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Faculty Towers
In the days before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice columns for graduate students and junior faculty, there were academic novels teaching us how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think, write, love, and (more than occasionally) solve murders. If many of these
books are wildly funny, others paint pictures of failure and pain, of lives wasted or destroyed. Like the suburbs, Elaine Showalter notes, the campus can be the site of pastoral and refuge. But even ivory towers can be structurally unsound, or at least built with glass ceilings. Though we love to
read about them, all is not well in the faculty towers, and the situation has been worsening.
In Faculty Towers, Showalter takes a personal look at the ways novels about the academy have charted changes in the university and society since 1950. With her readings of C. P. Snow's idealized world of Cambridge dons or of the globe-trotting antics of David Lodge's Morris Zapp, of the sleuthing
Kate Fansler in Amanda Cross's best-selling mystery series or of the recent spate of bitter novels in which narratives of sexual harassment seem to serve as fables of power, anger, and desire, Showalter holds a mirror up to the world she has inhabited over the course of a distinguished and often
controversial career.
books are wildly funny, others paint pictures of failure and pain, of lives wasted or destroyed. Like the suburbs, Elaine Showalter notes, the campus can be the site of pastoral and refuge. But even ivory towers can be structurally unsound, or at least built with glass ceilings. Though we love to
read about them, all is not well in the faculty towers, and the situation has been worsening.
In Faculty Towers, Showalter takes a personal look at the ways novels about the academy have charted changes in the university and society since 1950. With her readings of C. P. Snow's idealized world of Cambridge dons or of the globe-trotting antics of David Lodge's Morris Zapp, of the sleuthing
Kate Fansler in Amanda Cross's best-selling mystery series or of the recent spate of bitter novels in which narratives of sexual harassment seem to serve as fables of power, anger, and desire, Showalter holds a mirror up to the world she has inhabited over the course of a distinguished and often
controversial career.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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88 people want to read
About the author
Elaine Showalter
79 books143 followersElaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.
She is well known and respected in both academic and popular cultural fields. She has written and edited numerous books and articles focussed on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work on illnesses. Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television.
(source: Wikipedia)
She is well known and respected in both academic and popular cultural fields. She has written and edited numerous books and articles focussed on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work on illnesses. Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television.
(source: Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 21, 2014
Though I can imagine the discourse is probably quite drab for the general reader, for professors and those auspiciously writing their dissertations about campus and academic novels (ahem), Showalter's brief summaries of a few novels of each decade provide some good contextual historization of the genre and century.
I really liked her voice: playful, self-flagellating, not in any way pompous. Her literary analyses are short and indistinct, but what the reader truly gets is a introductory look into a genre that could be explored in much greater detail.
I really liked her voice: playful, self-flagellating, not in any way pompous. Her literary analyses are short and indistinct, but what the reader truly gets is a introductory look into a genre that could be explored in much greater detail.
January 16, 2025
'Faculty Towers' is a mainstay of campus novel scholarship for a reason.
What makes it unique from say Janice Rossen's 'The University in Modern Fiction' (1993) or Wesley Beal's 'Campus Fictions' (2024) is that Showalter foregrounds her researcher positionality and her lived experience of faculty life during the decades of academic novels she analyses. She knows of at least two novels where she was the direct inspiration for a fictional character. There are also several instances throughout the monograph where she quotes academic novels that name her and other contemporary scholars and reference their work directly. Both examples demonstrate her argument that academic novels are inextricable from their context and their authors, though we can, of course, analyse these factors independently as long as we are aware of this.
'Faculty Towers' traces the development and overarching themes of the American academic novel with a professor protagonist or, as Showalter uses Richard G. Caram's notion of the "Professorromane" (a professorial coming-of-age story) through the 1950s to the early 21st century. Her analysis of several novels from each decade demonstrate that campus novels are "a belated form of social commentary" (42) that generally respond to the concerns and the state of the academy that developed the decade prior and from a standpoint where patterns and themes can be understood from a more comprehensive perspective.
While I'm not studying American academic novels or "Professorromane's", I valued Showalter's mapping out of the shifts and evolution of the modern academic novel as we know it today. It is essential reading for any scholar of campus/academic fiction, whether student or faculty-centred. It is of benefit to those studying American academic fiction as well as those studying academic fiction of other Anglophone countries since 21st century campus fiction is largely shaped by the American campus novel and the British campus novel before that.
I also valued Showalter's personal, concise writing style that made this an enjoyable and pacy read for an academic tome.
What makes it unique from say Janice Rossen's 'The University in Modern Fiction' (1993) or Wesley Beal's 'Campus Fictions' (2024) is that Showalter foregrounds her researcher positionality and her lived experience of faculty life during the decades of academic novels she analyses. She knows of at least two novels where she was the direct inspiration for a fictional character. There are also several instances throughout the monograph where she quotes academic novels that name her and other contemporary scholars and reference their work directly. Both examples demonstrate her argument that academic novels are inextricable from their context and their authors, though we can, of course, analyse these factors independently as long as we are aware of this.
'Faculty Towers' traces the development and overarching themes of the American academic novel with a professor protagonist or, as Showalter uses Richard G. Caram's notion of the "Professorromane" (a professorial coming-of-age story) through the 1950s to the early 21st century. Her analysis of several novels from each decade demonstrate that campus novels are "a belated form of social commentary" (42) that generally respond to the concerns and the state of the academy that developed the decade prior and from a standpoint where patterns and themes can be understood from a more comprehensive perspective.
While I'm not studying American academic novels or "Professorromane's", I valued Showalter's mapping out of the shifts and evolution of the modern academic novel as we know it today. It is essential reading for any scholar of campus/academic fiction, whether student or faculty-centred. It is of benefit to those studying American academic fiction as well as those studying academic fiction of other Anglophone countries since 21st century campus fiction is largely shaped by the American campus novel and the British campus novel before that.
I also valued Showalter's personal, concise writing style that made this an enjoyable and pacy read for an academic tome.
February 8, 2023
Read this for my masters.
Although I expected this to go differently, its still a good book for those studying the campus novel/academic novel. It isn't so in-depth about the genre, but rather takes a decade approach to the most essential texts (to the author) that best represent the dilemmas and expectations of each decade.
It is an easy read, albeit a bit tiresome, thus I chose to not read it at once so I could best approach this without it getting too much.
↠ 4 stars✨
Although I expected this to go differently, its still a good book for those studying the campus novel/academic novel. It isn't so in-depth about the genre, but rather takes a decade approach to the most essential texts (to the author) that best represent the dilemmas and expectations of each decade.
It is an easy read, albeit a bit tiresome, thus I chose to not read it at once so I could best approach this without it getting too much.
↠ 4 stars✨
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June 17, 2023Less academic than I anticipated - this reads as a look at topics at themes in academic novels from the 1950s to the early 21st century told through a mild memoir lens.
May 15, 2012
This book was self-indulgent and narcissistic. I can't believe that she hailed Lodges Nice Work as the most feminist text of the 80's. Throughout the book, she seems to ignore key points in the novels she discusses so they fit better into her argument. Between that and her noting when a book mentions her (or a university at which she has taught) and her two page rant about the reasons that she does not like a particular character, I was quite happy when I was finally finished with the book. A good catalogue of some of the academic fiction books written over the second half of the 20th C, but poorly done.
January 16, 2016
The book is mostly about the American Campus Novel or "Professorroman". I expected an a little more comparative angle and even with this lilited scope I still missed Nabokov, Chabon's "Wonder Boys" and Smiley's "Moo", which are not even mentioned. And I was irritated that a novel called "Blue Angel" was described as based on the movie starring Marlene Dietrich when that is the film version of a novel by Heinrich Mann. Shouldn't that mean something to a literary scholar? Anyway, I think I still got a good introduction to the topic.
July 29, 2014
An entertaining but slight overview of an increasingly congested topic: the academic novel. It's fun - Showalter writes exceptionally well - but it lacks depth in its analysis, preferring generalisations and idle musings instead. Not a heavyweight piece of literary criticism, then, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing - this is a breezy and engaging introductory text, for all its flaws.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews