Academic Novels for Real People

2016/7/5 22:38:32

So much for the classics; time to break open the juicy stuff

 


Hadley Hooper for The Chronicle of Higher Education

 

By Ms. Mentor JULY 03, 2016

 

Question (from Hegelia): All right, I’ve read some of the books on last month’s list of classic academic novels, filled with profs performing intellectually in their native habitats. But where are the juicy academic novels?

 

Answer: That depends on what you mean by juicy. For some readers of academic novels, the scholarly in-jokes are the whole point of the genre. These are the sort of readers who chortle about the literary-theory tidbits in John L’Heureux’s The Handmaid of Desire, or claim to know the real-life inspiration for the pushy promoter of Diana Studies in Jennifer Vandever’s The Bronte Project.

 

Ms. Mentor, however, is a dedicated peasant who prefers academic novels written for all the people, with all the juicy things real people care about power, money, love, sex, justice.

 

Rona Jaffe’s Class Reunion, for instance, follows four friends from Radcliffe College in the 1950s through a reunion 20 years later. Radcliffe was the sister school to Harvard, which had space, endowment, and endless prestige. While sometimes permitted to attend classes with Harvard men, the Radcliffe girls were considered lesser (the term micro-inequities hadn’t yet been invented). Harvard men could come and go as they pleased; Radcliffe girls had dorm curfews and sign-out rules, including no opposite-sex visitors in their rooms. Ever.

 

Class Reunion is a page turner. The four Cliffies have intellectual ambitions — to be doctors, journalists, world-changers. They’re bright, lively, and distinctive. There’s one desperate-to-fit-in Jewish girl (Radcliffe had a quota), and one Southern debutante who is ostracized for being promiscuous (a good girl was supposed to save herself for marriage; most didn’t, really).

 

All of them are taught their place. The would-be physician is advised to be a social worker (more compatible with normal home life). The would-be journalist ekes out a living as a glorified proof reader. The others are also herded into limited lives that won’t use what they learned. Class Reunion is a vibrant and accurate picture of the simmering rage that fueled the women’s movement.

 

[…]

http://chronicle.com/article/Academic-Novels-for-Real/236981

 

 

Question: May we have this column’s list of books, to file in our perfumed memory books with Ms. Mentor’s other academic novel columns

 

Answer: Certainly (see below).

 

Here is this month’s shortlist of contemporary academic novels

 

Frankie Bow, The Case of the Defunct Adjunct

Stella Chance, The Campus Baller A Sports Romance

Ian Flitcroft, The Reluctant Cannibals

Lauren Fremont, Taboo Professor Wants Me Pregnant

Rona Jaffe, Class Reunion

Elle Kennedy, The Score (Off-Campus Book 3)

Alex Kudera, Auggie’s Revenge

John L’Heureux, The Handmaid of Desire

Janice MacDonald, Sticks and Stones

Lucy McConnell, The Academic Bride (Billionaire Marriage Brokers)

Adrian Jones Pearson, Cow Country

John Van der Kiste, Always There

Jennifer Vandever, The Bronte Project

Chris Wallace, Heads A Campus Novel

Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons A Novel

 

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