Abstract
This final chapter studies the academic novel’s thorough aversion to work. Whether their protagonists are faculty or students, the novels’ plots gravitate toward romances, affairs, midlife crises, protests, and all manner of dissipation—which is to say, anything but work! Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), Alex Kudera’s adjunct novel Fight for Your Long Day (2010), Julie Schumacher’s epistolary novel Dear Committee Members (2014), and Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021), this chapter studies work refusal as one of the chief appeals of the academic novel, as well as the distinguishing characteristic of the university among modern institutions. In generally refusing scholarly work and the preparations for gainful employment after undergraduate study, these novels also return readers to a central question that I foreground in order that we might remember the ideals of the academy in disorienting times: what is the university for?
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Notes
- 1.
Celia Aijmer Rydsjö studies the relationships between work and dignity in Stoner. Rydsjö notes that unlike the average campus novel’s professor, Stoner is described from the outset of the novel as a hard worker (2021, 78). And this is no small detail, but a part of Williams’s project of representing the tie between one’s work and one’s identity, regardless of the content or structure of the work itself (Rydsjö 2021, 72). Rydsjö finds that where other campus novels refuse academic work or resolve around a student or professor’s liberation from the academic workplace, Williams’s protagonist quits an affair with the love of his life, a graduate student, not to keep his job on the faculty but in order to preserve the sense of self that he has invested into his work (Rydsjö 2021, 77).
- 2.
The literary tradition can offer variations on that theme, but more recently has drifted toward a “critical utopia.” Kathi Weeks explains that the former tends toward a diegesis that is closed off from judgment and change, while the latter is more apt to reflect on its society’s failures, conflicts, and limitations (2011, 208 & ff.).
- 3.
In Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Fredric Jameson writes: “Wish-fulfillments are after all by definition never real fulfillments of desire; and must presumably always be marked by the hollowness of absence or failure at the heart of their most dearly fantasized visions (a point Ernst Bloch never tired of making)” (83). He continues, “the desire called Utopia must be concrete and ongoing, without being defeatist or incapacitating; it might therefore be better to follow an aesthetic paradigm and to assert that not only the production of the unresolvable contradiction is the fundamental process, but that we must imagine some form of gratification inherent in this very confrontation with pessimism and the impossible” (Jameson 2005, 84).
- 4.
This formal quality contrasts that of The Shakespeare Requirement (2018) and The English Experience (2023), Schumacher’s sequels to Dear Committee Members.
The Shakespeare Requirement represents work, too—some scant teaching and a heaping dose of administrative politics for Fitger to learn to navigate. But because it uses third-person limited narration, it doesn’t signal work in its very form as Dear Committee Members does. This may come as some relief for readers, given the absolutely dreadful bureaucratic mélange that Fitger must navigate in his new administrative role. “Every transaction at Payne required an abundance of supporting documents,” Fitger learns, “the simplest procedures requiring truckloads of paperwork accompanied by blood samples, D.N.A. test results, fingerprints, and F.B.I. files” (Schumacher 2018, 100).
The English Experience likewise eschews the epistolary form to develop Fitger’s interiority, though it also provides a range of student writing assignments to develop those characters. If not in form, however, it does mimic the way that Dear Committee Members is saturated with work: in the third installation of the Fitger saga, he accompanies a group of students who are studying abroad in England. “There was no hour of the day,” the narration states baldly, “during which he was free of his students” (Schumacher 2023, 71).
- 5.
An illustrative joke as relayed by the satirical Twitter account Shit Academics Say: for a graduate student seeking faculty employment or a grant or some such, the American style of recommendation might begin, “I have never recommended anyone more highly than this. Jones is, without doubt, the most agile thinker of his generation, and perhaps of any generation in living memory. I would like to say he will revolutionize the field, but such an understatement would do no justice to his true abilities,” and continue in that vein. The British style of recommendation might read in its entirety, “Jones is one of my Ph.D. students. For a Ph.D. student his work is quite good. Indeed, I would even say it compares favorably with the work of some of my Ph.D. students” (@AcademicsSay 2016).
- 6.
For instance, in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), the historian Godfrey St. Peter has just moved to a beautiful new home, decadent and constructed to his and his wife’s fancies, but he cannot part from the study in his old house. Indeed, the old study where he produced his multivolume history of Spain serves as a metonymy for St. Peter’s working, researching life. Late in the novel he tells his wife, “It’s the feeling that I’ve put a great deal behind me, where I can’t go back to it again” (Cather 1925, 142). It is that halcyon period of research that he’s thinking of—a lust for work itself—and the residues of which he chases after in his former home while the rest of his family has moved on.
- 7.
Unsurprisingly, the great majority of this study emerges out of my own Thanksgiving, spring, winter, and summer breaks. It’s another familiar academic joke: looking forward to finally getting some work done over the break!
And this joke echoes through the way we conceive of the sabbatical system in U.S. colleges and universities. The O.E.D. traces the term “sabbatical” back to the term “Sabbath,” meaning that “sabbatical” indicates a period of rest from work. For some institutions, that sense of the term may well obtain, with sabbaticals affording time with no strings attached, no expectations. For many other institutions, however, the sabbatical is far from nonwork, with faculty proposals awarded to those whose goals are to achieve the most work in their time away from usual duties.
- 8.
Quynn points out also that Duffy dedicates a significant amount of attention to his own “digestive preoccupations”: “musings on and fantasies about bathrooms, bowel movements, and farts” (2019, 98). In this motif lies a brutal parallel: bodily excrement, professional expulsion.
- 9.
The book’s racial politics are ambivalent at best, resentments seeping forth in multiple directions. Of students’ perceived xenophobia, the narration reflects, “It occurs to Duffy that he can’t compete either. The brilliant, exotic post-colonials having seized half the tenured posts in the humanities, and the Duffler is three-stepping the adjunct shuffle” (Kudera 2010, 97). Elsewhere, Duffy seems to blame “political correctness” for some scholars having climbed the ladder past him. He nicknames one outspoken Black student at Urban State “the Afrocentrist,” though she never exhibits discourses of Pan-Africanism or Negritude. Toward the end of his day, however, he shows some guilt over his own racism—he “wants desperately to quash the brazen stereotyping that stabs him in the brain” (Kudera 2010, 107)—as if providing the novel a note of the Bildungsroman.
- 10.
And this is far from a recent discovery. See for instance Linda A. Krefting’s “Intertwined Discourses of Merit and Gender: Evidence from Academic Employment in the U.S.A.,” published in Gender, Work, and Organization in 2003 for an earlier statement of this ongoing shortfall in gender parity in the academic workforce.
- 11.
The study found, for instance, that even controlling for factors such as title and rank, women are 13.24% less likely to be named on articles and 58.4% less likely to be named on patents (Ross et al 2022, 6).
- 12.
Veblen’s argument has an uncanny familiarity for those entrenched today, 100 years on, in defying neoliberal redefinitions of the academy and thinking through the university’s tensions between public and private goods. “‘Practical’ in this connection,” Veblen writes, “means useful for private gain; it need imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good” (1918, 169).
- 13.
Complicating the matter further is the intermediary of literary form. It’s not just the students’ and professors’ work that is suspect, mysterious, but that of the genre’s authors, too. Terkel surveys a writer/producer at an advertising agency and a copyeditor, but neither addresses the work of writing, the former instead contemplating the glass ceiling and the latter searching for fulfilling challenges in the workplace. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009) deftly chronicles the rise of the creative writing degree, the mid-century event that he argues best defines postwar American literary history. That development certainly separates Fitzgerald from Schumacher and Kudera, both of whom hold an M.F.A. degree with Schumacher also teaching in an elite M.F.A. program. But despite the leaps forward initiated by the American creative writing degree—its systematization of voice and its development of personal experience—writing still retains a note of leisure and still maintains a murky relationship to work after its post-Fordist reconceptualizations. So while Schumacher shares a direct genealogical tie with Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) are credited with establishing the epistolary form, in fact each of the genre’s writers could be said to share the same smears as Richardson’s protagonists, whose letter-writing signals a leisurely withdrawal from work: mere scribblers, idlers, all. In this way, and perhaps despite reductive readings of Fight for Your Long Day as a realist polemic, these novels’ form—rather than, say, that of documentary film or investigative journalism—muddies any discussion of work.
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Beal, W. (2024). Hardly Workin; or, the Valences of Productivism in Campus Novels. In: Campus Fictions. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1_7
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