Elaine Showalter is Professor Emeritus of English at Princeton University and a past president of the Modern Language Association.Her books include A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing; The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and Culture in England, 1830-1908; Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media; Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage; and Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents.
I invited her to apply the "page 69 test" to Faculty Towers; here is what she reported:
Faculty Towers is my contribution to a series called "Personal Takes," in which critics are invited to write "about the persistent hold particular writers, artists, or cultural phenomena have had on their imaginations." I chose to write about the Anglo-American academic novel of the last half-century, perhaps as a self-exorcism of the stories that had haunted me for forty years. Of course, some reviewers complained because I didn't give a comprehensive overview of the academic novel since 1820; others wondered why I was being so personal, while still others wished I had been more personal. But page 69 is probably the only really controversial page in the book. It is at the beginning of my chapter on the feminist academic novels of the 1980s, and I am discussing Death in a Tenured Position (1981), by Carolyn Heilbrun, a Columbia professor of English who wrote popular mysteries under the pseudonym "Amanda Cross."Many thanks to Elaine for the input.
Usually I disliked the heroine of the Amanda Cross books, another English professor and part-time detective called Kate Fansler; and was irritated by her complacency and snobbery. Because Heilbrun was revered by my generation of feminist literary critics, any criticism of her work, especially soon after her death in 2003, was bound to offend some women readers. But Death in a Tenured Position was so painfully relevant to the time, and to the experience of many women academics newly hired and tenured at formerly male universities, that it had to be part of every female academic's personal pantheon. Hired by Harvard, Professor Janet Mandelbaum is found dead in the English department men's room. Kate Fansler is called in to solve the crime, which turns out to be a suicide -- Mandelbaum has been made so miserable by her male colleagues that she takes arsenic. A bit of warning during a decade of apparent progress, and one that certainly resonated with me when I considered offers from Harvard and Princeton in 1984. Although there are many academic novels that took hold on my imagination, I think Death in a Tenured Position is the only one that gave me nightmares.
Click here to view the table of contents and read an excerpt from Faculty Towers.
An author's quote from the back cover of the book:
"I have been a character in academic fiction at least twice, once a voluptuous, promiscuous, drug-addicted bohemian, once a prudish, dumpy, judgmental frump. I hope I am not too easily identified in either of these guises . . . although I can tell you that I preferred being cast as the luscious Concord grape to my role as the withered prune."Click here for a brief interview with Showalter about the book.
For a Q & A with Showalter about her book, Teaching Literatu
re (2002), click here.One of Showalter's contributions to literary scholarship--she coined the term gynocritics to describe literary criticism based in a feminine perspective:
- In contrast to [an] angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture.
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--Marshal Zeringue
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