Academic fiction

[Paul Mackin]

A question: Are academically-set novels always SATIRICAL
(if that's the right word)?
 
Legal novels right wrongs and medical novels cure disease. Why don't
academic novels wage fierce, life-and-death struggle against student
 ignorance? (don't mean students on the p-list)

Academic novels are more like espionage novels since LeCarre
(or maybe Graham Greene).

Or have I just not read enough of them?

					P.
----------
> From: Bill Millard <millard at cuadmin.cis.columbia.edu>
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Academic fiction
> Date: Thursday, February 06, 1997 11:18 AM
> 
> Along with all the other examples of good novels with university 
> settings (a rare but not nonexistent species), like David Lodge's and 
> Ishmael Reed's, I'd recommend Nabokov's _Pnin_ and Jane Smiley's 
> _Moo_.  
> 
> Just finished the latter and liked it; it's light entertainment, but 
> less light than its annoying cow-college title implies.  Its lineup 
> of widely recognizable faculty types may border on stereotyping to 
> some degree, but some of the caricatures are dead-on and richly 
> deserved, especially the loathsome market-worshiping economics prof.  
> I'd be interested in what other people on the list think of it, if 
> anyone here's read it. 
> 
> Obligatory TRP Content: isn't the "People's Republic of Rock & Roll" 
> section of _Vineland_ close to this genre?  A-and the stuff in 
> _COL49_ about textual variants in revenge tragedies and the strange 
> people obsessed with them?  I wouldn't say the campus novel is 
> entirely below TRP's field of attention, even if some academics are 
> in fact solipsistic baffle-gabbing boobs and worthy targets for 
> Steely-style derision.  
> 
> --Bill Millard
> (in academia w/o being entirely of it)
> 
> 
> \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
> \ Bill Millard 
> \ millard at cuadmin.cis.columbia.edu
> \ Editor, 21stC, Columbia University
> \ http://www.21stC.org
> \ Voice, bass, and songs, Shanghai Love Motel 
> \ http://www.columbia.edu/~wbm1/slm.html
> \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/