their heads like bedcovers," Smiley writes, "but Chairman X never
lost the sense of that slope, and the sweep of forces across it" (39).
In sharp contrast with Chairman X, Dr. Gift functions as the novel's
most dangerous - and clearly most anti-ethical - infuence. A seem-
ingly respectable and distinguished Economics professor of inter-

national reputation and aplomb, Dr. Gift lives by the simple principle
that "all men, not excluding himself, had an insatiable desire for
consumer goods, and that it was no coincidence that what all men
had an insatiable desire for was known as 'goods,' for goods were
good, which was why all men had an insatiable desire for them"
(31). Moo U.'s highest-paid member of the professoriate and the
infuential leader of its Promotion and Tenure Committee, Dr. Gift
devotes particular attention to his work as a consultant for various
governments. The ways in which Dr. Gift masterminds the demoli-
tion of a rare Costa Rican cloud forest, under the offcial guise of
the university no less, in exchange for lucrative research grants
and beachfront property underscores Smiley's adroit satire of higher
education's often shadowy association with the corporate world. As
Gary Krist remarks, "Greed has become the new engine of academia
- satisfaction of greed its ultimate, forever-unattainable goal. In the
world of Moo," he adds, "the modern university has become a kind
of self-interested Darwinian entity devoted primarily to the propa-
gation of careers, buildings, and political agendas via the accumulation
of grants and tuition" (680). Dr. Gift's relentless consumerism - and
the easy manner in which he exploits the university's centripetal
and centrifugal communicative avenues for his personal gain - high-
lights Smiley's critique of the processes via which contemporary
higher education often blurs its educational prerogatives in order
to fulfll its economic interests.
Of particular signifcance to any reading of Moo is the complex
role of Mrs. Walker, the Provost's secretary, in the university's super-
structure. A furtive player in the institution's power confguration,
Mrs. Walker negotiates Moo U.'s channels of information with rela-
tive alacrity and ease. As the university's de facto president, she has
clearly mastered the offcial and unoffcial languages that propel
Moo U.'s institutional machinery. "Opinionated, well connected, and
well informed," Juliet Fleming writes, Mrs. Walker "is a dexterous
hacker of computer fles who exercises a charismatic grip over every
secretary on campus. Personally disinterested, sometimes indeed
wondering if it is worth saving, she runs the university, moving

personnel, secretly transferring funds, and effecting policy decisions

by discarding or re-routing documents" (20). For Mrs. Walker, the
university no longer exists as a collection of buildings and edifces.
From her more enlightened perspective, Moo U. consists of tele-
phone lines, computer servers, and fax machines. "The stony walls
and concrete paths, the closed windows and doors, the trees and

shrubs, all the elements of the campus that seemed to separate people,"
Smiley writes, "had become permeable membranes undetectable in
the wafting currents of information." For Mrs. Walker, the institution's
offcial administrators are nothing more than a collection of anointed
ciphers "whose lives, like those of chimps, were made up of nit-
picking, stroking, and jockeying for dominance" (137).
Not surprisingly, Moo U.'s faculty and student body seem equally
displaced by their discrepant profles as outsiders on their own campus
attempting to establish interpersonal relationships in a place where
little genuine notion of community exists. As a tenured professor of
creative writing and a junior Spanish professor, respectively, Tim
and Cecelia discover little human solace within the university's
largely emotionless environs. Never arriving for a new semester
more than twelve hours before classes commence, Tim walks forlornly
among Moo U.'s populace: "As he neared Stillwater Hall, the numbers
of people he knew and greeted thickened, until he had, in fact,
spoken to ten or twelve friends, two women he had dated, and one
woman he had lived with for two years. Such as it was, this was
home. He accepted that" (15-16). Even the prospect of a sexual
encounter with the delectable Cecelia leaves him "only 80 per-
cent excited" (100). As an Hispanic woman on an overwhelmingly
white faculty, Cecelia feels both intellectually and socially bifurcated,
as well as denied access to the centripetal and centrifugal channels
of power that might reward her with success amongst Moo U.'s
intelligentsia.
As students on a campus in which the administration blithely
refers to them as "customers," Moo U.'s student body seems simi-
larly disaffected. A student in Tim's introductory course on creative
writing, Gary Olson struggles to fnd a writerly voice as he wades
through endless revisions of his assignments at his professor's behest.
His inability to succeed underscores the institution's own power-
lessness to establish an atmosphere in which language can acquire
meaning and ultimately fulfll the needs of its practitioners. As dor-
mitory roommates in the campus's Dubuque House - the institution's
dream of multicultural diversity and for which, by necessity, it offers

a 20 percent rebate on tuition and housing - Mary and Keri like-

wise labor to discover themselves among Moo U.'s bewildering
environs. Keri's interpersonal dilemmas fnd their origins in her
tragicomic desire to preserve a potentially embarrassing secret from
the recent past - her one-year reign as the Warren County Pork
�ueen.

As an African American from Chicago, Mary's fears about life at a
midwestern university are decidedly more substantial than her white
counterpart's. Mary can scarcely "imagine" herself at Moo. U. "She
could watch herself walk across the campus, enter classrooms, study
in the library, eat in the commons or in the Dubuque House dining
room, dance with [her boyfriend] Hassan at a party, but still not
grasp where she was going or why she was doing anything. When
she thought of the campus or her classes or even her room, she
was absent," Smiley writes. "There wasn't even a space where a
black person should be" (381). Ironically, it is only the farmer and
quasi-inventor Loren Stroop - with his naIve belief that the admin-
istration continues to adhere to the Morrill Act's implicit dictum
about its mission of service to the community - who approaches
Moo U. with the confdence of being an insider amongst the
institution's conficted ivory towers and sacred groves. Paranoid about
the security of the vague invention that he plans to bestow upon
an ostensibly grateful university, Loren dons a bulletproof vest as
"his best protection against the FBI, the CIA, and the big ag busi-
nesses, all of whom, he knew, wanted to get him out of the way
before he perfected and marketed his invention, which was going
to revolutionize American agriculture" (85). In Smiley's sardonic
vision of the academy, it seems that only a madman could hope for
a place among Moo U.'s distorted cultural landscape.
During the latter portions of Smiley's novel, Moo erupts in a series
of carnivalesque moments in which her characters engage in sim-
ultaneous acts of transgression and complicity - acts, that is, in
which Smiley's academics both reject and cleave to Moo U.'s social,
economic, and political hegemony. In a virtual carnival of texts,
Smiley's characters exploit the offcial and unoffcial "languages" of
knowledge, sexuality, the media, innuendo, and interoffce corre-
spondence in order to effect their own self-driven ideologies and
agendas. In a chapter entitled "The Common Wisdom," for example,
Smiley surveys her characters' divergent perspectives of the
institution's fnancial and hierarchical conditions. Smiley enumerates
the common knowledge about Moo U. from a wide range of

viewpoints, including the state's citizens, for whom "it was well
known" that "the university had pots of money and that there
were highly paid faculty members in every department who had
once taught Marxism and now taught something called deconstruction-
ism, which was only Marxism gone underground in preparation for
emergence at a time of national weakness." In addition to register-

ing the voices of the state legislature - for whom "it was well known
that the faculty as a whole was determined to undermine the moral
and commercial well-being of the state" - Smiley reports the faculty's
equally politicized view that the governor and the state govern-
ment planned to diminish their research opportunities and replace
them with "computer-graded multiple choice" exams. For Moo U.'s
janitorial staff, "it was well known" that "if you wanted to main-
tain your belief in human nature, it was better never, ever to look,
even by chance, into any wastebasket." Finally, for the students,
common wisdom dictates that the campus populace frequently en-
dures unreported attacks by axe murderers, an administration that
intentionally overbooks the dormitories, and a nefarious cafeteria
staff whose Thursday afternoon chili "contained all the various kinds
of leftover meat from the preceding week, even meat left on plates"
(19-20).
By highlighting the vague intersections between fction and re-
ality in the arena of campus communication, Smiley demonstrates
the manner in which centripetal and centrifugal voices create various
levels of community and understanding at Moo U. Smiley accom-
plishes a similar end in a chapter entitled "Who's in Bed with Whom,"
an extended narrative in which she recounts her academic characters'
sexual proclivities and liaisons. For Mary, sex with Hassan - a
Palestinian graduate student at Moo U. - affords her with a new
means of imagining her place in the student population's ethnic
hierarchy. "A virtue she doesn't like to admit to herself," Smiley
writes, is that Hassan "is neither black nor white. When she tells
her black friends and her white friends that he is Palestinian, both
sets are impressed. Both sets suspend the judgments they would
otherwise make" (97). For Tim and Cecelia, sex provides a vague
communion. Tim fnds it diffcult to concentrate on the activity at
hand, while Cecelia is understandably troubled by his disinterest.
In bed with her lesbian lover Mrs. Lake, Mrs. Walker exerts a pre-
dictable degree of control during sex. In addition to refusing to
employ euphemisms about the female sexual anatomy, Mrs. Walker
periodically interjects bits of campus gossip during the couple's various

moanings and gropings. The chapter concludes with a fgurative

reference to Dr. Gift being "in bed," in a business and political
sense, with Arlen Martin, a billionaire with whom the economics
professor plans to annihilate the Costa Rican cloud forest for fnancial
gain. As he dreams alone in bed, "the thought of being personally
bought and sold by Arlen Martin two thousand times brings him to

such a pitch of excitement that he wakes up and can't go back to
sleep" (105).
Later, in the chapter entitled "Mass Media" - which inaugurates a
virtual string of such chapters that establish a narrative tension of
sorts and bring Moo to its dramatic conclusion in "Some Weddings"
- Smiley traces the public dissemination of Dr. Gift's plans to eradi-
cate the rain forest. Initially pleased by the "amazing" fashion in
which he and Martin "had orchestrated the whole thing during the
winter recess," Dr. Gift reads a politically embarrassing article bear-
ing the headline, "New Pressures on Central American Countries to
Exploit Resources in Protected Regions," on the front page of the
New York Times (309). During the same instant, Smiley reports, "Dr.
Cecelia Sanchez was asleep," while Tim stands in front of an En-
glish class on campus and negotiates the political correctness, or
lack thereof, of requiring his students to subscribe to the New York
Times. Loren Stroop remains blissfully unaware of the incriminat-
ing article, as the "New York Times was not sold in the town near
Loren Stroop's farm," where he still lives "untouched and unsabotaged
by the FBI, the CIA, and the big ag companies" (313). For Mrs.
Walker, though, the article comes as no surprise. "The reporter had
called her Friday and thanked her for being such a terrifc help in
linking Gift . . . and Arlen Martin," Smiley writes. Mrs. Walker also
knows that yet another article will soon appear, again at her behest,
that recounts Martin's appalling environmental record. After Dr. Gift
yells at her about the ensuing damage to his reputation, Mrs. Walker
makes "a mental note to do a careful audit of all of Dr. Gift's uni-
versity accounts" (315).
In "Conspiracy Theory," Smiley fashions a series of newspaper
stories in order to provide her readers with a sense of Moo U.'s
power structure and with an understanding of its institutional sem-
antics. A Reuters article, for example, recounts recent payoffs to the
Costa Rican government in an attempt by unknown groups to gain
access to the country's virgin rain forests. A Wall Street �ournal story
details the bankruptcy of Seven Stones Mining, which planned to
exploit the Costa Rican cloud forest, and whose owner, Arlen Martin,

shrugs off the company's fnancial woes, telling reporters that "some-
times you can crow, sometimes you gotta squawk, but that's business"
(325). Yet another article in the State �ournal offers a favorable expose
of Dr. Gift's celebrated life and work, praising, in particular, the
professor's elegant home, professional demeanor, and intellectual
sophistication. In a letter to the editor of the State �ournal shortly

thereafter, Chairman X notes recent student protests of Dr. Gift's
Costa Rican activities, while observing that "our natural world is
teetering on the brink of disaster, and writers in the State �ournal
tiddle on about oak paneling and kitchen conveniences. This sort
of journalism is not only maddening, it is dangerous. Please cancel
my subscription" (328). Smiley concludes her textual carnival with
yet another article in the State �ournal that reports Governor O. T.
Early's plans for a series of budget cuts in the state's support of
higher education as a punitive measure for the recent protests on
Moo U.'s campus. Governor Early also suggests that the university
administration "fre all those bozos up there who are getting the
sons and daughters of the people of this state stirred up" (331).
By commingling offcial and unoffcial voices from the media, the
campus, and the state government, Smiley succeeds in revealing the
hierarchical and ideologically motivated nature of discourse, as well
as the many ways in which an individual's ethical perspective ulti-
mately determines the nature of his or her response to a given set
of external circumstances. In "A Little Deconstruction," Smiley's novel
reaches its ridiculous nadir in a chapter in which she challenges
her characters to confront higher education's various intellectual
and cultural crises on a very personal basis. For Smiley, the demo-
lition of Old Meats and Earl Butz's subsequent demise function as
metaphors for Moo U.'s ethical decline, as well as for the larger
academy's moral deterioration. Each character refects upon and
responds to the chapter's events in a highly particularized fashion.
For Chairman X, "the result of it all was that when the crane with
its clam bucket came and bit down Old Meats, he didn't have the
heart to order his troops to lie down in front of it, or, indeed, to lie
down in front of it himself" (365). Mrs. Walker somberly watches
as Earl Butz fees from the wreckage of Old Meats. For her, the sight
of the frightened animal seems "poignant. Even as she jumped back,
she held out her hand as if to pat him on the head" (372). Interestingly,
many of Smiley's coterie of academics either miss the destruction of
Old Meats completely or view the day's sad events in silence. When
his body fails him after the exertion of his epic, fnal trot across

campus, Earl Butz fnds himself subconsciously drawn to Keri - one

of Moo U.'s freshman and part of the institution's hazy future -
despite the pain shooting through his being: "Was he drawn by her
green coat? By something about her odor? By an instinctive animal
recognition that she had served a year as Warren County Pork
�ueen?" (373).

After Earl Butz heaves his last, enormous sigh on the grounds of
Moo U. - and after Moo's carnival of narrative voices reaches its
tragicomic conclusion - Smiley affords her readers with an inten-
tionally over-sentimentalized vision of the campus's future, a world
that dissolves in a food of weddings and concludes with "an aston-
ishing, and even legendary, kiss" (414). Having allowed the university,
in academic fction's well-honed deus ex machina tradition, to es-
chew fnancial ruin via the production and implementation of Loren
Stroop's revolutionary agricultural machine, Smiley ostensibly seems
content to let her characters enjoy the simple pleasures inherent in
a happy ending. Yet her often acerbic critique of higher education's
growing tendency toward consumerism and away from its educa-
tional imperatives usurps the power of the novel's saccharine
conclusion. As Nakadate observes, "The thematic lifeline of Moo is
revealed in the fow of money, the raw material out of which come
new products, new patents, and more arguments for more grants"
(190). Although Smiley's carnivalesque chapters serve in many ways
as a unifying mechanism that brings socially and ideologically
disparate characters and textual voices together, the technique never-
theless allows her to posit a damning critique of the ways in which
people with supposedly similar professional goals frequently fnd
themselves at odds over the differing and seemingly more urgent
needs of the self. "The fundamental problem for humanism," Daniel
Jacobson writes, "is to explain what we learn from art that is of
ethical signifcance, and that we do not already know" (334). In
Moo, Smiley's satirical evaluation of unbridled consumerism concerns
precisely such a social dilemma, albeit one that has obviously been
dissected on many previous occasions.7 Yet Smiley's self-conscious
retelling of consumerism's cautionary tale - of what happens when
a beast like Moo U. is permitted to gorge itself at the trough of
other, ethically dubious creatures - affords us with a narrative that
never loses its value, that always proves compelling.

11
Conclusion: Ethical Criticism and

the Academic Novel beyond the

Culture Wars
"I want to suggest a different metaphor for theoretical work:

the metaphor of struggle, of wrestling with the angels" The
only theory worth having is that which you have to fght
off, not that which you speak with profound fuency""
- Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical
Legacies"
Despite the publication during the last decade of a number of vol

umes devoted to the humanistic study of literary works - a roster of
monographs that includes David Parker's �t�i�s� T�eory� an� t�e No�el
(1994), Martha C" Nussbaum's Poeti� J�sti�e� t�e Literary Iiagination
an� P�bli� Life (1995), Kim L" Worthington's Self as Narrati�e� S�bje�
ti�ity an� Coii�nity in Conteiporary Fi�tion (1996), Colin McGinn's
�t�i�s� ��il� an� Fi�tion (1997), Robert Eaglestone's �t�i�al Criti�isi�
Rea�ing after Le�inas (1998), and Geoffrey Galt Harpham's S�a�ots
of �t�i�s� Criti�isi an� t�e J�st So�iety (1999) - ethical criticism must
still successfully contend with several issues of historical and con
temporary import in order to authenticate itself as a viable interpretive
paradigm" Apart from continuing to underscore its usefulness to lit
erary study, ethical criticism must effectively differentiate itself from
the contemporary critical prejudice associated with the "traditional
humanism" previously associated with such fgures as F" R" Leavis
and Northrop Frye" By also demonstrating its signifcant pedagogical
value, as well as establishing itself as a meaningful - and remarkably
inter�is�iplinary - component in the future of the theoretical project,
156

Con�l�sion 157
the ethical paradigm can indeed confrm Wayne C" Booth's vision
in T�e Coipany We �eep� an �t�i�s of Fi�tion (1988) of a reading
methodology that shuns theoretical dogma in favor of "critical plu
ralism" and highlights the ethical interconnections between the
lives of readers and their textual experiences (489)"1
Although ethical criticism continues to assert itself as both an

interpretive reading paradigm and a corrective for the social irrel
evance of the theoretical project's critical machinery, its detractors
often question its capacity for intellectual endurance, as well as its
usefulness as a means for ideological critique" Paul A" Bove's acerbic
comments in Intelle�t�als in Poter� a Genealogy of Criti�al H�ianisi
(1986) demonstrate the prevailing critical misgivings about human
ism and its application to literary works" "Critical scholarship should
seize the power function of 'truth,'" he writes, "and sophistically
enlist it for political work intended not only to reveal the dark side
of humanism's oppression but also to knock the underpinnings from
humanism and the dominant regimes it supports" Criticism must be
negative," he continues (309-10)" Bove's remarks clearly illustrate
the nature of the theoretical project's anxiety about humanism's
capacity for postulating any sustained political critique" Yet, as
Nussbaum reminds us in T�e Fragility of Goo�ness� L��k an� �t�i�s
in Greek Trage�y an� P�ilosop�y (1986), the ethical study of literary
works provides readers with a powerful means for interpreting the
ideological and interpersonal clashes that defne the human experi
ence" The ethical investigation of literature, she writes, "lays open
to view the complexity, the indeterminacy, the sheer diffculty of
actual human deliberation"" Such humanistic criticism, she adds,
underscores "the vulnerability of human lives to fortune, the muta
bility of our circumstances and our passions, the existence of conficts
among our commitments" (13-14)" In short, contrary to Bove's dra
conian outlook, the ethical paradigm supplies us with a useful
mechanism for interpreting the political struggles that invariably
plague the human condition"
In addition to Bove's pessimistic arguments regarding what he
believes to be the ideological ineffectuality of humanist forms of
literary critique, recent observations by critics such as Gerald Graff
and Morris Dickstein implicitly problematize the contemporary force
fulness of ethical reading paradigms" In "The Future of Theory in
the Teaching of Literature," for instance, Graff laments what he
perceives to be the "fragmented" nature of "traditional humanism"
(260), while in his review of Nussbaum's Poeti� J�sti�e, Dickstein

paternalistically describes her "love of literature and insistence on

its social value" as "refreshingly oldfashioned" (19)" Amazingly,
and despite the recent theoretical achievements of ethical critics
such as Booth, Nussbaum, and J" Hillis Miller, Graff's and Dickstein's
comments seem to locate the heyday of humanistic literary study
somewhere in the distant past" Similarly, in his essay, "The Com

mon Touch, or, One Size Fits All," Stanley Fish unfatteringly compares
T�e Coipany We �eep, Booth's ethical manifesto, with the regressive
and ethically questionable texts published by several of the infamous
culture warriors, including Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Dinesh
D'Souza" In his discourse on the ethical agenda, Fish unfairly charges
writers such as Booth with championing "moral relativism" and
rendering "the act of judgment" into a "meaningless and trivial"
exercise (250-1)" Ethical critics such as Booth in fact argue that
morality remains decidedly contingent upon the norms and standards
particular to the localized practices of autonomous selves" As S" L"
Goldberg perceptively recognizes in �gents an� Li�es� Moral T�inking
in Literat�re (1993), "there is no unwritten constitutional rule about
what everyone should mean by 'moral'" (88)"
Rather than attempting to articulate any codifed systems of be
havior, ethical criticism strives to address the manner in which
individuals arrive at their decisions, while also assessing how the
results of those choices affect the larger human community in which
we live"2 In this study's evaluation of ethical criticism and the Anglo
American academic novel, for example, the institutional practices
and professional activities of university life receive particular atten
tion" By drawing upon the tenets of contemporary moral philosophy,
moreover, I have demonstrated the ways in which intellectuals and
institutional bodies often detract from the ethical intentions of their
scholarly missions in order to satisfy their personal and political
desires" In addition to providing readers with individual models of
ethical and unethical behavioral patterns, the characters in the eleven
works featured in this study underscore the ways in which the
practitioners of academic fction utilize satire as an implicit means
for advocating the merits of positive value systems, as well as a
mechanism for commenting upon the nature of the academy and
its institutional politics, its occasional veneration of false - or pos�lost
- art, its cultural practices, and its various interconnections with
such concepts as community, goodness, and love" Further, by engag
ing in what I describe as a form of pejorative poetics, the authors
of the works included in this study deliver their humorous attacks

Con�l�sion 159
upon the academy while simultaneously employing a form of Swiftian

satire that attempts to instruct readers about the ways in which their
intellectual targets depart from the university's mission for unim
peded discourse, fairness, and the unrestricted pursuit of knowledge"
Amis's L��ky Jii, for example, reveals the manner in which the
political undercurrents inherent in Jim Dixon's unnamed redbrick

institution - manifested, most notably, by the fctive persona of
Professor Welch - undermine his capacity for selfexpression and
individuality, ultimately resulting in his dismissal, and fortunate
liberation, from the academy" Nabokov's satire of pos�lost art in
Pnin and Pale Fire functions as an ethical metaphor for the bank
rupt value systems that undergird the academy's scholarly and artistic
standards" His characterization of the renegade Dr" Charles Kinbote,
the spiritual antithesis of Malcolm Bradbury's earnest Professor Stuart
Treece in �ating People Is Wrong (1959), likewise personifes Nabokov's
estimation of the scholarly rage for selfpromotion and intellectual
acceptance" Similarly, in T�e H�ngry G�osts, the intellectual charac
ters in Oates's short stories consistently subvert the possibilities of
goodness and community in their respective academic worlds be
cause of their unchecked ambitions and outrageous desires for power
and preeminence over their colleagues" Drawing upon a wide range
of scholarly characters in Lodge's trilogy of academic novels, I have
also demonstrated the ways in which the aforementioned profes
sional motives challenge the scholarly capacity for experiencing
the intimacy and human interconnection that often accompany
romantic love" Like Bernard Malamud's ineffectual S" Levin in �
Net Life (1961), Lodge's academics remain unable to balance their
desires for institutional accomplishment with their fundamental needs
for erotic fulfllment"
In Oleanna, Mamet's academic characters verge on enjoying a truly
"altered" relationship, yet fnd themselves, time and time again,
stymied by the academy's ethically fractured structures of interper
sonal dynamics and by the seemingly inevitable barriers inherent
in their competing ideologies" The racial cauldron that comprises
Jack London College in Reed's Japanese by Spring, moreover, cri
tiques the ethical contradictions inherent in a social and scholarly
milieu that functions upon a monocultural school of thought" By
implicitly celebrating the merits of multiculturalism, Reed's novel
argues in favor of the ethical sensibilities of a pluralistic ideology
that advocates intellectual freedom and inclusiveness" Gilbert and
Gubar's nonfctional "melodrama," Masterpie�e T�eatre, demonstrates

the ethics of multiculturalism and canon revision through their

dramatization of the perils of an unidentifed Text and its struggle
for academic recognition" The latter two volumes, with their em
phasis upon cultural assimilation and pluralism, remind us that, in
the words of J" L" Mackie, "cultural inheritance is itself a part of the
good life" (172)" Finally, Smiley's Moo offers an archly satirical reading

of an institution of higher learning's rage for scholarly dominion"
In addition to critiquing Moo U"'s shadowy relationship with the
corporate world, Smiley demonstrates exactly what transpires when
the university's various unchecked appetites of consumption replace
its ostensibly more important - and seemingly more ethical - edu
cational prerogatives" By challenging the ethical failures of higher
education through their respective pejorative poetics, the authors
of each of these works underscore the particular value of ethical
criticism to the investigation of academic narratives"
The exegesis of their textual depiction of such a wide range of
ethical issues also reveals the signifcant pedagogic value of ethical
criticism, a reading paradigm that challenges students and teachers
alike by establishing vital interconnections between the life of the
reader and the narrative experience" Yet, as Susan Resneck Parr notes,
very few professors avail themselves of the educational possibilities
of ethical criticism" "Many teachers, like their students, see questions
of morals and values as distinct from knowledge," Parr writes" They
"tend to avoid issues with any ethical component," she adds,
"insisting that teaching ought to be valuefree" (9)" Proponents of
the ethical paradigm, however, recognize the tremendous pedagogical
benefts of ethical study and its capacity for enhancing existing
teaching methodologies in the humanities" "Literary works," James
Battersby writes, "provide us with 'ethical samples' of ethical
possibilities, and they are, in a very large and untrivial sense, the
schools of our moral sensibilities, teaching us surreptitiously much
about the nature and bases of right behavior" (194)" In this way,
the ethical criticism of literature encourages educators to highlight
the selfrefexive nature of reading and the manner in which our
existing social and moral inclinations inform, and thus share in
the construction of, our narrative experiences"
In addition to providing readers with a valuable means for recon
sidering their ethical biases in relation to the moral proclivities of
the larger human community, the ethical paradigm invites us to
test our value systems in relation to those inherent in the works of
literature that we consume"3 Lynne Tirrell ascribes this phenom

Con�l�sion 161
enon to a form of "moral agency" in which literary texts urge us to

project our value systems upon their narratives" "It is through the
articulation of events, motives, and characters that we become moral
agents," Tirrell argues, and "in telling stories one develops a sense
of self, a sense of self in relation to others, and a capacity to justify
one's decisions" (125)" By challenging readers to reaffrm their existing

moral sensibilities through their textual experiences, ethical criticism
encourages prospective students to consider spheres of experience
and cultures beyond themselves, to recognize a plurality of human
conditions and realities" Patricia Meyer Spacks further argues that
these reading experiences - although powerful and affecting - may
be understood as activities that invite ethical experimentation, the
trying on of new possibilities without the fnality or consequences
of life beyond the boundaries and artifciality of our narratives"
"Because novels have the power to engage us morally, they give us
choices - not merely acceptance versus nonacceptance, but accep
tance versus refusal," Spacks observes" "Paradigms are not imperatives
but possibilities," she continues, and "the paradigms of fction provide
an opportunity for moralplayfulness: costfree experimentation" (203)"
By emphasizing the selfrefexive nature of reading, ethical criticism
offers a wide array of pedagogic possibilities for educators inter
ested in inspiring their students both to reevaluate their own value
systems, as well as to look beyond the often insular boundaries of
the self" Developing an ethical terminology for the investigation of
literary works in the classroom and beyond, Christopher Butler adds,
will allow us "to make sense of the life we actually live" (245)"
As the chapters in this study of the academic novel have demon
strated, the ethical paradigm and its reliance on the tenets of
contemporary moral philosophy offer a broad range of applications
to literary study" Because of its inherently interdisciplinary nature,
moreover, ethical criticism proves further illuminating as a reading
methodology for a host of other felds of study, including feminist
criticism and rhetorical study, to name only a few"4 The recent
emergence of ethical criticism as a viable reading methodology may
yet prove benefcial to the fractious contemporary life of the theo
retical project as well" Arriving on the criticaltheoretical scene during
an era when poststructuralism fnds itself under siege for its anti
humanistic and highly politicized interpretive activities, the ethical
paradigm provides literary theory with a means for evaluating the
status of its ideological critique" As Robert Scholes reminds us, "To
have an ethics means to have standards, canons, protocols" (154)"

Ethical criticism, with its emphasis upon the observation of inter

pretive norms and the value systems of readers, furnishes critical
theorists with a meaningful context for addressing the direction of
literary study as the new century rapidly approaches" "Any critical
act is an expression of values," Christopher Clausen argues in T�e
Moral Iiagination� �ssays on Literat�re an� �t�i�s (1986), and "much

conservative criticism is overtly or covertly moral" So is most radical
and feminist criticism," he continues, "even if often disguised as
ideological critique" (22)" The infusion of an ethical imperative into
the various subgenres of critical theory during this latepoststructuralist
moment might indeed provide scholars with a useful discourse for
contextualizing the theoretical project's current internal reassessment
of its value systems and interpretive norms"
The contemporary preoccupation with ethical concerns also un
derscores the ethical paradigm's value as a progressive and pluralistic
means of direction for the future of literary study in a cynical era
of institutional budget restrictions and shrinking employment op
portunities in higher education" It should hardly be surprising, then,
that the ethical reevaluation of literary theory emerges during a
period in postsecondary education characterized by its adherence
to a bottomline mentality and the necessity of selfjustifcation"
�incent P" Pecora further attributes the apotheosis of ethics to ideo
logical fuctuations on the international political scene" "It is perhaps
no accident that at a time when the possibility of a viable adversary
politics in Western Democracies " " " has been once again reduced to
mere neurotic fantasy," Pecora writes, "ethics should return to critical
discourse" (204)" Regardless of the reasons for its recent incarnation
as a reading paradigm, ethical criticism supplies its proponents with
an intelligible parlance for articulating the value of literary study
to a Western populace in signifcant need of a critical methodology
that elevates cultural pluralism and communal responsibility over
cynical and monoculturalist theoretical agendas" In "Is There an
Ethics of Reading?" J" Hillis Miller concedes that "surely no one
can be expected to master the intricate rigor of the deconstructive
way of reading and apply it habitually" We need to get on with it,"
he adds, referring to the business of ethically reinvigorating our
existing methods of literary critique (80)" By demonstrating the use
fulness of secular humanism and contemporary moral philosophy
to literary study, ethical criticism highlights the pedagogic and in
terdisciplinary value of literary study to an increasingly diverse
and expanding global community" "Philosophy is the childhood of

Con�l�sion 163
the intellect," Thomas Nagel warns us in T�e Viet froi Not�ere

(1986), "and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up" (12)"
With its accent upon literary study and its wideranging possibilities
for intellectual and interpersonal development, ethical criticism elu
cidates so many of the ways that the life of the text intersects the
life of the mind"

164 Notes
Notes
Chapter 1: Introduction

1 As Wayne C. Booth observes in The Company We Keep: an Ethics of
Fiction (1988), "the word 'ethical' may mistakenly suggest a project
concentrating on quite limited moral standards: of honesty, perhaps,
or of decency or tolerance." In Booth's postulation, however, "ethical"
refers to "the entire range of effects on the 'character' or 'person' or
'self.' 'Moral' judgments are only a small part of it" (8). In this study,
I will elaborate upon Booth's usage of the term in order to share
in the establishment of a reading paradigm that, in its effort to
investigate the interconnections between the lives of readers and their
textual experiences, eschews censorship and the codifcation of moral
standards.
2 Although in this instance ethical criticism operates as a partial rejoin
der to the excesses of the poststructuralist theoretical project, the notion
of reading ethically fnds its foundations in a number of historical
antecedents. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, for example, establishes
precedents for the understanding of happiness (1.5), goodness (1.7),
virtue (2.5), pleasure (3.10), justice (5.1), and friendship (8.3). In "The
Poet" (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson calls for a transcendental artifcer
to engage nature and language as a "sayer," a "namer," and a "liber
ating god" who can articulate the value of reason, love, and beauty
to an emerging nation (219, 231). Similarly, in his controversial volume,
The Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater endured charges of hedonism for
his examinations of art and its power to yield both aesthetic meaning
as well as an expanded sense of consciousness: "Great passions may
give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the
various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which
come naturally to many of us," he writes. "Of such wisdom, the
poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake,
has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing
but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for
those moments' sake" (153). While his arguments ultimately border
on censorship and critical exclusion because of his unduly high liter
ary and moral standards, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948)
ascribed value to the works of writers that celebrated the moral fabric
of the human community. Such writers, Leavis writes, "are signifcant
in terms of the human awareness they promotej awareness of the
possibilities of life" (10). Finally, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism:
Four Essays (1957) posits that the concept of an ethical criticism pre
supposes the idea of artists as moral focalizers for their communities:
"The social context of art is also the moral context of art," Frye
notes. "Hence the moral view of the artist is invariably that he ought
164

Notes 165
to assist the work of his society by framing workable hypotheses,

imitating human action and thought in such a way as to suggest
realizable modes of both" (113).
3 In Canons and Consequences: Refections on the Ethical Force of Imagina
tive Ideals (1990), Charles Altieri addresses the necessity of deriving an
ethical parlance for contemporary literary criticism. "Lacking a language
for adjudicating truth claims," he writes, "literary theory can do no

more. Yet confronted by the pressures of academic orthodoxy under
prevailing models that cannot adequately handle questions of
responsibility and community, it dare do no less" (18). Additionally,
the inclusion of Geoffrey Galt Harpham's chapter on "Ethics" in the
second edition of Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin's Critical
Terms for Literary Study (1995) underscores the emergence of ethical
criticism as a viable reading paradigm during the past decade. As
Harpham notes: "Understanding the plot of a narrative, we enter into
ethics. Ethics will always be at the fashpoint of conficts and struggles,"
he continues, "because such encounters never run smooth" (404).
4 As Stephen R. Yarbrough cautions, "The dream of Truth is itself man's
most formidable enemy" (25). By truth, in this instance, I mean the
human construction, through language, of various states of being. In
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Richard Rorty remarks: "Truth
cannot be out there - cannot exist independently of the human mind
- because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out
there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the
world can be true or false. The world on its own - unaided by the
describing activities of human beings - cannot" (5).
5 Derrida attributes the indeterminacy of language to its structural in
consistencies. In Of Grammatology (1967), he writes: "Language is a
structure - a system of oppositions of places and values - and an
oriented structure. Let us rather say," he continues, "that its orientation
is a disorientation" (216).
6 In ReThinking Theory: a Critique of Contemporary Literary Theory and
an Alternative Account (1992), Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller
argue that, at least terminologically, "the very conception of decon
struction seems incoherent. For it rests on two prima facie inconsistent
claims. On the one hand, it claims to be constrained to work with
and within the very concepts it seeks to deconstructj on the other,
however, it claims to provide a means of radically overturning these
concepts. There is, then, we believe a simple and disabling contradiction
at the heart of the enterprise, and the attempt to rename the contra
diction 'paradox' - as some have been inclined to do - does not
remove the contradiction, however consoling the attempt may be"
(119-20).
7 For this reason, critics such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith refer to
deconstruction as a form of "antihermeneutics" that functions at
variance with methodologies of literary interpretation such "as his
torical description, textual analysis, and explication" that continue
"to be practiced as a magisterial privilege in the classrooms of the
literary academy" (23-4).

166 Notes
8 Norris's The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction

(1985) answers various critical charges that deconstruction operates as
"a form of unbridled linguistic nihilism whose effects - if somehow
put into practice - would include the dissolution of the individual
subject and his or her ethical rights before the law" (191). Although
he neglects to demonstrate the paradigm's value as a means for pos
tulating any kind of relevant cultural critique, Norris rightly challenges

those legal philosophers who attack deconstruction as a theoretical
project that mitigates individual autonomy.
9 While Norris's articulation of the necessity of an ethics of criticism
adequately demonstrates the contemporary critical mindset, his argu
ments must be distinguished from the brand of ethical criticism that
will be described below. Unlike Norris's call for an ethically forceful
redefnition of critical theory, ethical criticism provides readers with a
more synthesized paradigm for textual evaluation that establishes vital
interconnections between the text and the reader.
10 Rosenblatt's contributions to readerresponse criticism receive special
attention in Terence R. Wright's reviewessay, "ReaderResponse under
Review: Art, Game, or Science?" The value of Rosenblatt's transac
tional theory of reading, Wright argues, "lies in its recognition of
both sides of the 'reading transaction,' reader and text" (542).
11 Rosenblatt derives efferent from the Latin effere, which means "to carry
away" (24).
12 For a more forceful defnition of "universal good," I defer in this
instance to the tenets of moral philosophy and Nussbaum, who, in
Love's Knowledge, explains that "knowledge of a good, that is to say a
value, in the world requires, we see, knowledge of evil, that is to say
of the possibility of confict, disorder, the contingent necessity of breaking
or harming" (131).
13 Gardner further illustrates this point through his discussion of Adolf
Hitler's political autobiography, Mein Kampf (1925-7), the text that
infuenced the emergence and direction of the Nazi movement. "In
the long run," he writes, "cornball morality leads to rebellion and the
loss of faith. I do not mean, either, that what the world needs is
didactic art. Didacticism and true art are immisciblej and in any case,
nothing guarantees that didacticism will be moral. Think of Mein
Kampf " (19).
14 Gardner addressed the issue of postulating standards of behavior during
an interview with the English Department faculty of Pan American
University on 21 April 1981: "I think that presenting sort of noble
models of behavior, which is not to say perfect people - I don't
believe in such things but by presenting noble models of behavior,
you give people a model for their own lives, for their own feelings.
In a way, you give them permission to feel the nobler things that
they do feel without feeling that they are making fools of themselves.
I think that all art has always done that" (260). In The Company We
Keep, Booth argues nevertheless that Gardner's position in On Moral
Fiction suggests that "the only acceptable fction will be whatever meets
his announced moral standards. He always implies that one might

Notes 167
arrive at his secure judgments by the same logic with which he de
fends them" (54). As Booth concludes regarding the issue of ethical
criticism and the dangers of censorship: "There may be one universal
supreme good for all human beings to aspire to. . . . But there is
surely not one supreme quality that all good art - and therefore all
good narratives - should aspire to" (56).
15 Altieri warns, however, that such a process of critical refection requires

a kind of historical refexivity, a selfconscious concern for the morals
of the historical past, as well as those of the more immediate present.
Only then, he argues, can narratives truly perform their ethical func
tions. "If works and authors are confned to their historical parameters,
it is impossible to rely on traditional images of literature's educational
functions," Altieri writes. "Texts still provide knowledge, but the knowl
edge has no direction or authority. Texts are a record of symptoms, at
times of heroic efforts to resist entrenched values, but their specifc ren
dering of experience provides only a historically determined scheme. So
the study of the past must get its direction from forms of thinking that
are shaped by our interests in the present" (165).
16 Unlike the false prophecy of censorship, this notion of a refexive
and free intellectual discourse offers, I believe, a more effective inter
pretation of ethical criticism's pedagogic intentions. In Love's Knowledge,
Nussbaum compares this type of open discourse to the beliefs of "the
ethical philosophers and the tragic poets" who "understood them
selves to be engaging in forms of educational and communicative
activity, in what the Greeks called psuchagogia," o or the "leading of
the soul." In Nussbaum's estimation, then, teachers - indeed, ethical
critics - can provide students and readers with the benefts of their
own, carefully considered "values and judgments" (16-17).
17 Booth derives the neologism of coduction from co ("together") and
ducere ("to lead, draw out, bring, bring out"). Booth further defnes
coduction as "what we do whenever we say to the world (or prepare
ourselves to say): 'Of the works of this general kind that I have
experienced, comparing my experience with other more or less qualifed
observers, this one seems to me among the better (or weaker) ones, or
the best (or worst). Here are my reasons'" (72-3).
18 In Booth's critical matrix, the notions of "friends" and "friendship"
take on greater proportions, for in The Company We Keep he estab
lishes the metaphor that a work of literature functions as a friend.
Booth writes: "Considered under the friendship metaphor, the implied
authors of all stories, fctional or historical, elevated or vulgar, welcoming
or hostile on the surface, purport to offer one or another of these
friendships" (174). In Love's Knowledge, Nussbaum deepens the elements
of moral philosophy inherent in Booth's metaphor: "People care about
the books they readj and they are changed by what they care for -
both during the time of reading and in countless later ways more
diffcult to discern. But if this is so, and if the reader is a refective
person who wishes to ask (on behalf of herself and/or her community)
what might be good ways to live, then it becomes not only reason
able, but also urgent to ask: What is the character of these literary

168 Notes
friendships in which I and others fnd ourselves? What are they doing
to me? To others? To my society? In whose company are we choosing
to spend our time?" (231). In Narrative Ethics (1995), however, Adam
Zachary Newton suggests that "ultimately it is the author - whether
freestanding or represented by his text - who will turn out to be a
better or worse friend for us" (64-5).
19 In this instance, I defer to Nussbaum's usage of "pluralism," for she

cogently argues that Booth's defnition of pluralism is all too inclu
sive. Booth's "pluralism . . . leads to ethical confusion," she writes in
Love's Knowledge. "I think Booth is, at this point, bending over back
wards to answer his real or imagined critics in the literary world,
hastening to reassure them that he is no dogmatist, no stuffy de
fender of logic." Instead, she argues that we should read "pluralism
as multiplicity, as contextualism, and as multiple specifcation" (243).
20 Although Booth's inclusion of feminist criticism under the auspices of
ethical criticism received praise from feminist advocates, critics such as
Siebers found problematic Booth's efforts to embrace this region of
ideological criticism. Regarding the publication of Booth's 1982 essay,
"Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist
Criticism," Siebers remarks: "While feminists have welcomed Booth's
statements, his essay is awkward in many ways. He ignores the litera
ture of feminism, as if women have made no contributions to issues
of interpretation, and uses his spouse as a character in his morality
play, in which she appears as the patient homemaker, doing the iron
ing, as he engages in intellectual pursuits" (189). In Getting It Right:
Language, Literature, and Ethics (1992), Geoffrey Galt Harpham further
argues that ethical criticism operates from a masculine bias: "Those
interested in ethics must reckon with a stubborn and resilient streak
of patriarchalism within ethical discourse, and with the possibility
that a contemporary revival of ethics as an area of academic interest
signals not just a resistance to various forms of antihumanism or
irrationalism but also a specifc resistance to feminism as a discipline
and a cultural force" (14). As Booth's postulation of an ethical para
digm emphatically reveals, however, ethical criticism - just as its seeks
to avoid the spurious demands of censorship - provides readers with
an open forum for the communal evaluation and remediation of
social injustices and inequalities.
21 Remarkably, Miller refers to this ethical revitalization of critical theory
as "the presentday triumph of theory," a "critique of ideology" that
examines "the hidden assumptions of our procedures of teaching and
of the general institutionalization of literary study." This theoretical
victory - although perhaps slightly "overdetermined," Miller admits -
seems little more than a belated attempt to assert the social and pol
itical relevance of poststructuralism (83). His celebration of critical
theory's triumph underscores, rather, the conclusions of Knapp and
Michaels, who argue that the "theoretical impulse" only serves to
separate, unnecessarily, the reader from the text through its reliance
upon the artifcial necessity of "theoretical choices" (29).
22 Booth writes: "Even the life we think of as primary experience - that

Notes 169
is, events like birth, copulation, death, plowing and planting, getting
and spending - is rarely experienced without some sort of mediation
in narrative. . . . We all live a great proportion of our lives in a sur
render to stories about our lives, and about other possible livesj we
live more or less in stories, depending on how strongly we resist sur
rendering to what is 'only' imagined" (14-15).
23 See Richard H. Weisberg's Poethics, and Other Strategies of Law and

Literature (1992), which, like Nussbaum's volume, explores the ethical
interconnections between the study of law and the interpretation of
literary texts.
24 In Ethics, Theory, and the Novel, Parker objects to Harpham's postula
tion of an ethical terminology, particularly Harpham's usages of
"obligation" and "ought." Parker argues that Harpham's ethical terms
unnecessarily challenge the philosophical integrity of the arena of
"free intellectual discourse" that Williams espouses in Ethics and the
Limits of Philosophy (205). Harpham's motives for positing an ethical
parlance, however, underscore Parker's own proclamation that ethical
criticism, as a new form of evaluative discourse, must "sustain an
adequate theoretical account of itself" (198). Harpham's efforts to
establish an ethical discourse would seem to support the spirit of
Parker's dictum.
25 Despite the efforts by critics such as Yarbrough, Miller, and Harpham
to reinvigorate poststructuralist critical projects such as deconstruction
and postmodernism with muchneeded doses of ethical refection, Parker
argues nevertheless that "poststructuralism of course displaces ques
tions of literary value in other ways - by insisting that literary meaning
is fnally undecidable, for example. If we cannot have hermeneutic
discourse, what is the point of evaluation, which must to some ex
tent depend upon it?" (201). Indeed, if meaning ultimately resists
interpretation, then why posit an ethics of criticism for its evaluation?
Chapter 2: Reading the "Heavy Industry of the Mind"

1 For an extended account of the evolution of the university novel
through the early nineteenth century, see Proctor's The English Univer
sity Novel (11-50). In his essay, "From Narragonia to Elysium: Some
Preliminary Refections on the Fictional Image of the Academic," Richard
Sheppard also provides readings of early academic novels and their
depictions of university life from the fourteenth through the nine
teenth centuries. For useful reference guides to American academic
fction, see John E. Kramer, Jr.'s The American College Novel: an Anno
tated Bibliography (1982), as well as Lisa Johnson's survey, "The Life of
the Mind: American Academia Refected through Contemporary Fic
tion" (1995). Finally, Lyons's 1974 essay, "The College Novel in America,
1962-1974," updates his original investigation of the academic novel
as a literary genre.
2 See Susan J. Leonardi's Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the
Somerville College Novelists (1989) for an excellent account of the various

170 Notes
literary depictions of the admission of female students at Oxford and

the acrimonious debate that followed over granting them degrees.
Further, Nadya Aisenberg and Mona Harrington's Women of Academe:
Outsiders in the Sacred Grove (1988) offers discussion regarding the
contemporary experiences of women in the academy competing for
tenure amidst a genderbiased university climate whose "ancient norms,"
they argue, still "cast women in subordinate, supportive roles in both

their private and their public lives" (xii).
3 Sheppard notes that for universities this era in English history also
marks the shift from their function as clerical institutions devoted to
producing educated priests to their emergence as the precursors of
our modern research institutions (11).
4 As Janice Rossen notes in The University in Modern Fiction: When Power
Is Academic (1993), the exclusion of women from the university com
munity still resonates within the pages of academic fction. "There
has been nothing else like the wholesale resistance to the admission of
a particular, coherent group to the University in Britain, and this is
part and parcel of the subject," Rossen writes. "The two facts are
inextricable - women got into the University, and women were bit
terly opposed in their efforts to do so. The powerful initial resistance
to their inclusion in the University would certainly have affected how
they saw themselves and their place in that community for some time
to come" (34).
5 Lyons traces the frst American academic novel to Nathaniel Hawthorne's
Fanshawe, published in 1828. Set at Harley College in the wilderness
of New England during the eighteenth century, Hawthorne's novel -
which he later attempted to suppress - explores a number of themes
endemic to modern academic fctions, including Hawthorne's depic
tion of the eccentric Dr. Melmoth, an absentminded and ineffectual
scholar who later becomes the institution's president (5-6).
6 Further, in his essay, "Inside Jokes: Familiarity and Contempt in Aca
demic Satire," Brian A. Connery observes that academic satire - in
contrast with neoclassical satire, which only attacks the vices and
follies of an absent or unknowing target - also aims its satiric barbs
at the reader. In this way, he argues, academic novelists deny their
readers the ironic, selfcongratulatory pleasures of neoclassical satire
because the readers themselves, often academics, function as the texts'
ultimate targets (124-6).
7 W. Scott Blanchard's Scholar's Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renais
sance (1995) illuminates the interconnections between the satiric ambitions
of the Menippean writers and the motivations of twentiethcentury
academic novelists: "Menippean satire is a genre both for and about
scholarsj it is an immensely learned form that is at the same time
paradoxically antiintellectual," he writes. "If its master of ceremonies
is the humanist as wise fool, its audience is a learned community
whose members need to be reminded . . . of the depravity of their
overreaching intellects, of the limits of human understanding" (14).
Unlike the aforementioned commentaries by Proctor and Lyons,
Blanchard's text implicitly establishes the place of modern academic

Notes 171
satire in a more richly developed and lengthy satiric tradition.

8 In addition to the aforementioned studies by Proctor, Lyons, Carter,
and Rossen, remarkably few monographs attempt to traverse the aca
demic novel and its devastating accounts of the scholarly community.
The university novel does receive attention in two recent collections
of essays, however. David Bevan argues in his Introduction to Univer
sity Fiction (1990) that conficting nuances of "deformation, divination,

desecration, [and] damnation" adorn the "disturbing hall of mirrors
constituted by that emergent genre" of university fction (3), while
Ben Siegel identifes the fundamental existential contradiction inher
ent in the genre in his Preface to The American Writer and the University
(1989), a collection of essays examining the interconnections between
creative writers and universities: "No other institution rivals the Ameri
can university in harboring so many who criticize and even revile it
while refusing to leave it," he writes (7).
9 Rossen suggests that students, through the necessity of entrance re
quirements and performance standards, endure similar threats of
expulsion from the university community. Undergraduates must con
form, moreover, to a form of communal disruption each term as
their lives redefne themselves around new course schedules and holi
day breaks: "What undergraduates in all of these novels seem to
experience primarily is an intensely intimate, private world with their
peers - and one in which they suffer from either ambitions to be
included . . . or yearning to fnd love and acceptance," Rossen ob
serves. "The unique feature of community life for undergraduates is
that the small world which they create for themselves vanishes when
the students disperse at the end of their University terms" (118). A
number of novels treat the undergraduate experiences of students in
the academy, including Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers (1973), Clare
Chambers's Uncertain Terms (1992), and Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of
Attraction (1987), among others. Finally, Marion Rosen's Death by
Education (1993) explores student life in a secondary educational
institution.
10 Caram writes that the concept of the Professorroman is "a term of my
own coining, in the tradition of slightlypompous Germanic schol
arship. . . . The Professorroman has distinctive features which qualify it
as a subgenre of literature similar to the Kinstlerroman or the
Bildungsroman" (42).
Chapter 3: Negotiating the University Community

1 In his Memoirs (1991), Amis places the event in 1948, although a
number of other accounts locate this particular visit to Leicester Uni
versity during 1946. As Amis recalls in his Memoirs: "On the Saturday
morning he [Larkin] had to go into college and took me ('hope you
won't mind - they're all right really') to the common room for a
quick coffee. I looked around a couple of times and said to myself,
'Christ, somebody ought to do something with this.' Not that it was

172 Notes
awful - well, only a bitj it was strong and sort of developed, a whole
mode of existence no one had got on to from outside, like the SS in
1940, say" (56). Eric Jacobs's 1995 volume, Kingsley Amis: a Biography,
confrms 1946 as the year in which Amis visited Leicester University's
Senior Common Room (143).
2 For additional discussion regarding the mission of the redbrick uni
versity, see Bruce Truscot's 1943 manifesto, Redbrick University, a volume

that outlines the perceived risks of the redbrick enterprise and its in
evitable clashes over funds with the more established English institutions
of higher learning, particularly Oxford and Cambridge. David Daiches's
The Idea of a New University: an Experiment in Sussex (1964) details the
founding of the University of Sussex and the fnancial and institu
tional dilemmas inherent in such a project.
3 In his essay, "What Are Universities For?" Louis Menand argues that
an increasingly utilitarian approach to postsecondary education has
usurped the traditional mission of the modern academy, which he
defnes as "the liberalization, through exposure to art, literature, and
philosophy, of the undergraduate mind" (92). Contemporary college
students, he notes, generally fnd their intellectual motivation in the
pursuit of the fnancial achievements upon which our culture places
value and esteem, rather than in the development of the mind and
the cultural nourishment of the soul. As Menand concludes: "Aca
demic thought may have been heading left in the last ten years or
so, . . . but college students themselves have been heading straight into
the mainstream. Even comfortably middleclass students feel an econ
omic imperative almost unknown to middleclass students of twenty
years ago. When I was a freshman, in 1969, I didn't have a thought
in my head about how I was eventually going to support myself. I
suppose I imagined that I would just hitchhike around the country
with my guitar (which I didn't know how to play) reciting my poetry
(which I didn't know how to write)" (90).
4 In yet another instance, Dixon even goes so far as to imagine that his
enduring sense of ennui might yet provide him with the occupational
security that continues to elude him in his academic life. "I'm the
boredomdetector," he remarks. "I'm a fnelytuned instrument. If only
I could get hold of a millionaire I'd be worth a bag of money to
him. He could send me on ahead into dinners and cocktailparties
and nightclubs, just for fve minutes, and then by looking at me
he'd be able to read off the boredomcoeffcient of any gathering.
Like a canary down a minej same idea" (215).
5 In his Introduction to the 1992 reprint of Lucky Jim, Lodge notes that
Amis's portrayals of Christine and Margaret both seem anachronistic
when "judged by 1990s standards of what is Politically Correct." As
Lodge observes, Amis largely depicts Christine in terms of her beauty,
while the novelist characterizes Margaret as "hysterical, deceitful, and
sexually frigid" (xvi). Amis's treatment of women in his novels has
enjoyed substantial critical attention, especially in such works as
Hermione Lee's reviewessay, "Kingsley and the Women," and
McDermott's Kingsley Amis: an English Moralist (1989). In his essay,

Notes 173
"Kingsley's Ransom: Why Have the British Been Bashing the Original
Amis?" James Wolcott argues that, "for a misogynist, Amis often gives
the women the choicest comebacks - if not the last word, then the
knockout nexttolast word" (55).
6 In his essay, "Changing Social and Moral Attitudes," James Gindin
remarks that the establishment of a personal ethos requires the ac
knowledgment of the plurality of other selves who populate the

community: "The moral framework is social as well as individual,"
Gindin writes, "contingent on the recognition that the world con
tains many others besides the self" (137).
7 Dixon's rambling title likely fnds its origins in the sprawling title of
Amis's own Oxford undergraduate thesis, "English NonDramatic Poetry,
1850-1900, and the Victorian Reading Public" (Gardner, Kingsley, 26).
8 In The AntiEgotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters (1994), Paul Fussell
identifes the character of GoreUrquhart as a standard plot mechanism
in Amis's fction. "He stands as Amis's type of the traditional magna
nimous man, implicit as a hero in all Amis's writings," Fussell writes (16).
9 Gardner argues that Bertrand, like Margaret before him, falls victim
to a "twotimer" theory that seems to undergird the ethos of Lucky
Jim's narrative: "One notes in both cases the operation of a severe
and perhaps oversimple morality," he writes. "People who twotime
(Bertrand with Carol, Margaret by trying to involve two men in her
'suicide') can be discarded" in Amis's fctive world (Kingsley, 31).
10 Fallis notes the limited role of luck as the singular means by which
Dixon should redefne his behavioral patterns, however: "Jim revels in
his trickiness," Fallis observes, but "in the end, all his trickery gets him
nowherej he is not saved by his own manipulations of himself but by
that of luck, his fate or wyrd over which he has no real control" (69).
11 In his essay, "Lucky Jim and After: the Business of University Novels,"
J. P. Kenyon argues otherwise. "I doubt if University Novels are re
garded by those who read them as especially relevant to 'real' universities,"
Kenyon writes. "Firstly, the profound cynicism and disgust displayed
by their authors is dismissed as a quirk of the cloistered academic. No
layman regards a professor as being quite of this world" (83).
Chapter 4: Scholar Adventurers in Exile

1 Scholars and critics frequently irritated Nabokov with queries about
the moral value of art and literature. In a September 1966 interview
with Herbert Gold, for instance, Nabokov remarks, "I do not give a
damn for public morals" (Strong Opinions, 93). In 1969, Kirk Polking
of Writer's Digest offered the author $200 for 2,000 words on the
ethical responsibility of the artist. In a letter of 13 June 1969, Nabokov
replied: "My answer to your question 'Does the writer have a social
responsibility' is: NO[.] You owe me ten cents, Sir" (453). Finally, in a
letter of 10 September 1969 to Brother Joseph Chvala of St. Edward
High School in Cleveland, Ohio, Vera Nabokov, the author's wife,
reiterated Nabokov's argument that literature should not function as

174 Notes
an express means for establishing moral standards: "My husband asks

me to tell you that he does not believe that an artist is responsible to
societyj he believes that an artist is responsible only to himself" (457-8).
2 For the purposes of this chapter, I will employ the diplomatic and
truncated transliteration, poshlost, to replicate the Russian IOIJOCTb.
See Nabokov's Strong Opinions for an example of this usage (100-1).
3 In Strong Opinions, Nabokov further defnes poshlost as "corny trash,

vulgar cliches, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations,
bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudoliterature" (101).
4 Menand disagrees with the widely held assumption that academics,
by virtue of their esteemed places in our institutions of higher learn
ing, are somehow entrusted with the care of "the common culture."
"Professors are people trained to study culture," he writes, "not to
conserve it (whatever that would mean). . . . Nor is it a favor to the
culture," he rightly adds, "to hand it over to academics for its nour
ishment and protection" (99). As the following analysis of Pale Fire
will vividly demonstrate, consigning a cultural artifact to the care of
academics bent on indulging their personal artistic ambitions can produce
devastating consequences indeed.
5 For a discussion of Nabokov's employment of narrative structure as a
means for satire in Pale Fire, see Keith Reierstad's essay, "Most Artisti
cally Caged: Nabokov's SelfInclusive Satire on Academia in Pale Fire."
6 In a letter of 3 February 1954 to Pascal Covici, Nabokov confesses his
role as a character in his own novel: "At the end of the novel,
I, V.N., arrive in person to Waindell College to lecture on Russian
literature," he writes (143). Some critics, Gennadi Barabtarlo among
them, seem uncomfortable with the author's intrusion into the narra
tive of Pnin. In Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin (1989), for
example, Barabtarlo refers to the narrator vaguely as "N-" (16). Other
critics fnd it diffcult to fathom Nabokov's narrative intrusion, par
ticularly Laurie Clancy. In Clancy's problematic 1984 volume, The Novels
of Vladimir Nabokov, he writes: "I regard the suggestion of the narrator's
being Nabokov himself as too manifestly absurd to be worthy of
serious discussionj there is not one shred of actual evidence to sup
port it" (122). In addition to a range of narrative clues that hint at
Nabokov's shadowy role as the novel's narrator, his correspondence
offers convincing proof regarding his role in the novel.
7 Nabokov published his frst nine novels - from Mary (1926) through
The Gift (1937-8) - in Russian as "V. Sirin."
8 Nabokov, of course, endured the wrath of a number of critics, par
ticularly Edmund Wilson, over his translation and annotation of
Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin: a Novel in Verse, published in a
lavish fourvolume edition in 1964. While Wilson derided Nabokov's
literal translation of Pushkin's long poem, other critics objected to the
profundity of his massive textual apparatus, a commentary that featured
nearly a thousand pages of explanatory notes. Although Nabokov's
edition remains an invaluable tool for the study of Pushkin's text,
critics such as Cowart in Literary Symbiosis note its ironic juxtaposi
tion with Pale Fire's own infated editorial apparatus (67).

Notes 175
9 Shade, unbeknownst of course to Kinbote, found the inspiration for

his title in Timon of Athens: "The sun's a thief, and with his great
attraction/Robs the vast seaj the moon's an arrant thief,/And her pale
fre she snatches from the sun" (4.3.436-8). Nabokov lampoons this
academic practice elsewhere in Pale Fire when he maligns the "fashion
able device of entitling a collection of essays . . . with a phrase lifted
from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past. Such titles

possess a specious glamor acceptable maybe in the names of vintage
wines and plump courtesans but only degrading in regard to the
talent that substitutes the easy allusiveness of literacy for original fancy,"
he writes (240).
10 Nabokov's descriptions of the English department's "Freudian fancies"
reveal his particular animus for the overarching infuence of Freudian
psychoanalysis upon twentiethcentury letters. In Speak, Memory: an
Autobiography Revisited (1951), for instance, he refers to Freud as "the
Viennese Quack," while in Strong Opinions he calls him "that fgure of
fun" (47, 66). According to Boyd, Nabokov "detested the way Freud
befouled something he held as precious as family love" (American
Years, 161). In his note to line 929 of Shade's poem ("Brutes, bores,
classconscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,/Fake thinkers"), Kinbote lam
bastes the psychoanalytical interpretation of literary works and concludes,
"Do those clowns really believe what they teach?" (271).
11 In addition to Cowart, several other critics, including Torgovnick,
Hennard, and David Rampton, argue that Nabokov anticipates the
interpretive practices of poststructuralism and other arenas of literary
theory. While Torgovnick describes Pale Fire as a "fable for contempo
rary criticism" (38), Hennard fnds similarities between the "metacritical
activity displayed in Pale Fire" and the "Derridean and Kristevan
poetics" inherent in contemporary critical theory. Rampton argues
that "Nabokov anticipates both the methods of poststructuralist crit
ics and their preoccupations, the notion of language as a play of
differences, the revealing of selfreferential paradox and selfconscious
indeterminability, [and] the emphasis on interpretation as misinterpre
tation" (105).
Chapter 5: Searching for Goodness and the Ethical Self

1 Remarkably, Oates's contributions to the genre of academic fction
remain unexamined in the available scholarly monographs devoted
to its study. In a 1978 interview with Robert Phillips, Oates describes
the unity of composition inherent in her volumes of short stories:
"Each of the story collections is organized around a central theme
and is meant to be read as a whole - the arrangement of the stories
being a rigorous one, not at all haphazard" (222). For this reason,
The Hungry Ghosts surely warrants consideration among the academic
novels produced during the latter half of this century.
2 In Academic Tribes, Hazard Adams notes the essential paradox that
undermines the very notion of an academic "community." Such an

176 Notes
institution, he argues, necessarily regards itself as "the vision of an

ideal of cultural achievement," yet its members function nevertheless
as employees rather than cultural guardians (26). "That the faculty
are employees," he writes, "refects the postEdenic condition of public
education and the growing call for accountability of public institutions
to the people" (15). This tension, then, between cultural responsibility
and public accountability reveals the ideological contradictions that

problematize the mission of the academic community, as well as the
ethical dilemmas that confront its members.
3 In addition to setting a number of her short stories in the sacred
groves of the academy, Oates devotes considerable attention to uni
versity life in several of her novels, particularly Unholy Loves (1979)
and the intensely autobiographical Marya: a Life (1986).
4 Oates reiterates her usage of Hilberry University as an academic set
ting in such later stories as "The Transformation of Vincent Scoville"
and "The Liberation of Jake Hanley," both of which appear in Cross
ing the Border (1976). See Trachtenberg's essay, "Desire, Hypocrisy, and
Ambition in Academe: Joyce Carol Oates's Hungry Ghosts," for further
discussion regarding the institution's role in these later tales (45-46).
5 See, for example, Hermann Severin's The Image of the Intellectual in
the Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates (1986), which examines the story
in terms of "the humiliating experiences of a young graduate stu
dent" (125), while unnecessarily mitigating the satiric import of Oates's
characterization of Dr. Thayer in "The Birth of Tragedy."
6 In "The Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates," Samuel F. Pickering, Jr.,
registers a similar complaint: "The pictures of academic life are the
stuff from which Miss Oates's weakest tales are made," he writes. "We
are given dreary people with dull vices wandering in psychological
mazes. Certainly such people exist, but they constitute only a part,
not the whole, of any world, academic or otherwise" (221). Like Severin,
Pickering fails to recognize Oates's satiric argument that such behav
ior, although equally plausible in the larger human community, offers
important commentary regarding the social politics of academic life.
7 Oates's inspiration for the events at the MLA convention in this story
undoubtedly arose from her experiences at the 1971 meeting of the
MLA at the Palmer House in Chicago. On 28 December, Sister Enda
Eileen Byrne of Our Lady of Holy Cross College chaired a session
entitled "Joyce Carol Oates." The panelists included, respectively, James
R. Giles, Rose Marie Burwell, and Ildik� de Papp Carrington. Carrington
reports that Oates in fact attended the session, although the writer -
unlike the meek and nervous Bernadine Donovan of her story - fully
participated in the event, literally marginalizing the panelists and their
papers in the process. See the November 1971 program issue of PMLA
for more session details (1131).
8 Carrington astutely notes that Mason functions ironically in the story
as the only "ethical critic" among the Hilberry English department
faculty. Yet after Ron exposes the other professors as wholesale pla
giarists, Mason - himself a disciple of one of the most ethical of
critics, Northrop Frye - ultimately suffers a nervous breakdown for

Notes 177
his efforts (137). Creighton recognizes the irony of Mason's fate as

well: "The satiric target is less on Ron's shoddy poetry than on his
colleagues' cowardice," she writes (131).
Chapter 6: The Professoriate in Love

1 In 1993, Penguin inaugurated its exclusive publication of the three

novels in England as A David Lodge Trilogy.
2 Although the arguments of contemporary moral philosophy generally
support this view, Singer correctly reminds us of the communal
possibilities of erotic love's healthier incarnations: "The ideal of sexual
love envisages a happy confuence between sexuality and love," he
writes. "It treats lasting and benefcial interdependence between two persons
as the making of a good society. To this extent, sexual love is inher
ently a social love, like friendship or love within the family" (71).
3 In The Culture of Love (1992), Stephen Kern further illustrates roman
tic love's propensity for transforming the rigid boundaries of the self.
"Desire takes the subject beyond itself toward another self," he writes,
and it "returns the self to itself dialectically at a higher level of self
awareness" (91). In this way, love operates as a means for establishing
human interconnection, as well as a mechanism for promoting the
individual's capacity for acknowledging the emotional needs of other,
equally autonomous selves: "The focus of the history of selfhood in
loving is on awareness of oneself as a self," he adds, "which varies
between the extremes of fusion and autonomy" (281).
4 Lodge cites Nathaniel Hawthorne's prefatory dictum on the Romance
in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) as an infuence upon his
academic fctions and their frequent narrative perambulations. In his
Preface to the novel, Hawthorne writes: "When a writer calls his work
a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a
certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would
not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to writing
a Novel" (1).
5 Lodge's narrative experiments underscore the wide range of textual
variation that marks the genre of academic fction, an ostensibly con
ventional literary format characterized by satire as its metier. Academic
narratives enjoy a variety of narrative forms, moreover, including verse
- Galway Kinnell's "The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson" (1994)j
drama - David Mamet's Oleanna (1992j see Chapter 7) and Susan
Miller's experimental Cross Country (1977)j the epistolary novel - Michael
Frayn's The Trick of It (1989)j a farcical short story - Stephen Dobyns's
"A Happy Vacancy" (1994)j and the narrative dislocation of parallel
texts - A. S. Byatt's Possession: a Romance (1990) and John Updike's
Memories of the Ford Administration (1993). Academic novels also fre
quently employ the conventions of the murder mystery, as evidenced
by such texts as Amanda Cross's Death in a Tenured Position (1981),
P. D. James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), D. J. H. Jones's
Murder at the MLA (1993), and Estelle Monbrun's Meurtre chez Tante

178 Notes
Leonie (1995). While Christine BrookRose draws upon the textual

nuances of postmodern pastiche in Textermination (1991), Lodge him
self uses parody in his 1965 narrative reconfguration of Joyce's Ulysses
(1922), The British Museum Is Falling Down. In Recalcitrance, Faulkner,
and the Professors: a Critical Fiction (1990), Austin M. Wright offers
one of academic fction's more innovative works. In his quasi
nonfctional study, Wright satirizes contemporary literary criticism

through his reproduction of two imaginary essays on Faulkner's As I
Lay Dying (1930) by a pair of feuding instructors whose students sub
sequently meet at "Phil's Pub" in order to critique the quality of their
professors' divergent arguments. The academic novel reaches its ex
perimental apex in Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat (1981), a
work that features stylistic forays into such genres as blankverse drama,
the sermon, the diary, the fable, poetry, the essay, and formal oration,
among a host of others.
6 Rummidge's workingclass locale loosely resembles the terrain surrounding
the University of Birmingham, where Lodge served as a professor of
English for three decades. Likewise, Euphoria bears more than a pass
ing resemblance to the University of California at Berkeley, where
Lodge taught as a visiting professor in the late 1960s. His essay, "The
People's Park and the Battle of Berkeley" (1969), refects his experi
ences during his stay at the university during a protracted era of
student unrest.
7 Tanner also contends that adultery will eventually lose its force as a
narrative construct as the social value of marriage decreases. "When a
society ceases to care much about marriage, and all that is implied in
that transaction, by the same token it will lose contact with the sense
of intense passion," he writes. "Adultery, we may say, no longer signifes"
(89). As Lodge's novels demonstrate, however, Tanner's argument simply
neglects to account for the literary power of adultery in contempo
rary novels such as Changing Places and Small World. In his own review
of Tanner's volume, Lodge writes: "One might be impressed, rather, by
the durability of adultery as a theme for fction, persisting in spite of
all of the changes of literary and moral fashion over the past hun
dred years" (119).
8 In his valuable work of moral philosophy, Love and Friendship (1993),
Allan Bloom refers to this phenomenon as amourpropre, "the imperi
ous need to subjugate another's will . . . because every ounce of one's
selfesteem depends on success in the venture" (176). By indulging
their selfprotective desires for amourpropre, lovers subsequently elevate
the needs of the self over the functional life of their romantic rela
tionships. As Nussbaum notes in The Therapy of Desire, "lovers infict
pain on one another. They do so because they perceive their desire
for the other person as a source of pain - a wound or ulcerous sore
in the self" (259).
9 Ammann registers similar reservations about Lodge's characterization
in David Lodge and the ArtandReality Novel, arguing that "most of
his characters in Small World . . . tend to be 'fat'" (110). In David
Lodge: How Far Can You Go�, Moseley also observes that the plot of

Notes 179
the novel "remains fairly broad and unsurprising." He writes: "That

people go to conferences to advance their careers and slake their lust
as well as to learn about literature, that many papers are dull repeti
tive things to which nobody listens, and that professors are at least as
ambitious as members of other professions, these are not revelations,
unless it is to a naIve public for which Small World is a searing expose"
(91). Yet Moseley, like Ammann, fails to recognize the many moments

of meaningful interpersonal exchange depicted in Lodge's novel. As
this chapter demonstrates, Lodge's academic characters - even as the
indeterminacy of language and the contradictions of their profession
invariably thwart their desires - continue in their decidedly human
quest for community and love. In this way, Lodge invests his charac
ters, much like ourselves, with the capacity to hope for and dream of
a better life in some foreseeable future.
10 Lodge's characterization of Fulvia clearly underscores Bjork's conten
tion that university novelists typically depict academic women as either
frigid or sexually deviant. "In campus literature," Bjork writes, "femi
nists are often portrayed as inficting pain upon their partnersj Lodge's
own creation in the novel Small World, the sadistic Italian professor
Fulvia Morgana, is a case in point" (121). Bjork rightly concludes
that "a constructive dialogue cannot be created by means of carica
ture" (125).
Chapter 7: Performing the Academy

1 See James Berardinelli's online review of the flm for additional dis
cussion regarding the title's folklore origins and the legend of the Ole
and Anna land swindle. Interestingly, the play version of Oleanna
begins with John engrossed in a telephone conversation in which he
remarks, "And what about the land. The land. And what about the
land? What about it?" (1).
2 In Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (1998), Robert Eaglestone
argues, rather unconvincingly, that "Levinas's thought cannot be turned
into a methodology: it is not a philosophy that can be applied. . . .
To ask for a Levinasian critical method is to ask for something that
cannot and should not exist" (176j italics added). In fact, Eaglestone
offers little evidence demonstrating the thrust of his contention be
yond his observation that "there is obviously no one critical process
which embodies Levinas's ideas, no one answer" (176). Yet Levinas's
ethical philosophy quite obviously posits its own terminology - in
cluding such concepts as "adequation," "alterity," "the face," and
"negation," among a host of others. Simply put, Levinasian philoso
phy, despite Eaglestone's misgivings, can easily be applied as an
interpretive matrix in much the same interdisciplinary fashion as gen
der studies, psychology, history, and sociology - to name but a few
of literary criticism's multitudinous allied disciplines, each of which
possesses its own contingent of thinkers with their own critical
vocabularies.

180 Notes
3 Thomas H. Goggans offers a useful reading of the feminist group's

function in Oleanna: "Carol appears to embrace the ideological rigor
of the Group because it provides her with a readymade tool allow
ing her to identify and challenge a world which she perceives as her
victimizer. And John's fatuous pedagogy, revealing an essentially pa
triarchal position, is worthy of measured criticism. But the specifc
allegations of sexual harassment and assault seem unreasonable," he

writes. "Instead, it seems to be misinterpretation fated by her personal
history and merely mischanneled by the selfinterested Group which
pursues, in John, a legitimate perpetrator of hierarchic abuse, but the
wrong representative of Carol's literal 'patriarchal' abuse. Carol's rela
tionship with her Group thus becomes a type of exploitation itself,
which emphasizes the complexity of Carol's role within the text and
validates the signifcance of her struggle" (440).
4 Craig Stewart Walker argues, rather intriguingly, that Carol might perform
a more oblique narrative role in Oleanna as "an extension or projec
tion of John's thought." Hence, "we imagine the play to be occurring
entirely in John's imagination, like a nightmare" (159).
5 Mamet received largely poor notices for the flm version of Oleanna,
in contrast with the generally rave reviews that the play enjoyed.
Roger Ebert writes that "experiencing David Mamet's play Oleanna on
the stage was one of the most stimulating experiences I've had in
theater. In two acts, he succeeded in enraging all of the audience -
the women with the frst act, the men with the second." Yet the flm
"lacks fre and passion," he adds. "Watching it was like having a pale
memory of a vivid experience." Eschewing any acknowledgment of
the similarities between the dialogue in Oleanna's play and flm versions,
Cynthia Fuchs attributes the flm's problematic screen transformation
to "a lazy script, in the sense that potential complications are made
infammatory rather than provocative, and responsibility (on the part
of either character) is made inconsequential rather than political or
structural." In one of the flm's few positive notices, James Berardinelli
writes that "Oleanna probes deeply into some of the darker facets of
human interaction, and anything with this keen an edge will likely
cause discomfort." He argues that "this flm has been made for those
willing to look beneath the surface to see a taut, intellectual sparring
match where there is no absolute truth."
Chapter 8: Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project

1 In The Ethics of Multicultural and Bilingual Education (1992), Barry L.
Bull, Royal T. Fruehling, and Virgie Chattergy further argue that a
multicultural pedagogy functions upon an ethical ideal. Multicultural
education, they write, demonstrates "that the ideal of unity in diver
sity has a moral and not just a pragmatic meaning. That ideal concerns
not only how culturally, religiously, and ethnically different people
can live together but also how they should live together" (4).
2 Likewise, the concept of individuality remains central to the multi

Notes 181
culturalist agenda. "We need a notion of respect for persons that is

sensitive," Waldron argues, "to the fact that for every man and woman
the construction of an identity . . . is a painfully individual task. We
need, accordingly, a conception of multicultural education that is
sensitive to the fact that each individual's identity is multicultural and
that individuals can no longer be regarded in the modern world (if
indeed they ever could) as mere artifacts of the culture of the one

community to which they think they ought to belong" (114).
3 Although Reed actively supports the aims of the multicultural project,
he nevertheless problematizes the movement's terminology in a 1995
interview: "We were the frst ones to use the term 'multicultural,' and
I wish we never used it because now it doesn't mean anything. Academia
got a hold of it and now it's just a big hustle. Anybody is multicultural"
("A Gathering of the Tribes," 373). In a 1994 interview with Wolfgang
Binder and Harold Zapf, moreover, Reed acknowledges the rich, sa
tiric terrain of the United States and its institutions of higher learning,
the setting of Japanese by Spring: "I can go from issue to issue, from
event to event in the United States, and I can have an ironic twist on
it. The United States provides endless material for me" (110).
4 In the novel, Reed clearly employs the historical persona of Jack Lon
don as an ironic metaphor for racism. Despite his socialist desire for
the creation of a classless society during his lifetime, London also
espoused the merits of the evolution of a "superrace" not unlike the
monoculturalist vision later espoused by the Japanese occupants of
Jack London College. See Lee Clark Mitchell's "Naturalism and the
Languages of Determinism" for further discussion regarding London's
ambiguous social policies (540-2). Reed also includes several references
to Japanese racial atrocities in the Pacifc theater of the Second World
War - evinced, most notably, by their cruel organization of the Bataan
Death March in the Philippines in 1942. Like his depiction of Lon
don, Reed surely appropriates the racism of the Japanese historical
past as an implicit metaphor for illustrating the brutality and hypoc
risy of xenophobic behavior in Japanese by Spring's fctive present.
5 Reed's depiction of Puttbutt's struggle for tenure surely fnds its ante
cedent in the novelist's own tenure dilemmas in the English Department
at the University of California at Berkeley during the mid-1970s. The
department ultimately denied him tenure because, incredibly, "two
colleagues felt that Reed's work was too innovative to win acceptance
within the department," according to Jon Ewing. In a 1977 interview
with Ewing, Reed recalls the events surrounding his own tenure battle:
"I told the chairman of the department that I thought racism was a
factor. I didn't say it was a racist decision. . . . I'm not so simplistic as
to believe that it was merely racism. But I think if you get 40 whites
in a room, there's going to be some racism, a racist element. I think
you could put that into a computer" (219, 221).
6 Like the respective academic protagonists of Don DeLillo's White Noise
(1985) and Jane Smiley's Moo (1995), Puttbutt indulges in extracur
ricular language study and experiences the unethical proclivities of a
hostile campus administration. DeLillo's novel, for instance, traces the

182 Notes
intellectual progress of Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at

the fctitious CollegeontheHill who surreptitiously learns the German
language during the evenings in an effort to avoid being exposed
before his colleagues for not knowing the native language of his life's
work. See Chapter 10 for analysis of Moo's satiric depiction of the
insular world of university administration.
7 Clearly, Puttbutt's dismay regarding the nature of Jokujoku's outra

geous salary and perks hardly results from a monoculturalist ideology,
but rather, from an academic world that has come to revere its own
star system, as well as to rely upon management models that reward
select individuals while marginalizing others. Interestingly, Jokujoku's
name derives from the Yoruba word jokujoku, which literally means
"corpseeater" and refers to a bird of prey.
8 In his review of the novel, Tsunehiko Kato objects to the ineffcacy of
Reed's depiction of Yamato's rightwing extremist organization: "Reed's
satire on this point is an example of the exaggeration which often
characterizes his narratives," Kato argues. "Actually there are no right
wing groups in Japan with clout and money who seek to restore the
Shogunate. There is no social and cultural basis for the existence of
such groups since the capitalist economic developments dating from
World War II. Reed's knowledge of Japan," he adds, "is still rooted in
stereotypes of old Japan or images of the new Japan that are narrowly
focused on its potential as a market for American commodities"
(126-7).
9 Reed's depiction of his own public persona contributes to the roman a
clef favor of Japanese by Spring, a novel that also features thinly
disguised portraits of the "culture warriors" of the late 1980s and
early 1990s. Such fgures include, perhaps most notably, Reed's pejo
rative characterization of D'Gun ga Dinza, a loosely veiled portrait of
Dinesh D'Souza, the controversial author of Illiberal Education: the
Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991). D'Souza appears in Reed's
narrative as an "antidiversity personality" and a "foreign mercenary"
from an "Eastern think tank" (109, 112). In addition to drawing
heavily from a wide range of personalities from American popular
culture, Reed offers a satiric portrayal of Jack London College's Pro
fessor Himmlar Poopovich, a paranoid scholar with a Nazi past who
maintains that blacks lack the equivalent brain size of whites, thus
undermining their collective intelligence. In this instance, Reed likely
targets the phrenological studies of J. Philippe Rushton, a develop
mental psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. Rushton's
arguments regarding race, brain size, and intelligence ignited an inter
national controversy during the early 1990s. Several of his colleagues
subsequently called for his dismissal from a tenured professorship as a
result of his controversial biological study, Race, Evolution, and Behavior:
a Life History Perspective (1995).
10 While Reed problematizes the exclusionary practices of Afrocentrism,
he hardly approaches the animus of Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of
Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History
(1996), in which Lefkowitz argues that Afrocentrism "teaches young

Notes 183
students to distrust all Europeans, past and present. . . . In short, the

Afrocentric myth of antiquity does not educate its adherents. Instead,
it keeps them in a state of illusion, both about the true course of
history and also of the ways in which people have always been able
[to] learn from cultures other than their own" (156, 158). Khaula
Murtadha offers a useful response to the words of Lefkowitz, as well
as a spirited defense of Afrocentrism's multicultural possibilities: "The

critics of Africancentered education, and even some of its adherents,
incorrectly assume that the only purpose of Afrocentricity is an at
tempt to make African Americans feel good about themselves, building
selfesteem, and taking pride in historic accomplishments. These critics
fail to recognize the signifcance of examining the historical record as
a means for evaluating social, political, and economic events as well
as their consequences and ramifcations for the impact on people's
lives" (360).
Chapter 9: Academic Nonfction and the Culture Warriors

1 For thorough examinations of the culture wars and their principal
voices, see Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature (1990), Gerald Graff's
Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conficts Can Revitalize
American Education (1993), Todd Gitlin's The Twilight of Common Dreams:
Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (1995), John K. Wilson's The
Myth of Political Correctness: the Conservative Attack on Higher Educa
tion (1995), and Lawrence W. Levine's The Opening of the American
Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (1996).
2 In To Reclaim a Legacy, Bennett argues that the politicization of literary
and cultural studies accounts for the general decline in the number of
humanities majors since the 1970s. Bennett claims that humanities
professors - because of what he believes to be their rage for ideological
modes of criticism - marginalized the master texts of Western culture
and essentially drove students away from the humanities community.
3 In General Knowledge and Arts Education: an Interpretation of E. D.
Hirsch's 'Cultural Literacy' (1994), Ralph A. Smith's misreading of the
multicultural project demonstrates precisely the way in which the cul
ture warriors fail to understand the movement's pluralistic aims: "What
makes multiculturalism a matter for serious concern," he writes, "is its
transformation into an extreme ideology whose purpose is to under
mine the signifcance of Western civilization by claiming that Western
traditions, owing to their purported racism, sexism, and elitism, are
the cause of most of our modern problems" (78). Smith's defnition
of the multiculturalist agenda, however, fails to account for the widely
held belief among scholars that its investiture would actually broaden
the existing reading canon rather than shrink it.
4 David E. Purpel's The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education: a Curricu
lum for Justice and Compassion in Education (1989) also problematizes
the hegemony of professionalism within our institutions of higher
learning. The academy's "major preoccupation is with perpetuating a

184 Notes
system based on the individual competitive struggle for material suc

cess," Purpel writes. "This goal, however, is masked in the rhetoric of
concern for knowledge and truth, and hence the schools do not even
pretend to seek higher truth, higher meaning, or wisdom," he adds
(60). In this manner, Purpel also admonishes academe for its lack of a
spiritual imperative in its scholarly pursuits. For additional discussion
regarding the culture warriors' assault on tenure, see Martin Anderson's

Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals Are Destroying Our Uni
versities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future (1992), particularly
his chapter on "Culprits and Solutions" (194-210).
5 Incredibly, Page Smith attributes what he considers to be the demise
and politicization of contemporary scholarship almost entirely to the
activities of Jacques Derrida. In Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in
America (1990), Smith describes Derrida's philosophy as "an acid eating
away at the dominant structures of the academic world, French, English,
and American. He has quite literally 'deconstructed' higher educa
tion," Smith adds, "and left us with the question of how we are to
regain our moral and intellectual equilibrium" (304). Similarly, Bruce
W. Wilshire reiterates Smith's vilifcation of Derrida in his 1990 vol
ume, The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and
Alienation. Wilshire credits Derrida's writings with the current state of
"creative chaos in the humanities." In Wilshire's estimation, Derrida's
deconstructionist critique has been "little more than a fad, for caught
up in jargon it has lost touch with the very tradition which lent it
sense and direction: the recuperation of vital possibilities of philo
sophical growth and coherence in the positions of past Continental
thought" (157-8).
6 Gilbert and Gubar originally published Act I of their melodrama in a
1991 issue of Critical Inquiry as the culture wars reached their contro
versial apex.
7 The controversy that accompanied Harold Bloom's 1994 publication
of The Western Canon: the Books and School of the Ages underscores the
Forward into Instability group's animus toward the proscriptive pro
cess of canon formation, an act that by its very defnition demands
the exclusion of some texts in order to preserve the legacy of others.
Bloom endured particular scholarly censure for his postulation of
several expansive appendices, or "canonical prophecies," tracing the
publication of cultural artifacts from the "Theocratic Age" through
the present "Chaotic Age." In Bloom's defense, however, his literary
canons typically cross a broad range of cultural, racial, and gender
lines, while also intersecting an impressive array of national litera
tures. See Bloom (531-67).
8 See D'Souza's Illiberal Education (68, 185) and Smith's General Knowl
edge and Arts Education (39) for further examples of the Back to
Basics movement's appropriation of Clausen's statement for their ideo
logical ends. In The Myth of Political Correctness, Wilson refutes Clausen's
conclusion through a rudimentary survey of the 1991 syllabi for English
courses at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Wilson
estimates that during that school year "nearly 100 Shakespeare plays

Notes 185
were read for every copy of Alice Walker's book" (85). A survey of
the 1986 course syllabi in the Department of English at Northwestern
University conducted by Gerald Graff produced similar results. See
Graff's Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conficts Can Revi
talize American Education (1992) for a detailed analysis of the
controversy that erupted regarding Clausen's statement (20-1).
9 The ethics and implications of tenure receive special attention in a

1996 special issue of Academe. See Hamilton Beazley and John Lobuts,
Jr.'s "Ransomed Teaching, Indentured Research, and the Loss of Reason"
(30-3), William R. Cotter's "Why Tenure Works" (26-9), and Stephen
Joel Trachtenberg's "What Strategy Should We Now Adopt to Protect
Academic Freedom?" (23-5) for various arguments regarding the need
for tenure reform. In addition to fending off attacks from the Back
to Basics contingent, Trachtenberg writes, "It is particularly urgent
that those employed in American higher education adopt a tone and
perspective that is sensitive to the profound economic insecurity now
affecting their fellow Americans" (25).
10 In "Cooling the Polemics of the Culture Warriors," Sanford Pinsker
adds: "A glance at the uncivil world around us should be enough to
convince academics that pursuing rhetorical strategies that rely on
anger and insult has done us no more good than it has politicians
and talkshow hosts. And if attempting to become better models also
means a decline in books that preach to the choir by taking cheap
shots at the opposition," he continues, "I probably won't be the only
one rejoicing" (A56).
Chapter 1�: �ane Smiley�s Academic Carnival

1 Smiley has been teaching at Iowa State University since 1981. Signifcantly,
she served on the Faculty Senate from 1987 to 1989. In an article in
the Des Moines Register regarding Moo, she remarks that "I not only
didn't consciously base it on Iowa State, I didn't subconsciously base
it on Iowa State" (Bunke, 1T-2T). Smiley likewise objects to readers
who associate Moo with the academic novel as a literary genre. As
Smiley notes, "I would never have written an ivorytower comic novel.
I call my novel a slipperyslope academic novel, in which academia is
not cut off from the world, but is constantly contaminating the world,
is constantly both recreating the world in its own image and re
creating the world" (11A).
2 The impact of the First and Second Morrill Acts upon American life
is simply unprecedented in the world of higher education. According
to Cross, "In 1994, 29 tribal colleges joined the landgrant system,
increasing the total to 104 [colleges and universities]. Three million
students attended landgrant colleges and universities in 1997, includ
ing about 150,000 at the nine campuses of the University of California,
the largest, and fewer than 2,500 at Kentucky State University, the
smallest university. The landgrant institutions have granted twenty
million degrees, including onethird of all masters degrees and more

186 Notes
than half of all doctorates. The landgrant schools have also pro
duced eleven American presidents" (88).
3 Morson and Emerson caution against confusing the notion of
heteroglossia with the concept of polyphony. Quite obviously, both
terms refer to aspects of multiplevoiced narratives, yet "polyphony is
not even roughly synonymous with heteroglossia," Morson and Emerson
write. "The latter term describes the diversity of speech styles in a

language, the former has to do with the position of the author in a
text. . . . The two concepts pertain to fundamentally different kinds
of phenomena, although the critical practice of confating Bakhtin's
categories has tended to blur the distinction for many readers" (232).
4 As Michael Gardiner reminds us, though, it is important to remain
cognizant of the offcial culture's signifcant place in the same social
phenomenon that produces the carnivalesque moment. Synchronous
with carnival's utopian effervescence, offcialdom's hegemonic nature
ensures that it will attempt to stabilize the cultural continuum via a series
of staid, conservative, and potentially oppressive gestures. As Gardiner
observes, "A crucial aspect of carnival is its critical function, the refusal
to acquiesce to the legitimacy of the present social system which, for
many theorists, is the hallmark of the oppositional utopia" (260).
5 Adam Begley similarly describes Moo as a "muffed satire" and a "cel
ebration of the pleasures of university life, pleasures that should go
hand in hand with security, a little money, and good company nearby"
(44). In her review of the novel, Allison Lurie writes that "for a sati
rist, Ms. Smiley is remarkably fairminded and kind" (26).
6 The boar's name fnds its historical origins in Earl Butz, the Secretary
of Agriculture during the Nixon and Ford administrations who pro
moted a "get big or get out" approach to establishing a marketoriented
agriculture in an increasingly global economy (Nakadate 192). While
reviewer Michael Carlson largely (and playfully) dismisses Moo as "an
almost udder bore," he lauds the "700pound porker" as "the novel's
most endearing, if not necessarily most complex character" (44).
7 Susan Johnston perceptively argues for the artistic value of - and,
indeed, our abiding need for - such ethical models for living: "As
human selves we are always involved in normative claims, and thus . . .
we require a theoretical model that does not dismiss or indict such
claims, which are in fact the sine qua non of both emancipatory theory
and ethical criticism. Without such a model we will indeed by irrel
evant" (99).
Chapter 11: Conclusion

1 Annette Baier's "Doing without Moral Theory?" outlines the interdis
ciplinary possibilities of contemporary moral philosophy, which itself
provides the theoretical underpinnings for ethical criticism. In her essay,
Baier calls for moral philosophy's mergence with other disciplines in
order to assist philosophers in avoiding the "arrogance of solitary
intellect." See Baier (41-6).

Notes 187
2 In Find You the Virtue: Ethics, Image, and Desire in Literature (1987),
Irving Massey argues that readers also engage in the ethical investiga
tion of literary works in order to locate the moral structures unavailable
to them within the boundaries of their real lives. "Even in this
postliterate, postaesthetic, and possibly postethical age, we all continue
to seek out art, with its unnameable ethical satisfactions, ambiguous
as the very status of ethics itself may be. If ethics be a delusion," he

adds, "it is at least a delusion shared by saints and sinners alike" (189).
3 For examples of the practical application of ethical criticism in the
classroom, see Anne Barbeau Gardiner's "The Teaching of Ethics through
Literature and Dante's Inferno." As Gardiner argues, "Surely it is time
to do some civilization building and return the art of moral discern
ment to the public classroom" (26). In "Putting Head and Heart on
the Line," Robert Coles writes that "students need the chance to di
rectly connect books to experience." Literary texts, Coles adds, allow
educators to "address our humanity with subtlety - conveying the
willingness to do justice to our variousness and to the complexities,
ironies, and ambiguities that shape our lives" (A64). Finally, in "Is
There an Ethics of Reading?" J. Hillis Miller astutely argues that as
the millennium approaches "it would be benefcial to the health of
our society to have an abundance of good readers" (100).
4 In "Moral Understandings: Alternative 'Epistemology' for a Feminist
Ethics," for instance, Margaret Urban Walker elaborates upon ethical
criticism's value to feminist criticism. "Feminist ethics clarifes the moral
legitimacy and necessity of the kinds of social, political, and personal
changes that feminism demands in order to end male domination,"
she writes, "or perhaps to end domination generally" (165). Likewise,
in "Teaching Rhetoric and Teaching Morality: Some Problems and
Possibilities of Ethical Criticism," Frederick J. Antczak discusses ethical
criticism's contributions to contemporary rhetorical study. "We can
teach our students," Antczak observes, "how to see ethical issues taking
shape in and shaping the most important material for the constitution
of their characters, the most important medium for their ethically signif
cant choosing, acting, and living - that is, for their rhetoric" (22).

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202 Index
Index
Abalos, David T", 112

Bennett, William J", 25, 127,

Acheson, James, 84
128-9, 131, 132, 134-7, 139,
Acker, Kathy, 138

183
Adams, Hazard, 3, 175-6

Berardinelli, James, 179, 180
adequation, 179
Bergonzi, Bernard, 92
Aeschylus, 134
Berube, Michael, 129-0, 131
aesthetic reading, 8
Bevan, David, 171
Afrocentrism, 116, 125, 182-3

Bildungsroman, 171
Aisenberg, Nadya, 170

Binder, Wolfgang, 181
Alexandrov, �ladimir E", 52

Bjork, Eva Lambertsson, 89-90, 95,
Alighieri, Dante, 187

179
alterity, 100-1, 103, 106, 107, 179

Blake, William, A Descriptive
Altieri, Charles, 165, 167

Catalogue, 63
Amis, Kingsley, Lucky Jim, 24,

Blanchard, W" Scott, 170
27-42, 66, 159, 171-3

Bloom, Allan, 25, 96, 127, 128-9,
Amis, Martin, 53, 171; The Rachel

131, 158, 178
Papers, 171
Bloom, Harold, 132, 184
Ammann, Daniel, 83, 94, 178, 179

Blum, Lawrence, 118
Amour-propre, 178
Bly, Robert, 139
Anderson, Martin, 184

Booth, Wayne C", 7, 8, 11-13, 14,
Angry Young Man movement, 28,

15, 17, 157, 158, 164, 166-7,
29, 41
168-9
Antczak, Frederick J", 187

Bove, Paul A", 157
Aristotle, 8, 47, 134, 164; The

Boyd, Brian, 44, 58, 175
Nicomachean Ethics, 164

Boyer, Jay, 112
Arnolfni, Giovanni, 145

Boyle, Ted E", 39
Assoun, PaulLaurent, 100

Bradbury, Malcolm, Eating People
Austen, Jane, 81, 134

Is Wrong, 159
Avant, John Alfred, 73-4

Bradford, Richard, 29
Bront�, Charlotte, 134
Badenhausen, Richard, 99
BrookeRose, Christine,
Baier, Annette, 77, 186

Textermination, 178
Bailey, F" G", 59

Brown, Robert, 79-80
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 145-6, 168

Brown, Terence, 39
Barabtarlo, Gennadi, 174

Buddhism, 62
Barthes, Roland, 118, 122

Bull, Barry L", 180
Battersby, James, 160

Bunke, Joan, 185
Beattie, Ann, 14
Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim's
Beazley, Hamilton, 185

Progress from This World to That
Beckett, Samuel, 14
Which Is to Come, 63
Begley, Adam, 186

Burton, Robert S", 96
Bender, Eileen T", 62-3, 69

Burwell, Rose Marie, 176
Benjamin, Walter, 118

Butler, Christopher, 161
202

Index 203
Butler, Samuel, The Way of All

Daiches, David, 172
Flesh, 99
Darwinism, 149
Butz, Earl, 186

deconstruction, 2-5, 6, 93, 121,
Byatt, A" S", Possession: a Romance,

145, 152, 154, 165, 166, 184
177
DeLillo, Don, White Noise, 181-2
Derrida, Jacques, 4, 132, 140, 165,
Caesar, Terry, 141

175, 184

Canfeld, Cass, 46
Deus ex machina, 40, 95, 155
canon revision, 127-8, 130, 131,

Diawara, Manthia, 125
135
Dick, Bruce, 124
Caram, Richard G", 26, 171

Dickens, Charles, 67
Carlson, Michael, 186

Dickinson, Emily, 134, 177
Carnival, 146-7, 151, 154, 155,

Dickstein, Morris, 157-8
186
didacticism, 9-10, 11, 166
Carrington, Ildik6 de Papp, 69,

Dobyns, Stephen, "A Happy
176
�acancy," 177
Carter, Ian, 22, 95-6, 171

Douglas, Lawrence, 60
censorship, 10, 166-7, 168

Douglass, Frederick, 134
Chambers, Clare, Uncertain Terms,

D'Souza, Dinesh, 128, 130-1, 137,
171
139, 158, 182, 184
Chattergy, �irgie, 180

Dworkin, Andrea, 138, 139
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 20
Cheney, Lynne �", 128, 131-2,

Eaglestone, Robert, 156, 179
135, 139
Eagleton, Terry, 78, 96
Chvala, Joseph, 173

Ebert, Roger, 180
Clancy, Laurie, 174

Eco, Umberto, 134
Clausen, Christopher, 136, 162,

Education Act of 1944, 28
184, 185
Eisenstadt, Debra, 102
coduction, 12, 167

Eldridge, Richard, 41-2
Coles, Robert, 187

Eliot, T" S", 134
commonsense, 45-6, 50, 57

Ellis, Bret Easton, The Rules of
Connery, Brian A", 170

Attraction, 171
consumerism, 143, 147, 155

Ellis, John M", 4-5
Cooke, Alistair, 133

Emerson, Caryl, 146, 186
Cotter, William R", 185

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 134, 164;
Court, Franklin E", 139

"The Poet," 164
covert polylingualism, 56
erotic (romantic) love, 15, 79, 80,
Covici, Pascal, 174

177
Cowart, David, 47, 49, 56, 57,

ethical duty, 16
174, 175
ethicity, 16
Cowley, Julian, 113

ethnocentrism, 139
Creighton, Joanne �", 61, 64, 176

Eurocentrism, 111, 123, 130
Cross, Amanda, Death in a

Ewing, Jon, 181
Tenured Position, 177
Cross, Coy F", 144, 185

face, 100, 101, 105, 179
Csicsery, George Paul, 125

Fallis, Richard, 32, 42, 173
culture wars, 25, 109, 127-42, 156,

Faulkner, William, As I Lay Dying,
158, 182, 183-5

178

204 Index
Field, Andrew, 58
Gubar, Susan, 25, 124, 127-42,
First Morrill Act of 1862, 144, 151,

159-60, 183-5; Masterpiece
185
Theatre: an Academic Melodrama,
Fish, Stanley, 140, 158

25, 127-8, 132-42, 159-60,
Fleischacker, Samuel, 107

183-5
Fleming, Juliet, 149
Ford, Gerald R", 177, 186

Haley, Alex, 134

Foucault, Michel, 118, 134
Hall, Stuart, 156
Fox, Robert Elliot, 123

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 16-17,
Franklin, Phyllis, 135

18, 108, 156, 165, 168, 169
Frayn, Michael, The Trick of It,

Harrington, Mona, 170
177
Hartman, Geoffrey, 60
Freadman, Richard, 165

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Fanshawe,
Freud, Sigmund, 134, 138, 175

170; The House of the Seven
Freudian psychoanalysis, 56, 81,

Gables, 177
175
Hennard, Martine, 53, 175
Friedman, Ellen G", 67

Heteroglossia, 145-6, 148, 186
Fruehling, Royal T", 180

Hill, Anita, 116
Frye, Northrop, 72, 156, 164-5,

Hirsch, E" D", Jr", 128, 130, 134, 183
176
Hitchcock, Alfred, 134
Fuchs, Cynthia, 180

Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, 166
Fussell, Paul, 173

Hollinger, David A", 111
Holmes, Frederick M", 87
Gardiner, Anne Barbeau, 187

Homer, 128
Gardiner, Michael, 186

HooDooism, 112-13, 114-15
Gardner, John, 9-10, 17, 18, 166

Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 73
Gardner, Philip, 28, 32, 173

Hume, Kathryn, 113
Gaskell, Elizabeth, North and South,
92
infnity, 101
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr", 132

intellectual territorialism, 24
GI Bill, 144
Gilbert, Sandra M", 25, 124,

Jacobs, Eric, 172
127-42, 159-60, 183-5;

Jacobson, Daniel, 155
Masterpiece Theatre: an Academic

James, Henry, 14
Melodrama, 25, 127-8, 132-42,

James, P" D", An Unsuitable Job for
159-60, 183-5
a Woman, 177
Giles, James R", 176

Jameson, Fredric, 138
Gindin, James, 173

Jay, Gregory, 136, 142
Gitlin, Todd, 183

Johnson, Greg, 69
Goggans, Thomas H", 180

Johnson, Lisa, 169
Gold, Herbert, 173

Johnson, Samuel, 10
Goldberg, S" L", 158

Johnston, Susan, 186
goodness, 60-1, 63, 65, 75-6, 158,

Jones, D" J" H", 177
159, 164, 166

Jordan, W" K", 144
Goya, Francisco, 145

Joyce, James, Ulysses, 178
Graff, Gerald, 3, 139, 141-2,

Jungian criticism, 81
157-8, 183
Grant, Mary Kathryn, 62, 75

Kant, Immanuel, 15
Greenblatt, Stephen, 127

Kato, Tsunehiko, 123, 124, 182

Index 205
Keats, John, "The Eve of St"

Macy, William H", 102
Agnes," 88
Maddox, Lucy, 86
Kennedy, George A", 135

Malamud, Bernard, A New Life,
Kenyon, J" P", 173

159
Kern, Stephen, 177

Mamet, David, 25, 98-108, 159,
Kernan, Alvin, 183

177, 179-80; Oleanna, 25, 98-9,
Kimball, Roger, 25, 128, 130, 137,

101-8, 159, 177, 179-80

158
Mann, Patricia S", 125
Kinnell, Galway, "The

Martin, Jane Rowland, 111
Deconstruction of Emily
Martin, Reginald, 113
Dickinson," 177
Marx, Karl, 138, 175
Knapp, Steven, 5, 18, 168

Marxism, 2, 8, 81, 90, 152
Kramer, John E", Jr", 169

Massey, Irving, 187
Krist, Gary, 149

McDermott, John, 23, 28, 30, 33,
Kristeva, Julia, 80, 132, 140, 175

34, 37, 173
K�nstlerroman, 171
McGinn, Colin, 156
McLaughlin, Thomas, 165
Lacan, Jacques, 118

McLuhan, Marshall, 70
Lacanian psychoanalysis, 8
Meckier, Jerome, 38, 41
L'Amour, Louis, 134

Menand, Louis, 172, 174
Larkin, Philip, 28, 29, 171

Menippean satire, 170-1
Lauter, Paul, 136

Mews, Siegfried, 86, 91
Leavis, F" R", 156, 164

Meyer, Priscilla, 54
Lee, Hermione, 173

Michaels, Walter Benn, 5, 18,
Lefkowitz, Mary, 182-3

168
Le Guin, Ursula, 134

Miller, J" Hillis, 13-14, 17, 18, 158,
Lentricchia, Frank, 132, 165

162, 168, 169, 187
Leonardi, Susan J", 169-70

Miller, Seumas, 165
Levinas, Emmanuel, 100-1, 105, 179

Miller, Susan, Cross Country, 177
Levine, Lawrence W", 183

Milton, John, 128, 135
Lobuts, John, Jr", 185

Mitchell, Lee Clark, 181
Lodge, David, 25, 31, 38, 77-97,

Modern Language Association
98, 114, 159, 173, 177-9; The

(MLA), 71, 87, 88, 131, 135,
British Museum Is Falling Down,

176, 177
178; Changing Places: a Tale of

Mohrman, Kathryn, 138
Two Campuses, 25, 78, 81-6, 114,

Monbrun, Estelle, Meurtre chez
178; A David Lodge Trilogy, 177;

Tante Leonie, 177-8
Nice Work, 25, 78, 92-6, 114;

Moore, Lorrie, 145, 148
Small World: an Academic

Morace, Robert A", 89
Romance, 1, 25, 78, 86-92, 114,

moral agency, 161
178
moral relativism, 7, 112, 158
logocentrism, 4
Morgan, Kathryn Pauly, 79
London, Jack, 181

Morrill, Justin Smith, 144
Lurie, Allison, 186

Morrison, Blake, 86
Lyons, John, 20-1, 22, 169, 170, 171

Morrison, Toni, 109
Lyotard, JeanFran�ois, 3
Morson, Gary Saul, 146, 186
Moseley, Merritt, 38, 178-9
Mackie, J" L", 160

Murdoch, Iris, 60-1, 63, 76, 77
macroturn, 17
Murtadha, Khaula, 183

206 Index
Nabokov, � era, 173-4

Parr, Susan Resneck, 160
Nabokov, �ladimir, 24, 43-59,

Pasteur, Louis, 47
159, 173-5; Lolita, 43; Nikolai

Pater, Walter, The Renaissance, 164
Gogol, 44; Pale Fire, 24, 43, 44,

pathological love, 15
45, 46, 52-8, 159, 174-5; Pnin,

Pecora, �incent P", 162
24, 43, 44, 45, 46-52, 56, 58-9,

Pejorative Poetics, 1, 22, 30, 45,
159, 174; Speak, Memory: an

63, 76, 98, 101, 107, 110, 128,

Autobiography Revisited, 175;
147, 158
Strong Opinions, 43, 48, 173

Phillips, Robert, 175
Nagel, Thomas, 162-3

Pickering, Samuel F", Jr", 176
Nakadate, Neil, 144, 147, 155, 186

Pinsker, Sanford, 185
Nassar, Joseph, 56
Plato, 128
National Endowment for the

Polhemus, Robert M", 79
Humanities (NEH), 128, 134

political correctness, 98, 138
negation, 179
Polking, Kirk, 173
Newton, Adam �achary, 168

Polyphony, 186
Nicol, Charles, 52
Poshlost, 44-5, 46, 49, 52, 54, 56,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of

58, 158, 159, 174
Tragedy, 63
postmodern humanism, 17-18
Nixon, Richard M", 186

practical love, 15
nonaesthetic (efferent) reading, 8,

Proctor, Mortimer R", 20-1, 169,
166
171
Norris, Christopher, 5, 6, 166

professionalism, 140
Novak, Michael, 111

Professorroman, 26, 80, 171
Noyes, George R", 43

Proust, Marcel, 14
Nussbaum, Martha C", 7, 14-16,

Psuchago-gia, 167
17, 18, 77, 80, 156, 157, 158,

Purpel, David E", 183-4
166, 167, 169, 178

Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin:
a Novel in Verse, 174
Oates, Joyce Carol, 24, 60-76, 159,
175-7; Crossing the Border, 176;

Rabelais, Fran�ois, 146
The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive

Rabinowitz, Peter J", 5-6
Comedies, 24, 60-76, 159, 175-7;

Rampton, David, 175
Marya: a Life, 176; Unholy Loves,

Reagan, Ronald W", 127
176
redbrick universities, 22, 25, 28,
Obligation, 16, 99, 169

30, 81, 159, 172
O'Brien, John, 113

Reed, Ishmael, 25, 109-26, 130,
Ollila, MaijaRiitta, 79
159, 180-3; Japanese by Spring,
Ommundsen, Wenche, 88
25, 110, 115-26, 130, 159, 180-3
Orwell, George, 131

Reierstad, Keith, 174
Osborne, John, Look Back in

Rendezvous, 79, 89
Anger, 29
Robbins, Jill, 100
Ought, 16, 169

Rorty, Richard, 135-6, 165
Outlaw, Lucius T", 125

Rosen, Marion, Death by
Oxbridge, 2, 20
Education, 171
Rosenblatt, Louise M", 8-9, 166
Packman, David, 55
Rosovsky, Henry, 140
Paglia, Camille, 137, 138, 139

Rossen, Janice, 22-3, 40, 81, 170,
Parker, David, 2, 156, 164, 169

171

Index 207
Rushton, J" Philippe, 182

Trachtenberg, Stanley, 62, 64, 67,
Russo, Richard, Straight Man, 19

75, 176
Trachtenberg, Stephen Joel, 185
Salwak, Dale, 32
Trollope, Anthony, 68
Schine, Cathleen, 147

Truscot, Bruce, 172
Scholes, Robert E", 134-5, 161
Searle, John, 143

United Nations Educational,

Second Morrill Act of 1890, 144,
Scientifc, and Cultural
185
Organization (UNESCO), 90, 91, 92
Severin, Hermann, 67, 176

Updike, John, Memories of the Ford
Shakespeare, William, 47, 53,

Administration, 177
55-6, 66, 115, 128, 135, 136,
184; Hamlet, 66, 67, 91; Othello,

�anderbilt, Kermit, 138
115; Timon of Athens, 55, 175

�an Eyck, Jan, 145
Sheppard, Richard, 169

�endler, Helen, 132
Siebers, Tobin, 5, 6-7, 8, 12, 17,
168
Wain, John, Hurry on Down, 29
Siegel, Ben, 171

Waldron, Jeremy, 112, 181
Silver, Mitchell, 120

Walker, Alice, 136, 185
Singer, Irving, 78-9, 177

Walker, Craig Stewart, 180
Smiley, Jane, 26, 143-55, 160, 181,

Walker, Margaret Urban, 187
182, 185-6; Moo, 26, 143-5,

Waller, G" F", 75
147-55, 160, 181, 182, 185-6

Washington, Booker T", Up from
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 12-13,

Slavery, 63
165
Waugh, Evelyn, 31
Smith, Page, 184

Weisberg, Richard H", 169
Smith, Ralph A", 183, 184

Williams, Bernard, 10-11, 14, 169
Soble, Alan, 79
Wilshire, Bruce W", 184
Solomon, Robert C", 80

Wilson, Edmund, 174
Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 161

Wilson, John K", 183, 184-5
Steel, Danielle, 134

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 70
Steele, Shelby, 117

Wolcott, James, 173
Steiner, G", 70
Wong, David B", 112
Swift, Jonathan, 72
Wood, Michael, 51
Swiftian Satire, 159

Woolf, �irginia, 72
Sykes, Charles J", 128, 130, 137

Worthington, Kim L", 156
Wright, Austin M", 178
Tanner, Tony, 83
Wright, Terence R", 166
Theroux, Alexander, Darconville's

Wurzel, Jaime S", 111
Cat, 178
Tirrell, Lynne, 160-1

Yarbrough, Stephen R", 17-18,
Tocqueville, Alec de, 63, 64;

165, 169
Democracy in America, 63
Torgovnick, Marianna, 57, 175

�apf, Harold, 181

Kenneth Womack-Postwar Academic Fiction - Satire, Ethics, Community-Palgrave Macmillan (2002)

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Postwar Academic Fiction

Satire, Ethics, Community

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

BRITISH BOOK-COLLECTORS AND BIBLIOGRAPHERS (3 volumes, co-edited

FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL (co-edited with William Baker)

RECENT WORK IN CRITICAL THEORY, 1989-1995 (compiled with William

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

TWENTIETH-CENTURY BIBLIOGRAPHY AND TEXTUAL CRITICISM (com-

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

Satire, Ethics, Community

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

1. College stories, English-History and criticism. 2.

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

2 Reading the "Heavy Industry of the Mind!: Ethical

3 Negotiating the University Community: Lucky Jim

4 Scholar Adventurers in Exile: Nabokov's Dr. Kinbote

5 Searching for Goodness and the Ethical Self: Joyce

6 The Professoriate in Love: David Lodge's Academic

7 Performing the Academy: Alterity and David Mamet's

8 Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project:

9 Academic Nonfction and the Culture Warriors:

10 Jane Smiley's Academic Carnival: Rooting for Ethics

11 Conclusion: Ethical Criticism and the Academic

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

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10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

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How do academic fctions create meaning and value through their

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

under the specter of "Oxbridge," modern academic characters suffer

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10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

schools of interpretation, deconstruction in particular, increasingly

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10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

M. Ellis proffers a similar argument regarding deconstruction and

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

points and the consequent winnowing out of those that cannot

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10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

canon formation and detective fction, Rabinowitz notes that texts

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10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

of making decisions and of studying how these choices affect the

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

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We recognize art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for

The role of the ethical critic, then, involves the articulation of a

10.1057/9780230596757 - Postwar Academic Fiction, Kenneth Womack

lead to the textual injustice of censorship. Gardner writes: "I would

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In Nussbaum's schema, then, the literary artist bears the responsi

value in a postmodern world beset by moral chaos and verbal dys

The advance of industrial capitalism during the nineteenth cen

the contemporary novelist and his audience" (188). Rossen's para

them" (24). This culture of alienation in the 1950s ultimately pro

class men who struggle to fnd acceptance and selfsuffciency in

At such moments, Dixon opts to disengage his attention, "just keep

As he stood in the badlylit jakes, he was visited again, and un