McCarthy’s novel takes us back to comedy once again, mining the same territory as The Chair and Straight Man but written well in advance of either. Forget the Campus Novel – the English Department Novel is a more interesting sub-genre.

If you enjoyed this series, I’d recommend checking out these four novels, all of which offer compelling depictions of English departments. New Netflix drama The Chair is honest and funny, but it still romanticises modern university life Professor Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh) steers a team of colleagues who have eccentric literary quirks but are recognisable figures in many workplaces. At the fictional Pembroke University, there are familiar office politics and dramas, as well as the usual mixture of ambition, resentment, and status-seeking that exist elsewhere. We must resign ourselves to being largely unknown to the broader culture, living in quiet obscurity.Īnd yet, as Netflix’s The Chair makes clear, life within an English department can actually look a lot like life in any other workplace. Those of us writing on literature, she suggests, must make our peace with this fact. Harvard professor Deidre Shauna Lynch says even more bluntly that what English academics get up to simply “does not look like work” to those on the outside. Literary scholars everywhere, writes Terry Eagleton, “live in a state of dread – a dread that one day, someone … will suddenly get wise to the fact that we draw salaries for reading poems and novels.” This fact, say Eagleton, “is as scandalous as being paid for sunbathing eating chocolate.” What exactly do lecturers do all day? They teach and interact with students, but what happens the rest of the time? Those looking in from outside must find them even more baffling. Even to those of us who spend our working lives inside them, they can seem utterly mysterious.

Stegner crossing to safety