The thing that mattered most in this elite new world of mine was brainpower—or, at least, the projection of brainpower. Being a decent, truthful, cha… - Maureen Corrigan

The answer to the whodunit of why work was dumped as the novel’s main subject had to do with centuries of theorizing about the function of art intersecting with the dawning of modern capitalism. From Plato onward, philosophers and poets insisted that art should enlighten and elevate. Art has always belonged to the realm of freedom, while work, particularly at the close of the eighteenth century, moved further and further into the realm of necessity. Industrial capitalism made work an even less appealing focus for art because it changed the very nature of work by divorcing the head from the hand. The development of the novel paralleled this split by delving deeper into the head and caring less about what the hand was doing. The public and private spheres also became more rigidly separated under industrial capitalism: the mill was where people had to go for a certain number of hours every day in order to make a living; but that by-product of work—a living—was consumed at home. Storytellers, always on the lookout for a good time, found the private sphere much more diverting that they did the cramped and coerced public sphere of work.

The best Dorothy Parker-like riposte to nosy questions about adoption was uttered by a friend of a friend of mine on a New York City bus. This white mother and her Chinese baby daughter were riding up Madison Avenue when an older woman got on, sat down across from them, and barked out: “Is her father Chinese?” “I don’t know,” the mother replied. “It was dark.”

Now, given the consumer-pleasing politics of today’s universities, I have, in effect, seventy new bosses each semester; they’re sitting at the desks in front of me. If a teacher is not entertaining or lenient enough and her teaching evaluations plummet, she could lose the job.