Alison Lurie

Invited to write a short piece for The Guardian (a UK newspaper) on a philosophically interesting movie, Haack deliberately chose, not Serious Cinema, but a light-hearted comedy, Galaxy Quest, for the questions it provokes about the real and the fictional.

The version here is as submitted; the published version, sadly, was a little dumbed-down.

This monograph provides a chronological overview of the campus novel from the 1950s to the early 21st century. All of the six chapters compare two representative texts from each decade—one British and one American. The findings show that the authors of American campus novels (e.g. Nabokov, Malamud, and DeLillo) are more diverse than their British counterparts (e.g. Amis, Bradbury, and Lodge). The monograph also addresses the coexistence of the comic and the satirical within the genre. The conclusion emphasizes that although Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, one of the most recent campus novels, can hardly be characterized as a comic novel, all of the texts analyzed in this volume are satirical in their effect, as they try to name and potentially reform various problematic aspects of academia.

This paper examines the gendered aspects of consumer waste, dirt, and domestic mess in three early novels by Alison Lurie – Love and Friendship (1962), The Nowhere City (1965), and The War between the Tates (1974), set in 1969 – which I argue provide an incisive account of the transformation of gender relations over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. By focussing on the signifying potential of material objects in these texts, I seek to demonstrate Lurie's relevance to the “thingly turn” in literary criticism, to reignite interest in an author whose work has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, and to instigate a wider discussion of waste in her work as a whole, where it in fact proliferates. In broader terms, I hope to complicate existing scholarship on waste in literature (including my own in this area to date), which remains almost exclusively focussed on male authors.

Dans The War Betwenn the Tates, Alison Lurie a érigé une hiérarchie de la Philosophie où, à l'intention des étudiants dans cette discipline, elle a mesuré rigoureusement la difficulté de ses parties,  dans des distinctions dont Deleuze et Nietzsche mais aussi Russell et Wittgenstein ont donné les raisons.