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So.if you'd rather laugh than cry about the frustrations and absurdities
of life on a college campus, then these books are for you. From the 1950's
through 1997, from authors who make gentle fun to those whose humor is
laced with acid, from cannibalism to post-moderism, there should be something
here to satisfy. Take your pick and enjoy! (The date the book was first
published is listed just after the author's name.)
Book: A Novel / Robert Grudin / 1992 / PS3557. R787 B66 1992
Stacks, Level Two. Mr. Grundin, who teaches English at the University
of Oregon.has a field day not only with the idea of text, but also with
the various chic disciplines that generated it. He has, in essence, taken
the genre of the academic satire.and run it through the post-structuralist
dicer. -Sven Birkets, New York Times.
Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses / David Lodge / 1975 /
PR6062 .O36 C5 1983 Stacks, Level Two. A university exchange program
provides the premise for Changing Places. Aggressive, flamboyant Morris
Zapp leaves his post at the State University of Euphoria (a thinly-disguised
Berkeley) to trade places with timid, unambitious Philip Swallow from
the dreary University of Rummidge in the English Midlands. Eventually
they exchange cars, homes, and wives as well. -Contemporary Authors.
Small World: An Academic Romance /1984 / PR6062 .O36 S64 1991 Stacks,
Level Two. Zapp and Swallow appear again in Small World..They are
only two of the many characters who jet around the globe from one academic
conference to another in search of glory, romantic trysts, and the UNESCO
chair of literary criticism--a job with virtually no responsibilities
and a $100,000 tax-free salary. -Contemporary Authors. Nice
Work / PR6062 .O36 N5 1989 Stacks, Level Two. Half of Nice
Work, inside the redbrick University of Rummidge, is the sort of college
novel likely to remind readers less of [Kingsly] Amis than of Mary McCarthy's
The Groves of Academe or Randall Jarrell's Pictures From an
Institution. It's about the knowledge factory gone berserk. But the
other half of Nice Work is about another sort of factory, producing
car parts instead of knowledge, motors instead of meaning. When these
two modes of production meet, there's a very messy dialectic. -John Leonard,
The Nation.
Eating People is Wrong / Malcolm Bradbury / 1959 / PR6052. R246
E2 1984 Stacks, Level Two. A novel.about how weary academic life
is in the English Midlands of the '50s-but this is not a weary novel.
Often truly comic, its satire has many barbs and they often draw blood..
-Herbert Burke, Contemporary Authors. Stepping Westward
/ 1965 / PR6003 .R118 S7 1979 Stacks, Level Two. The author's exaggerated
versions of university life work by lending a British ear and eye to the
oddities of the American scene. -Bernard McCabe, Contemporary Authors.
The History Man / 1975 / PR6003 .R118 H57 1983 Stacks, Level
Two. The History Man is set on a 1970's campus heavy on parking lots,
poured concrete, endless hallways, student radicals, bored professors,
and pompous officials. Everyone falls victim to Bradbury's acid tongue,
but no one more so than his main character, Howard Kirk, who teaches a
famous course on Revolutions..A master of faculty infighting, seducer
of all women in sight, wearer of a Zapata mustache, and preacher of equality
whose wife does most of the child care, Kirk maneuvers to get a racist
geneticist invited to speak on campus so that he can lead the protest.
-Adam Hochschild, Mother Jones. Rates of exchange 119831
/PR6052.R246 R3 1983 Stacks, Level 2 .he [Bradbury] is up to something
other than the usual picaresque of an academic innocent abroad. The book
is, in fact, an intricately witty gloss on linguistics and structuralism,
if not on the novel-writing process itself. -Christopher Porterfield,
Time.
Foolscap / Michael Malone / 1991 / PS3563 .A43244 F66 1991 Stacks,
Level Two. Ivy-choked groves of academe and overcultivated fields
of creative endeavor are pruned to riotous effect in this rollicking satire.
In top comedic form, Malone follows English professor Theo Ryan from North
Carolina's Cavendish University across the Atlantic to London on a merry
chase after the purloined Foolscap, a play he's penned about Sir Walter
Raleigh. -Publishers Weekly.
Four Dreamers and Emily / Stevie Davies / 1997 / PR6054 .A89152
F6 1997 Stacks, Level Two. Literary obsessions, farce and tender
explorations of the heart combine in British novelist and literary critic
Davies's entertaining U.S. debut, a gently satirical contemporary novel
that targets academics and other devotees who worship at Emily Bronte's
shrine. -Publishers Weekly.
The Groves of Academe / Mary McCarthy / 1952 / PS3525 .A1435 G76
1952 Stacks, Level Two. With the main character a faculty member
who wants it known that he is a former communist-when he isn't-so his
liberal college doesn't dare fire him, this story has a definite 50's
feel. It is nonetheless a fun read since some of the most lampooned aspects
of academic life seem never to change.
Handmaid of Desire / John L'Heureux / 1996 / PS3562 .H4 H36 1996
Stacks, Level Two. John L'Heureux.who teaches creative writing
at Stanford University, has created in ''The Handmaid of Desire'' a satirical
fantasy in which a motley bunch of Bartheans, deconstructionists and disciples
of Foucault are wholly at the mercy of an omnipotent novelist, who rearranges
their lives for them according to the requirements of her latest plot.
-Evelyn Toynton, The New York Times.
Japanese by Spring / Ishmael Reed / 1993 / PS3568 .E365 J35 1993
Stacks, Level Two. In his funny, explosive.novel, "Japanese by
Spring," no one who has ever jockeyed for power in an American university
escapes [Ishmael Reed's] ridicule: liberals, conservatives, feminists,
male chauvinists, whites, blacks and Asians..Borrowing from vivid African-American
slang and turning academic jargon inside out, Mr. Reed constructs brilliant
verbal fusillades that reduce his targets to their most ridiculous components.
-Edward Hower, New York Times.
Lucky Jim / Kingsley Amis / 1954 / PR6001 .M6 L8 1954 Stacks,
Level Two. The most popular [British] anti-hero of our time has been
without doubt, Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim-an astonishing
best-seller of the middle nineteen fifties. Amis caught the public mood
of post-war restiveness in a book which though socially significant, was,
and still is, extremely funny. -Anthony Burgess, The Novel Now.
Make No Bones / Aaron Elkins / 1991 / PS3555.L48 M35 1993 Stacks,
Level Two. Gideon Oliver must excuse himself from the festivities
of the biennial anthropological convention, bone bash, and weenie roast
in order to investigate the disappearance of the remains of Dr. Albert
Jasper, previously housed in an Oregon museum. -Publishers Weekly.
The Masters / C. P. Snow / 1951/ PR6037.N58 M33 1959 Stacks,
Level Two. [This book] might be considered the template from which
countless imitations have been struck: an election has been called to
decide who the new Master will be, and that is quite enough to ensure
a stomach-churning academic season. What might strike non-academics as
a tempest in a teapot leads inexorably to enormous expenditures of fretful
energy and intrigues worthy of Jacobean drama. -Sanford Pinsker, Who cares
if Roger Ackroyd gets tenure? Partisan Review 66:3, Summer, 1999.
(This article is a fun-to-read critique of American academic satire-I
highly recommend it. The call number for the Partisan Review is
AP2 .P267.)
Moo / Jane Smiley / 1995 / PS3569 .M39 M66 1995 Stacks, Level
Two. Incorporating the arc of a Shakespearean comedy, Smiley skewers
any number of easily recognizable campus fixtures: the grant-seeking egomaniac,
bewildered freshmen, the obsessive researcher. Smiley's satire also takes
dead aim at the venal motives of college fund-raisers and scores a direct
hit. -Booklist.
Murder in the Museum of Man / Alfred Alcorn / 1997 / PS3551 .L29
M87 1997 Stacks, Level Two. "What possible motive could someone
have for killing and eating the dean?'' This simple-sounding question
is the pivot of Alfred Alcorn's stylish, occasionally fiendish detective
story, ''Murder in the Museum of Man.'' Mr. Alcorn's heroic victim is
not the devoured dean, nor is it any subsequent murderee; it is the Museum
of Man itself, a modest-looking archeological and anthropological treasure-trove
about to be gobbled up from without by adjacent Wainscott University,
avid to turn the museum's dusty collection rooms into administrators'
offices, and by self-promoting researchers within, who fawn on reporters
but despise the humanity whose history they pretend to chronicle.
A New Life / Bernard Malamud / 1961 / PS3563 .A4 N4 1961 Stacks,
Level Two. Political correctness didn't exist when Malamud wrote this
delightful saga of New Yorker Sy Levin's new life teaching English at
tiny Cascadia College in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, but there
was plenty of absurdity on campus even without it. The story of Levin's
existential coming-to-terms with life and love mirrors themes apparent
throughout Malamud's work, but here the academic foolishness, along with
the comic possibilities of a New York Jew encountering the small-town
Northwest (Malamud actually taught at Oregon State University), makes
for more laughs than one finds in, say, The Fixer or The Assistant.
-Booklist.
Pictures from an Institution / Randall Jarrell / 1968 / PS3519
.A86 P5 1986 Stacks, Level Two. Jarrell's one novel, Pictures
from an Institution . is an extremely clever work of satire as well
as a humanely intelligent book. It is set in a progressive women's college
not altogether unlike Sarah Lawrence College and its pictures of the academic
and personal life of all concerned remain amusing. -M. L. Rosenthal, Randall
Jarrell.
Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror / James Hynes
/ 1997 / PS3558 .Y55 P8 1997 Stacks, Level Two. With "Publish and
Perish," Hynes' greatest feat is that he has done something wholly original,
taking the best of satire, literary fiction and the suspense genre and
splicing it into a collection of stories that is, above all else, intensely
fun. -Dean Bakopoulos, The Capital Times.
The Secret History / Donna Tartt / 1992 / PS3570.A657 S4 1992
Stacks, Level Two. "It was a strange, still, oppressive day. The
campus seemed deserted ...and the green lawn, the gaudy tulips, were hushed
and expectant beneath the overcast sky. Somewhere a shutter creaked. Above
my head, in the wicked black claws of an elm, a marooned kite rattled
convulsive then was still. This is Kansas, I thought. This is Kansas before
the cyclone hits. The library was like a tomb, illumined from within by
a chill fluorescent light that, by contrast, made the afternoon seem colder
and grayer than it was. The windows of the reading room were bright and
blank; bookshelves, empty carrels, not a soul." This quotation from The
Secret History tells you where this novel is going-to the "graves"
of academe (as Publishers Weekly puts it). Not so much an academic
satire, but the only book on this list told from the students' point of
view-and it's a creepy one!
Straight Man / Richard Russo / 1997 / PS3568 .U812 S77 1997 Stacks,
Level Two. Easily the funniest novel you'll read this year [1997],
Straight Man stars perpetual wise-guy Hank Devereaux waging comic war
on both the contentious English faculty and the bean-counting administrative
bureaucrats. No other serious novelist can blend heartache and high jinks
quite like Russo. -Booklist.
Textermination / Christine Brooke-Rose / 1992 / PR6003 .R412 T48
1992 Stacks, Level Two. The setting is a literary conference, where
academics have gathered to hear papers and debate about which works merit
inclusion in the world's cannon of literature. Brooke-Rose [a British
novelist and critic] has produced a wildly funny fictional entry in the
ongoing debate about deconstruction, multiculturalism and the respective
merits of "fine" and "pop" art. -Publishers Weekly.
The War Between the Tates / Alison Lurie / 1974 / PS3562 .U7 W3
Stacks, Level Two. A comic novel [not truly a satire] about the
marital difficulties of a professor and his wife in an era of campus unrest.
-Contemporary Authors.
Linda
Keiter, Marriott Library 2/00
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