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is where the action-and the academic satire-bubbles. Here, for example,
is how Zachary Kurtz (his last name is hardly accidental) describes the
department of his deepest dreams:
It would include Comp Lit, Mod Thought, and all the little language
departments-French, Russian, Spanish, you name it. It would take on
all written documents, equally and with absolute indifference to the
author's reputation or the western canon or the nature of writing
itself-whether it was Flaubert's Bovary or a 1950 tax form or the
label on a Campbell's soup can...and subject them all to the probing,
thrusting, hard-breathing analysis of the latest developments in
metaphilosophical trans-Ii terary theory.
And what would this new disposition call itself? Easy-the Department of
Theory and Discourse.
Andr here is how L'Heureux describes a meeting with the various
deans hired to represent the identi
ty
politics of their respective con–
stituencies:
There was the gay Dean and the lesbian Dean, a sort of androgynous
duo, whose clothes and hair and dress, and indeed even their features,
seemed remarkably alike. They could have been a pair of very unhap–
py twins. Originally there had been
only
a single Dean for both gays
and lesbians, but the lesbians had complained that this was a clear case
of penile hegemony and so a lesbian Dean had been appointed, as
much Iike the gay Dean as possible given their sexual differences....
The Chicana Dean was not able
to
attend, [president] Seton
explained, because she was participating in an international forum on
mariachi, past and future, and would be away for the month. The Dean
of Jewish Studies would join them later.
Exaggerations all? Absolutely, but rendered with smaller amounts of
grotesquery than one might imagine. The great advantage that novelists
have over those who argue on either side of the "culture wars" question
is that the former can use ridicule while the latter are-or at least ought
to be-constrained by evidence and logical argument. In the process,
L'Heureux gets to more unsettling truths in a single paragraph than most
critical studies of the educational follies manage to unpack in fifteen or
sixteen earnestly written chapters. No doubt this is one reason that the
