English departments are strange places. Even to those of us who spend our working lives inside them, they can seem utterly mysterious. Thos...
English departments are strange places. Even to those of us who spend our working lives inside them, they can seem utterly mysterious. Those looking in from outside must find them even more baffling. What exactly do lecturers do all day? They teach and interact with students, but what happens the rest of the time?
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 [or] eating chocolate”.
He has a point.
Harvard professor Deidre Shauna Lynch said even more bluntly that what English academics get up to simply “does not look like work” to those on the outside. Those of us writing on literature, she suggests, must make our peace with this fact. We must resign ourselves to being largely unknown to the broader culture, living in quiet obscurity.
And yet, as Netflix’s The Chair makes clear, life within an English department can actually look a lot like life in any other workplace. At the fictional Pembroke University, there are familiar office politics and dramas, as well as the usual mixture of ambition, resentment, and status-seeking...
