Literary critic Terry Castle waited 35 years before publishing a long story about an affair she had with an older female professor. She isn’t sure why she waited, or why she revealed it now, said Christine Smallwood in The Nation. “Perhaps my therapist could answer better than I can,” says the 56-year-old lesbian scholar. Waiting for the perspective that comes with age might be one explanation. The novella-length title essay in Castle’s new book, The Professor and Other Writings, revisits the young woman Castle was in the early 1970s and happily pokes fun at her. “I felt myself in that period to have been such an idiot,” she says. “It took a while to realize I could describe my own idiocy and it might be interesting to people.”
Castle, whom the late Susan Sontag once called “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today,” has clearly tired of writing only criticism, said Jed Lipinski in Salon.com. “Much of what passes for advanced literary scholarship these days is dreadful twaddle—incoherent, emotionally empty, deeply illiterate,” says Castle, who is now a professor of English at Stanford University. Writing about herself also offered her a chance to make a contribution to one of her true passions. “I love literary gossip. I love it,” she says. “I’m always, in principle, more interested in openness and explicitness than in being, I don’t know, kind of prim about it.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
'A financial windfall for Iranian terrorism'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Orangutan heals cut with medicinal plantSpeed Read A Sumatran orangutan in Indonesia has been self-medicating to heal a wound on his cheek
-
Turkey halts trade with Israel in latest Gaza riftSpeed Read The country plans to join South Africa's genocide case against Israel
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”