Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A delicious chowder of quips and ironies. One may have heard individual lines at faculty cocktail parties, but listening to all the disparate voices of the university together, one realizes how much we sound like a thousand Franz Kafkas trying to sing a madrigal."--
Chronicle of Higher Education"An enjoyable description (and vivisection!) of the various people in Academe. Essential for anyone who extracts his livelihood from the forests primeval of Academe and who periodically suffers fits on the meaning of it all."--
ChoiceTable of ContentsPreface to the Second Edition vii
Preface to the First Edition ix
1 A Primer of Academic Politics 1
2 Stereotypics 31
3 Tribes:
Les Purs et les Appliques 63
4
Rites de Passage: Coming of age in Academe 77
5 The Rhythm of the Year: Solar Rituals 97
6 Styles and the Decay of Style 109
7 Bureaucriticism: What's Wrong and Why It Isn't Likely to Be Fixed 121
8
Confessio Amantis 139
A Triptych of Appendixes 145
1) A Political Primer for the Chair of English: Form and Content 147
b) How Departments Commit Suicide 161
c) Definition and/as Survival 179
