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07.01a. James Hynes, The Lecturer's Tale ; English Departments. This novel is entertaining, and I was gratified to see reference to James Hogg's good novel, The True Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which made it to my 2003 Christmas List. It probably is grossly unfair to English departments. The exaggeration of political correctness and the animus against white male heterosexuals is probably legitimate exaggeration (it's a comic novel, after all), but I am skeptical that English departments are really so hierarchical, unscholarly, and full of petty disputes. Still, I like the passage below, from page 63.

Nelson stepped out. The elevator door hissed shut, and the car whined away upward. He passed through the steel doorway into a vast, white room of plas�terboard cubicles, where the muffled rumble of the ventilators and the constant fluorescent buzz gave the place the feel of a sweatshop. Above the industrial hum rose the steady murmur of lonely women in their thirties and forties, their cubicles lined up like sewing machines in a shirtwaist factory. Nelson started down the aisle between the cubicles; he was already beginning to sweat. He always hoped when he came here that no one would notice him, but everyone always did. In each cubicle a thin woman in thrift shop couture sat earnestly tutoring some groggy student in a point of grammar or the construction of an argument, and each woman looked up at Nelson as he passed with the hollow-eyed, pitiless gaze of the damned. A few composition teachers lived in hope: faculty wives making a litde extra money, the department's own recent Ph.D.s teaching a year of comp as they played the job market, MFA students treading water as they finished their novels. But most of the comp teachers were divorced moms and single women with cats who taught eight classes a year and earned a thousand dollars per class, who clung to their semester-to-semester contracts with the desperate devotion of anchoresses. They combined the bitter esprit de corps of assembly-line workers with the literate wit of the overeducated: They were the steerage of the English Department, the first to drown if the budget sprang a leak. They were the Morlocks to the Eloi of the eighth floor. Pace Wallerstein, they were the colonial periphery, harvesting for pennies a day the department's raw material--undergraduates--and shipping these processed students farther up the hierarchy, thus creating the leisure for the professors at the imperial center to pursue their interests in feminist theory and postcolonial literature.

Passing among them, Nelson knew he stood out like some dissolute white beachcomber in Robert Louis Stevenson. Even though his appointment was in the Comp Program, he was not of them. Not necessarily because he was a man, but because he was a failure. Like colonial peoples everywhere, the women of the Composition Program despised any colonial overlord who had sunk to their level even more than they hated overlords in general. Every gaze in the place was pointed at his back like a spear.

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