CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEAD: CRISIS IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE AMERICAN COLLEGE NOVEL by DAVID MCKAY POWELL (Under the Direction of Douglas Anderson) ABSTRACT This dissertation analyzes the dual histories of modern literary studies in the university and the American “college novel,” a genre that includes both student- and faculty-centered narratives. I pay particular attention to the substantial volume of antipathy shown by novelists toward the academy, and suggest causes ranging from student frustration with curricular standards, professorial angst regarding departmental and bureaucratic politics, and the essential question of mission in the university humanities—how can literary studies justify themselves to the public and to modern technologically- and vocationally-oriented institutions of higher education? The central primary texts of this study are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December (1982), and Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys (1995), which I put into conversation with commentary on education from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles William Eliot, John Dewey, C. P. Snow, Allan Bloom, and Mark McGurl. INDEX WORDS: College novel, Humanities, Literary studies, University history, Ralph Waldo Emerson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Michael Chabon, James Hynes CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEAD: CRISIS IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE AMERICAN COLLEGE NOVEL by DAVID MCKAY POWELL B. A., Henderson State University, 2002 J. D., Washington and Lee University, 2005 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2011 © 2011 David McKay Powell All Rights Reserved CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEAD: CRISIS IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE AMERICAN COLLEGE NOVEL by DAVID MCKAY POWELL Major Professor: Douglas Anderson Committee: Michael G. Moran Hugh Ruppersburg Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2011 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to the following people, without whom this dissertation and the degree it represents would have been one of my life’s more troubling “what if”s: My parents, Bill and Dana, whose emotional and material support has always been an embarrassment of riches; Dr. Douglas Anderson, who directed this study and whose assistance, insight, leadership, and company has reminded me that humanists can indeed be humane; Drs. Michael Moran and Hugh Ruppersburg, my reading committee, who have provided much valuable commentary and advice during this process; and Erin, my lovely wife—I’ve forgotten how I ever got through the day without you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………iv PREFACE…………………………………………………………………………………………1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: RATIONALITY, ROMANCE, AND THE AMERICAN COLLEGE NOVEL…………………………………………………………………...4 2 SCOTT FITZGERALD’S THIS SIDE OF PARADISE AND THE MODERN(IST) STUDENT NARRATIVE…………………………………………50 3 SAUL BELLOW, THE DEAN’S DECEMBER, AND PROFESSORIAL DUTY………………………………………………………………………………109 4 REFLEXIVE MODERNITY, CREATIVE WRITING, AND THE ACADEMY IN MICHAEL CHABON’S WONDER BOYS…………..…………...152 5 CONCLUSION: WHAT OF “SUBMERGED OLD ATLANTIS”?.........................187 NOTES………………………………………………………………………………………….195 v Preface The following discussion is about two things: the evolution of the humanities in the modern research university, and the way in which college novels—a genre that has suffered a surprising level of critical indifference—have treated that evolution. The profession of the modern “lit prof” is a young one, and college fiction, which more often than not puts the figure of the literature professor in its sights, is a young form; the fact that their growing pains might reverberate off of one another, and that the latter would calibrate on the former, is such a natural eventuality as to be not particularly worth mentioning. What has gone unnoticed and what is worth exploring is that the authors of college novels have consistently used that medium to voice concerns over the theories and practices that characterize university humanities. What follows will analyze these concerns using F. Scott Fitzgerald‟s This Side of Paradise, Saul Bellow‟s The Dean’s December, and Michael Chabon‟s Wonder Boys as representative texts implicating a wide range of issues: the curriculum, the effect of departmental politics, innovations in the field such as the rise of creative writing, and the essential question of mission—how do the humanities justify themselves to the world outside, especially in a university setting that increasingly demands technological and vocational justification? The earlier iterations of the genre tended to lean toward the student narrative. Fitzgerald‟s novel is the story of Amory Blaine, Princetonian, and the devivified study of literature he encounters in his college experience. Amory is bright and eager, but the classroom is a place of disappointment for him, its curriculum lockstep and its teachers wooden. Fitzgerald‟s novel 1 echoes earlier student-centered novels from Hawthorne‟s Fanshawe (1828) to Owen Johnson‟s Stover at Yale (1912), and sets the tone for later student novels, which tend to promote autonomy for the learner in curricular decisions so that a student‟s passion might better manifest itself, a reflection of reforms at the time which saw the shift from the rigid classical curriculum to the elective system. Philosophically, this was a shift that suggested the flexibility of education—a uniform body of knowledge no longer represented “education” as it had in the era of the classical school. Mid-century saw the ascent of the “academic novel,” one that treated the issues particular to faculty life and career. Saul Bellow wrote more consistently about the professor figure than perhaps anyone other than Nabokov (not coincidentally, both spent significant portions of their careers working in a university environment). The discussion of Bellow here centers primarily on The Dean’s December, but counts that novel‟s companion texts—Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and Ravelstein—as integral parts of one musing on the professorial life, particularly on how the humanities can be quantified, digested, packaged, and used for the good of humankind beyond the proverbial ivory tower. Bellow asks, what is it that counts as real work in the humanities? What good do advanced studies and research in the humanities actually do? What constitutes “research” in the humanities? And what benefit does humanism bestow not only on the general public, but on the individual scholar or student? The question of justification posed by Bellow, especially how the humanities impact the individual scholar/student, is also the subject of Michael Chabon‟s Wonder Boys, a novel about a creative writing professor, Grady Tripp, whose work has run aground and whose stalled career has spilled over into his personal life. Wonder Boys depicts Tripp struggling to justify the practice of creative writing to one of his students over the course of a harried long weekend. It 2 calls into question the rise of creative writing in the academy and posits a primarily personal and therapeutic benefit from its practice, something a bit at odds with the modern dictate that university work be to the benefit of the larger community and not just for the individual practitioner. Wonder Boys explores this reflexive justification for the humanities and how it relates to more traditional modes of literary scholarship. The relationship between the arts and the academy has always been uneasy, particularly as regards the literary arts. This unease has become more intense with the rise of the modern literature department, which has declared that the professional scholar‟s duty is to explain either the meaning or the relevance of what the artist has created; the artists more often than not have believed that their points need no further clarification—as Emerson wrote, “Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare.” The college novel genre has been particularly poised and repeatedly used to voice the concerns of authors against those who would appropriate their message. But beyond this territoriality, the college novel has been a record of the century-long revolution in literary studies that saw the ebb of the classics, the development of a contemporary canon, the advent of theory, and the inclusion of the creative alongside the scholarly. It is often a biased history and conveyed by many voices, but it is a narrative to which the humanities, facing an uncertain future, ought to pay attention. 3 Chapter One Introduction: Rationality, Romance, and the American College Novel But you should not assume, Hippocrates, that the instruction of Protagoras is of this nature: may you not learn of him in the same way that you learned the arts of the grammarian, or musician, or trainer, not with the view of making any of them a profession, but only as a part of education, and because a private gentleman and freeman ought to know them? — Plato, Protagoras1 The story of Fanshawe‟s publication and failure is perhaps better known than the contents of the narrative itself. Nathaniel Hawthorne‟s first attempt at a novel, it centers on a love triangle at Harley College, a fictional analogue of Hawthorne‟s Bowdoin. Its eponymous character is a bookish student who assists a classmate, Edward, in rescuing and courting a female charge of the school‟s headmaster. Hawthorne published the novel himself, anonymously, and, after its