Academics in Literature

Abstract

By Catharine R. Stimpson I write, I am haunted by the memory of my friend Carolyn Heilbrun, who died in October 2003. She wrote mystery novels under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, a self-divided name that combines the vivacity of a Noel Coward character, the Amanda of Private Lives, with an irascible mood, crossness. Not surprisingly, her mystery novels, set in universities, also embody a dual nature. They crossly expose the awful faults of universities: the pretentiousness, sententiousness, lethal power games, backbiting, prejudices, hypocrisies, and twitty timidities. Yet Kate Fansler, Heilbrun's heroine, an academic and amateur detective, displays some of the attractive possibilities of academic life: learning, urbanity, wit, cleverness. This contradictory representation of academic life at once positive and negative has a rich history. A 2003 book, Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination, by A. D. Nuttall, finds traces of its beginnings in the story of the Garden of Eden. The Western classics are another source. Socrates, alive from the waist up and down, dominates Plato's Dialogues, that transcendent fusion of philosophy, drama, and pedagogy. However, it has been the Catharine Stimpson is university professor and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University.