Accounts of lives filled up by endless class periods and faculty meetings seldom make for high drama. Two examples from 20 are books by Joseph Blotner and Marjorie Perloff.Ī basic problem that the academic memoirist must face is that (to adapt Tolstoy) academic lives are all alike-like each other as well as alike in themselves from week to week and year to year. Works by Alfred Kazin and Wallace Fowlie were early instances. The academic memoir could easily follow in its path. After all, the academic novel had been a well-established form since the 1950s. The next step from this was obvious: the critic would become the originating artist. The emergence of the academic memoir certainly reflects and extends the claim increasingly made by literary critics over the last thirty years that the critic is himself or herself an imaginative artist equal to the novelist or poet about whom he or she writes, for the critic continues and expands the process of creative discovery of the originating artist. In recent years a new subgenre of autobiography has been born-memoirs by academic literary critics-and it seems to have every prospect of continued growth. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
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