Academic novels

[David Casseres]

I said
>>But what Barth did so masterfully is sometimes the deadly pitfall of the
>>academic novel -- namely, being dependent on the illusion that the
>>university is the universe. < deathless prose ruthlessly snipped >
>>Wallace Stevens did not write poems in which the universe was like
>>an insurance company office, < snip, snip >

and now that John Boylan sez, sez he:
>Sez I : Yeah but Borges _did_ write 'The Library of Babel', in which
>the universe is a library -- this was ( along with Mervyn Peake's
>Gormenghast trilogy ) a key inspiration for 'Giles Goat Boy'. Borges
>was, of course, a librarian.

Absolutely.  But can you imagine a long tradition of librarians writing 
fiction in which the universe is a library and the characters are all 
librarians or library users?  I think not (Eco did show for this one with 
his mammoth yawn, _The Name of the Rose_).  And although foax have 
pointed out many examples of really good fiction set in the academy, I do 
believe there are also way too many deadly snoozers being cranked out.  
A-and the actual complaint I have is that the critics take these snoozers 
far too seriously, since they themselves tend to be academics.  There are 
plenty of blah examples of non-academic fiction, after all, but they get 
short shrift for the most part.

Look at the great energy and enthusiasm that has been devoted in the last 
few days to pointing out the good academic fiction, as compared to the 
rather desultory effort to mention novels centered somewhere else.  No 
one, as far as I have noticed, brought up Doctorow, Kesey, McMurtry, 
Proulx, Rushdie, Garcia Marquez, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Melville, Twain, 
Coover, de Lillo, etc. in this connection, although most of them have 
popped up in other threads among the same foax.  I think that's 
interesting and shows a lack of balance in our literary climate.


Cheers,
David