University of Minnesota.
Thanks for the link, Bill.
… a new novel by Diane Meier, is a mix of university novel and chick lit. Unlike much contemporary academic fiction, it doesn’t take up some grand theme (sexual harassment, political correctness, free speech, student unrest), but instead focuses throughout on the emotional awakening of a repressed professor, Joy Harkness.
In her book Faculty Towers, Elaine Showalter notes that “While earlier academic novels had been idyllic, satiric, ironic, or even embittered,” more recent instances of the genre, by writers like Philip Roth and Francine Prose, tend to be “cosmic, mythic, and vengeful.”
Meier’s novel is none of these things. It is more like Jane Eyre, a first-person account of a withdrawn and emotionally wounded woman’s emergence out of self-protective self-control. Like Jane, Harkness, an English professor, substitutes the world of literature for a personal reckoning:
We humans are, after all, lying in wait for the next great story. I know. Literature is my game. I hand the playing cards to the next generations: Emma Bovary and Jay Gatsby, Hester Prynne and Othello, Medea, Newland Archer and Daily Miller – their stories are what carry me back into the classroom each day; they are the reasons I get out of bed. The thing I might not really wish to look at is that their stories may have been so compelling, they allowed me to put off creating my own.
The reflections on literature Meier places throughout the narrative, though, aren’t particularly illuminating, since the writers Harkness admires most – in particular, Henry James – feature themes at odds with the comic and even utopian themes at the core of chick-lit. The attainability of radical self-transformation toward moral perfection and domestic bliss is the fundamental conviction of chick-lit, and this conviction animates The Season of Second Chances. Consider, on the other hand, the fate of the characters Harkness just listed: Bovary, Miller, Gatsby, Othello, Medea…
So there’s a curious knottedness at the center of this novel. It must convince us of Joy’s initial dark Jamesian convolutions; it must then make her breakthrough into the light plausible and sympathetic. But – in accordance with its genre – this is a relentlessly plot-driven novel. It has no time for the dense flows of interiority James gives us for people like Isabel Archer.
Novels like the Bridget Jones series also, like Season, offer self-consciously literary narrators, but in their purely comic way these narrators are aware of the vast gulf between the realities of their ridiculous lives and the grand romantic contrivances of their favorite heroines’ lives. Season of Second Chances lacks this comic lightness; it’s morally didactic in a pretty straightforward way.
I liked the novel, actually — it was easy to keep reading. But Season locates itself in an ultimately less than satisfying fictional netherworld — it’s neither a modernist Jamesian novel affording us the pleasure of insight into the ambiguities and entrapments of moral consciousness, nor a postmodern confection like the Bridget Jones novels, affording us the weightless pleasure of satirical self-recognition. I guess I’m saying that for me, an English professor happy to encounter English professors in the pages of novels, Joy’s being an English professor – being in a university setting at all – seemed incidental.
From ABC News:
Colleagues are touting a University of Alabama biochemistry professor with heroically saving lives during last week’s campus shooting rampage.
… [Debra] Moriarity, 55, is a professor whose lab was next door to Bishop’s lab. She was also believed to be Bishop’s closest friend in the department.
… The shooting erupted about an hour into the meeting at a moment when Moriarity was looking at some papers. When she looked up, the chairman of the department Gopi K. Podila had been shot in the head and Bishop was firing a second round at the person sitting next to Podila, Adriel D. Johnson Sr., Moriarity said.
Bishop was going down the line, shooting each person in the head, although the sixth person was shot in the chest, she told the magazine.
Moriarity said she immediately dove under the table and scrambled over to Bishop. “I was thinking ‘Oh, my God, this has to stop,” she said.
The professor said she pulled and then pushed on Bishop’s leg, yelling, “I have helped you before, I can help you again!”
Bishop pulled her leg away from Moriarity’s grip and kept shooting, she said. Moriarity crawled past Bishop and into the hallway when she said Bishop turned towards her friend, the gun gripped with both hands and a look of fury on her face.
“Intense eyes, a set jaw,” Moriarity told the Chronicle. As Moriarity, still on her hands and knees, looked up at her one-time friend helplessly, Bishop pulled the trigger. Click. She fired again. Click.
As Bishop stopped to reload, Moriarity said she scrambled back inside the room and with the help of survivors, quickly barricaded the door with a table so Bishop couldn’t reenter the room and resume shooting…
… Iris Murdoch remembered
the Oxford of our first year – utterly Bohemian & fantastic – when everyone was master of their fate and captain of their soul in a way that I have not met since. Those people just didn’t care a damn – and they lived vividly, individually, wildly, beautifully.
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There – right there –
is University Diaries’
New Year’s toast to you:
May you live vividly,
individually, wildly,
beautifully.
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In particular, the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project, which has successfully defended Lucia Joyce scholar Carol Shloss against venal, vindictive Stephen Joyce, who controls the Joyce Estate, and has blocked her work.
The Stanford scholar who wrote a controversial biography of James Joyce’s daughter has settled her claims for attorneys’ fees against the Joyce Estate for $240,000. The settlement successfully ends a tangled saga that has continued for two decades.
As a result of an earlier settlement reached in 2007, consulting English Professor Carol Loeb Shloss already had achieved the right to domestic online publication of the supportive scholarship the Joyce Estate had forced her to remove from Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003). She also had achieved the right to republish the book in the United States with the expurgated material restored. After that settlement was reached, Shloss asked the court to award the attorneys’ fees and costs she had incurred in bringing her suit, and the court granted that request. The parties eventually settled the amount of the fees and litigation costs Shloss and her counsel were to receive at $240,000.
… Shloss said that the suit is a game-changer because now literary “estates know they can get hurt.”
“They know that scholars have resources now. They just can’t be bullies,” she said. “We’ve established that if you don’t pay attention to the rights of scholars, authors and researchers the copyright laws protect, you might have to pay something as the Joyce Estate has had to pay.”
In a tartly worded Feb. 24 filing to determine attorneys’ fees and costs, Shloss and her legal team argued that “the cost of litigating this case, which was substantial, was a direct result of the Estate’s assiduous and energetic efforts to prevent Shloss from exercising the rights the U.S. copyright laws encourage, and its ‘scorched earth’ approach to litigating the early stages of the case to see if it could bully Shloss into capitulation.”
The whole account is worth reading.
… Neda Soltan are beginning to show up on my referral log.
I’m proud to share the same last name.
If the British tabloids knew about the sex-advice column Heather Brooke wrote for the University of Washington Daily nearly two decades ago they might run with it as a salacious news item.
Click the link for more.
Eva von Dassow has already made a starring appearance on this blog, complaining about the benighted University of Minnesota, where she teaches. This luminous personality is at it again in the Star Tribune, in a piece written with Timothy Brennan:
… [I]n one category, expenditures have nearly doubled over the last five years. That category is “institutional support,” which consists essentially of central administration. The 2008-09 budget plan increases expenditures for institutional support by more than $143 million, or 80 percent, over the figure for 2004-05. The spending increase in this category alone covers the amount by which the governor proposes to reduce the state’s annual appropriation to the university.
Click the second link in this post for more.
Thanks for the tip, Bill.
Dr. Lou Ann Cook, nursing professor who died Dec. 17, was memorialized by at least 45 current and retired faculty members, administrators and family at a ceremony Feb. 6 in the nursing and allied health complex.
Cook was a nursing professor at this college 25 years.
She was born Jan. 9, 1938, in Lakewood, Ohio.
Click on the link for more.