The Times Magazine and Academic Megastars

Tim Spurgin The Times Magazine and Academic Megastars Anthony Pescecane Has a Cold In James Hynes's novel, The Lecturer's Tale, the English department at the University of the Midwest is full of jerks. That's one of the best things about the book, too. For unlike many recent academic novels, which give us good guys and bad guys, saints and sinners, pitting Lovers of Literature and Keepers of the Faith against Theory-Slinging, Careerist Trendoids, The Lecturer's Tale tries to be even-handed. The novel's opening pages include a couple of stereotypical academic poseurs—"bloodless" Victoria Victorinix (3) and "strikingly featured" Miranda DeLaTour (6)—yet between its introductions of these two ruthless women, the novel also interposes, as if to even the score, an unflattering sketch of the department's leading conservative, senior professor Morton Weissmann. "[0]nce strikingly handsome but possessed now of the sagging good looks of an aging movie star," Weissmann blows by our hapless protagonist with "a rictus of a smile and a flip of the hand, like Gregory Peck diffidently acknowledging a fan" (6). In this department, clearly, the falling stars are just as shallow, and just as self-absorbed, as those on the rise. Despite the general levels of meanness and vanity at Midwest, it isn't hard to pick out the biggest jerk of all. The prize goes, no question, toAnthony Pescecane, the "flamboyant and forceful" chair (6) who looks and sounds, as Elaine Showalter has noted, like a cross between Frank Lentricchia and Stanley Fish. Pescecane is not without his charms, but I wouldn't follow Showalter in suggesting that he is portrayed lovingly (Bl3). In a department where image is everything, no one is more concerned with appearances than Pescecane. He styles his hair, wears expensive suits and Italian shoes, and takes great pride in his resemblance to a mob boss. What's more, he's "come to academic superstardom by way of advertising," discovering in the academy "an arena where his talent for words and the heedless momentum of his ambition could bring him absolute power" (78-9). The full extent of Pescecane's nastiness is revealed later, when we learn that he's "been quoted in The New York Times Magazine—in an article titled 'Anthony Pescecane Has a Cold'—as saying that 'the finest thing in life is to take an academic department and bend it to one's will'" (93). It seems, then, that Pescecane is not only vain, but eager to parade his vanity, not only contemptuous of his colleagues , but happy to display that contempt in the glossiest pages of the nation's most influential newspaper. It also seems—and this, 226 the minnesota review for my purposes, is the most interesting point here—as if his stardom is of a different order, a significantly greater magnitude, than that of his colleagues at Midwest. To be sure, everyone in Pescecane's department is a star of some sort: everyone seems to be out on the conference circuit, everyone seems to publish regularly, and almost everyone seems to be moving up and getting ahead. Yet with the possible exception of Stephen Michael Stephens, "the department's only senior African American" (37) and the author of a "prize-winning semi-autobiographical first book" (37-8), no one else seems to have broken out of the academy into the larger public sphere in quite the way that Pescecane has done. Stephens does publish interviews with black celebrities in Vanity Fair, and he occasionally appears on Nightline as well (38), but Pescecane gets booked regularly on both Charlie Rose and Politically Incorrect (80). What's more, he's not only been quoted in the Times, he's been profiled by the Times. He's what I might call an academic megastar, one of the elite few deemed worthy of the full Stanley Fish/Richard Rorty/Skip Gates treatment. Following Hynes, we might imagine a whole typology of academic celebrity, one that would include but not be limited to the following categories: 1.stars: academics known and highly esteemed by others in their subfields or specialties; a star's work is usually published in specialized journals...