Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (Personal Takes) [Paperback]

This is one of those lightweight vanity projects that academics with considerable clout occasionally knock off in their spare time. Showalter is known for being one of the progenitors of gynocriticism, that is criticism that focuses on women's literature and literary traditions. So, many feminist academics will know Showalter by reputation. Although this is not one of her more scholarly endeavors, it is clear that feminism is her main concern and feminist interests do inform this work as well.

Although she mentions a couple of nineteenth-century texts (Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, 1857, and George Eliot's Middlemarch, 1872) and a couple of early twentieth-century works (Willa Cather's The Professor's House, 1925, and Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, 1935) Showalter confines her focus to the latter half of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first centuries which is a time span that roughly coincides with her own academic career. And one of the appeals of this book is that Showalter is not afraid to offer some insider gossip about this world that she knows so well. Showalter's affection for this genre dates back to her own student days when she more or less used these novels as guides on how to behave in academic circles, but then once she became an academic (and the subject of at least two professorromans) Showalter's interest shifted from a professional to a personal one. This book is both a petit self-portrait and an institutional history of a profession (which, according to many of these professorromans, is not an idyllic one, but one fraught with uncertainty and struggle, intense cut-throat competitiveness and sycophancy, and a rapidly waning, if not altogether vanished, idealism).

One short chapter is dedicated to each of the six decades under review. This allows her to look at the academic novel as a genre with its own conventions, themes, and tropes and to reflect upon the changing social and academic realities of the times. Its a slight book, and more scholarly studies of this genre are available, but for my interest level this was about what I needed to get started.

I found this book to be thin on insight and critical evaluation but valuable as an introduction to a genre that I knew very little about. Basically, I use it as a reading list. Since the book is not an easy one to find I'll give a quick rundown of the books that she mentions (in case there are others who really just want a reading list as well). The titles of the chapter headings for each decade are Showalters.

1950's: Ivory Towers

1951 C.P. Snow, The Masters

1952 Mary McCarthy, Groves of Academe

1954 Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

1954 Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

1960's: Tribal Towers

1962 Alison Lurie, Love & Friendship (Lurie is particularly good at examining academe's impact on relationships)

1968 Gerald Warner Brace, The Department

1970's: Glass Towers

1974 Gail Godwin, The Odd Woman (based on George Gissing's The Odd Women, 1893)

1975 Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man (a satiric look at the life of a tenured radical)

1979 Joyce Carol Oates, Unholy Loves

1980's: Feminist Towers

1984 David Lodge, Small World

1988 David Lodge, Nice Work (a reworking of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, 1854)

1988 Richard Russo, Straight Man

1990's: Tenured Towers

1990 A.S. Byatt, Possession

1995 Gilbert & Gubar, Masterpiece Theatre (includes an excellent summary of the culture wars of the 1980's)

1995 Amanda Cross (Carolyn G. Heilbrun), Death in a Tenured Position

1998 James Hynes, Publish and Perish

1999 Lev Raphael, Death of a Constant Lover

1999 J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

2000's: Tragic Towers

2000 Philip Roth, The Human Stain

2001 Jonathen Franzen, The Corrections

2001 James Hynes, The Lecturer's Tale

This book is part of a series entitled "Personal Takes," so Showalter needlessly pretends to provide a historical survey of the academic novel and fails in this ambition. Probably everyone will have favorites that this approach omits; I, for example, was sorry that Showalter had nothing to say about Jane Smiley's wonderful Moo. Some of the books she does discuss are given little coverage beyond plot summary.

Still, I enjoyed what Showalter did have to say, particular her thoughts on Middlemarch and The Corrections. Indeed, if this book had been more straightforwardly a personal take it would have been even more engaging.