The text’s positioning within academia deserves particular scrutiny, especially regarding its relationship to intellectual movements of its era. While presented as a contemplative character study, the novel can be read as embodying specific cultural attitudes about education, merit, and authority that were being challenged by postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Althusser, Durkheim, Lacan, and Lyotard. These French theorists offered substantial critiques of modernist assumptions, contrasting notably with contemporary American authors like David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, whose works often reinforce traditional academic hierarchies and meritocratic assumptions.

The novel’s treatment of Charles Walker and Hollis Lomax presents particularly complex questions about difference and institutional power. The text’s portrayal of physical disability and its correlation with character assessment reflects problematic assumptions about difference and academic legitimacy. As Elaine Showalter observes in The Washington Post, what’s troubling is Stoner’s recognition of Walker’s intellectual capabilities while still choosing to fail him – a decision that seems more ideologically than academically motivated. This dynamic raises important questions about how institutions evaluate and validate different forms of intellectual expression.

The work’s relationship to New Historicism merits detailed analysis, particularly regarding Stephen Greenblatt‘s emphasis on textual collection and preservation. This approach to literary studies, while valuable, can sometimes reinforce traditional power structures within academia. Similar concerns arise with Harold Bloom‘s perspectives on the literary canon, as both scholars sometimes privilege certain cultural traditions over others in ways that merit examination. The English major, in this context, can sometimes function as an agent of cultural conservation rather than critical inquiry.

Greenblatt’s wife Ramie Torgoff’s efforts to reexamine women’s roles in Shakespearean history exemplify how historical revision can serve contemporary ideological purposes. This context helps illuminate how “Stoner” approaches questions of academic authority and institutional change. The novel’s treatment of opposition and difference, particularly through Stoner’s response to Walker, reflects broader institutional resistance to emerging forms of scholarly inquiry.

Dr. Christopher Willard‘s review, while insightful, perhaps too readily accepts the novel’s characterization of Walker as “a liar and pseudo-intellectual.” This interpretation overlooks how contemporary academic practices, including essay mills, often emerge as responses to institutional rigidity rather than mere academic dishonesty. The question of what constitutes legitimate academic “work” becomes increasingly complex when considering how institutions sometimes enforce ideological conformity through grading practices.

The novel’s conclusion – “He was himself and he knew what he had been” – resonates deeply with Weber’s analysis of Protestant ethics and capitalism, particularly regarding how religious dedication can manifest in academic institutions. The text’s treatment of Walker’s supposed “laziness and dishonesty and ignorance” reflects more on institutional biases than individual merit. This framework helps us understand how certain forms of academic dedication can sometimes mask resistance to institutional change.

Alice Rachel Ashe‘s 2023 thesis, “The Queer Plot of Stoner,” provides crucial insights into the novel’s treatment of difference. Her analysis of Walker’s name and its implications adds depth to our understanding of how the text constructs and critiques academic authority. Her observation about the “cruel irony” in naming a physically disabled character “Walker” highlights how the novel’s symbolism sometimes reinforces problematic assumptions about disability and difference.

The physical descriptions of characters like Walker and Lomax deserve careful examination. As Showalter observes, the correlation between physical appearance and moral character represents one of the novel’s more problematic aspects, potentially reinforcing irrational biases within academic institutions. This association between physical difference and moral or intellectual capacity reflects deeper cultural assumptions that merit critical analysis.

David Brooks‘ concept of “Bobos” (bourgeois bohemians) from his 2000 study provides valuable context for understanding the cultural attitudes reflected in “Stoner.” The novel anticipates how academic meritocracy would evolve to incorporate both elitism and performative tolerance, characteristics that Brooks identifies in contemporary upper-middle-class culture. This framework helps explain how institutions can simultaneously maintain exclusive power structures while professing egalitarian values.

Contemporary academics who share aspects of Stoner’s approach to literature and institutional authority might benefit from examining how shifting cultural attitudes and emerging critical perspectives continue to challenge traditional academic paradigms. The emergence of diverse theoretical frameworks and methodologies suggests the importance of remaining open to new forms of intellectual expression and inquiry.

“Stoner” can be productively read as reflecting particular academic ideals that were already being challenged by postmodern innovations. Walker’s character, rather than representing academic fraud, might better be understood as embodying emerging forms of intellectual expression that challenged institutional conventions. The text’s treatment of difference and authority continues to resonate with contemporary debates about academic culture and institutional change.

This interpretation suggests we might productively view Stoner not as an academic hero but as a figure whose struggles with change and difference reflect broader institutional tensions that persist in contemporary academia. The novel’s enduring relevance lies not in its celebration of traditional academic values but in how it illuminates ongoing debates about power, authority, and difference in academic institutions. These questions remain central to discussions about the purpose and practice of higher education.

Through this critical lens, “Stoner” becomes not merely a character study but a text that invites us to examine how academic institutions navigate change, difference, and authority. Its treatment of these themes continues to resonate with contemporary discussions about inclusivity, legitimacy, and power in academic settings.

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Alex Kurtagic, London: Spradabach, 2023, hb., 997pps., PRICE

In 2009, Alex Kurtagic published Mister, his novel of a highly cultured IT consultant operating within what he saw as the hellscape of contemporary Europe – a man too intelligent for an age suspicious of intellectual distinctions and too independent-minded for a continent in thrall to neurotic pettifoggery. In Angel, we meet a similarly misfitting man, but one with even less adaptive ability – indeed, a man almost without agency. This is a behemoth of a book about a midget of a man wandering solitarily in the drab wasteland of these times.

Angel is a student of 17th-century literature at an English university, whose unhappy fate it is to combine refined tastes and fastidiousness with an inability to impose these on even his immediate surroundings. He is physically slight and correspondingly cowardly, chronically short of money, and not even compensatingly articulate. Traditionally, angels enunciate glad tidings, but this one (aspiring poet though he may be) can barely sustain a basic conversation. He is announced to, rather than an annunciator. His most obvious resemblance to Biblical or Hebrew angels lies in his essential insubstantiality.

Angel is surrounded by people infinitely more impressive than he is – especially women, from his formidable mother and sister and brilliantly inductive fellow students to the mothering Amelia, who (for some incomprehensible reason) pants to enfold Angel in her ample embonpoint. He is an involuntary celibate, but unlike some involuntary celibates, he is not potentially dangerous. He is not even angry – although the debased nature of his university and society deserves almost unlimited contempt. Kurtagic’s front-cover oil of his Van Dyck-bearded subject excellently conveys the nervy nature of his character, his twitching worriedness and state of blinking surprise at the awfulness of almost everything.

We do not lose sympathy for Angel as the tale unfolds because we never develop any. Even if somehow we could, he would hemorrhage it with his every action, or more precisely, inaction. It is only at the very end that we start to feel sorry for him, but we can never feel respect. He is epically inept and wholly dependent on others, unable to perform the simplest task without mishap. He gets a menial job but can’t manage the hours. He is given expensive things and loses them. He is given excellent advice and makes no attempt to follow it. He gets blamed even for things that aren’t his fault – and we are neither surprised nor particularly perturbed. The reason he has no money is that he burned through a generous grant from his wealthy and influential parents in pursuit of an American woman so obviously unworthy that people who have never met her instantly smell the gold-digger.

Huge events unfold around him, culminating in unexpectedly dramatic style, but he is so busy mooning about his love interest (and feeling sorry for himself) that he misses all the portents. And yet this over-specialized evolutionary aberration ends up as one of his cohort’s rare survivors. His near-invisibility ensures that he is mercifully overlooked by the most malign influencers, except when he accidentally offends à la mode ‘activists’ of one kind or another. He does encounter real rebels but (probably luckily for him) never capitalizes on these encounters through distractedness or pusillanimity.

But if we cannot admire Angel, we can smile at some of his pratfalls and predicaments. The author’s mordant sense of humor is abundantly in evidence as his protagonist lurches from one petty indignity to the next – building up debts, humiliations, and resentments, borrowing money he can’t repay, exasperating his family, failing his few friends, irritating his tutors, losing all his clothes at the launderette (and all his illusions about Madison), and vomiting all over the fragrant front of the only woman in the world who wants anything to do with him. Angel’s phobias are Ruskinian in their rarefaction, as he registers disgust with bad table manners, dirt, drunkenness, earrings, oxter hair (on women), tobacco, and tattoos.

This is however not just a novel of amusing incidents, but also of serious ideas. The author is a determined logophile, and even those with above-average vocabularies may encounter words that are new to them or that they have forgotten. These pleasing encounters contrast with sometimes over-long staccato dialogue sections when Angel is trying to attract the attention of barmen or shopkeepers or, yet again, failing to explain himself to his supposed intellectual peers.

Sophisticated sociopolitical arguments are seeded through this book – about sex differences, elitism, the nature and purpose of universities, and freedom of conscience – but none of these viewpoints are expressed by Angel, although we infer that he generally agrees with their conservative-reactionary tenor. There are shrewd observations of today’s cry-bully tendencies, with their manic oscillations between psychological extremes, attacks on easy Aunt Sally targets, and protesting-too-much parading – and excellent evocations of cityscapes in all their Bladerunner alienness, or broken-down decrepitude. Strewn names of books, films, and paintings betoken authorial wide interests, and the book’s production values hint at his awareness of the importance of aesthetics in shaping worlds. Kurtagic is certain there is such a thing as ‘good taste’, and it is at its root a moral choice. This is weighty literature in more than just a physical sense.

We eventually leave Angel all alone, contemplating the ruins of all his hopes and with no obvious avenue of escape, with even his once-powerful parents implicated in his downfall. It is a desolate outcome indeed, even to so inglorious an odyssey, and even for someone not obviously deserving of respect – because behind his seriocomic unfolding can be seen substantive insights into 21st-century society, and in his deeply-grained disappointment something of ourselves.

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In the novel Dangerous Liaisons, which shocked the French public with its depiction of the cruelty and degeneracy of the nobility, two aristocrats plot to corrupt a teenage girl who is engaged to marry an older nobleman. This nobleman had earlier jilted the Marquise, who thus asks the Vicomte to help her gain revenge by deflowering the girl before her wedding. The Vicomte, a ruthless seducer, at first schemes to have the girl sleep with her young music teacher, but growing impatient with the hesitations of the latter, he changes his mind and does the job himself. In shock, the morning after the rake has forced himself on her, the distraught girl, named Cécile, turns to Valmont’s partner-in-crime, the Marquise herself, for solace and counsel. But instead of showing sympathy for her plight or expressing indignation at her violation, Merteuil scolds the girl for being upset in the first place. Few men, she reminds her, are as romantic and as charismatic as the Vicomte. Far from being upset at the loss of her virtue, Cécile should look ahead to the enjoyment waiting for her in the future. “The shame caused by love is like the pain, you experience it only once,” declares the Marquise, “yet the pleasure remains, and that is something.” Merteuil goes as far as to propose that a friendship with Valmont, a ”difficult man to keep and a dangerous one to leave,” will help her to fool her disapproving mother and to win the undying love of her naïve music teacher, the Chevalier Danceny.

Cécile’s reply reveals a total and even enthusiastic acceptance of her corrupter’s counsel. What she had first believed to be a violation and a misfortune is now something she avidly enjoys. While overcome on occasion by sad thoughts about her earnest admirer, Danceny, she nevertheless enjoys the nightly visits Valmont makes to her room, in which the rake amuses her with stories about the sexual escapades of her mother in her younger years. Cécile even declares that she is no longer worried about wedding a much older man, because, thanks to the wise words of the Marquise, she has come to realize that “marriage” means “having more freedom” to love other men. But the ease with which Cécile accepts the views foisted on her by Merteuil and Valmont provokes in the libertines not relief or delight but deep revulsion. Merteuil describes the girl in the most scathing terms: she has “weakness of character,” which, in the view of the Marquise, is “worst defect a woman can have.” Cécile’s eagerness to go along with whatever she and Valmont propose, far from indicating a capacity to adapt to new situations, instead masks an ineradicable obstinacy that renders her ineducable. In Merteuil’s view, she is the type of woman who gives herself to others indiscriminately, without any concern for why or how she is being pursued.

The opinions that Marquise and the Vicomte express and pretend to espouse in the presence of Cécile, who makes these views her own, accord with modern sexual mores. Moral restraints on sex are both unhealthy and unnecessary and so ought to be disregarded. Sex is a game where, if one is to succeed, one must keep one’s partner guessing. Just as important as what one feels are the emotions one feigns to throw one’s rivals off the scent. If Merteuil fails to recognize the importance of consent when she chastises Cécile for being upset about the loss of her innocence, she makes up for this lapse by exhorting the girl to free herself of the dreary religious morality she learned in the convent to fulfill what resembles a very modern ideal: the empowered woman in full control of her sexuality. Yet Merteuil decides to wash her hands of Cécile after learning that the girl is following her advice unreservedly. Indeed, she judges the girl with far greater severity than the religious authorities would have shown her. Whereas the nuns would allow for Cécile to regain their approval by repenting of her transgressions, the libertines show no such leniency. Why do Merteuil and Valmont take such a harsh and unforgiving view of the girl? It is not because she is sexually promiscuous, since they are so themselves. Rather, what repels them most is the view that Cécile takes of sex, which is for her a form of recreation. This strikingly modern attitude toward sex, which is nothing more than the means to experience physical pleasure, is what they find utterly objectionable. For the libertines no less than for the Church, the practice of sexuality involves the highest ethical stakes. While the Church holds that an individual’s sexual behavior is bound up with the salvation of his or her soul, sexuality for the libertines must be an avenue for the expansion of one’s vital powers.

The novel finds the deceitful pair at a time of peace when they find the victims for their predatory designs within the social circles they inhabit. But in times of conflict with hostile powers, it is harder to imagine men and women who would be capable of rendering more valuable services than the libertine. The techniques of seduction and deception that wreak psychological havoc and destroy the reputations of their victims would then become the most reliable means by which the kingdom could gain vital information about its adversaries and rivals. Who, other than an expert libertine, would be best suited to penetrating the court of a foreign power and wringing from it its secrets? The preternatural ability of Merteuil to divine the weaknesses of others, which enables her successfully to deceive and betray rivals as well as lovers, would become a most effective skill in helping her side to triumph over its adversaries. The link between pleasure and power for the libertines makes them capable of rising above selfish and private interests and, indeed, endows them with the burning ambition to do so, when the occasion arises. The glory they achieve in serving their lord or the state moreover serves to magnify their charisma as well as to intensify the pleasures they will reap from the enhancement of their aura.

But such great subjective riches are beyond the reach of those who are bereft of the imagination that would drive them to pursue ever more intense and ever more elusive pleasures. A wholly sensuous creature like Cécile is unsuited for an education in “intrigue,” to which the Marquise and the Vicomte had thought to provide for her. Her obstinacy thus has to do with her attitude that sex cannot be anything but a matter of private pleasure, in which such concerns as power and virtuosity, and meaning and glory, enter not at all. The figure of the libertine, in his defiance of religious morality and readiness to break moral taboos, serves as a prototype of the modern emancipated, self-fashioning subject. Yet it is a striking irony to see the libertines in Dangerous Liaisons objecting to what amounts to the modern belief in sexual freedom with a severity that exceeds that of the religious moralists. For such beliefs that sexual freedom is healthy, normal, and “empowering” correspond in their eyes to the dullness of spirit and the incapacity to discriminate between what is fine and what is coarse, what is exalted and what is brutish, and what is extraordinary and what is common. For Merteuil and Valmont are the products of a refined and sophisticated civilization, in which moral restrictions are not seen as irrational limits on one’s freedom but as incentives to unfold one’s talents, strengthen one’s willpower, and steel one’s nerve.

The reader may object to the perhaps excessively negative characterization of a minor character in the novel, one who is moreover still young and immature. Yet, it remains the case that modern conceptions of freedom, sexuality, and ethical behavior are intended for people who lack any higher conception of their lives. Thus, from the standpoint of the libertines as well as of Christian believers, it is no wonder that the pleasures of the emancipated way of life quickly grow dull and that defensiveness, bitterness, and loneliness are the order of the day for too many in the present. From this standpoint, the pleasures and freedoms of modern society have become too diluted and mechanistic to support the civilization that has enshrined and abused ideas such as tolerance, human rights, and group identity.

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Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom:
and with all thy getting get understanding.
—Proverbs 4:7

Ancient cultures had a special wisdom literature, such as Proverbs or Ecclesiastes in the Bible, a literature which gives direct, sage counsel. To a great extent, however, all of ancient and medieval literature counts as wisdom literature. The authors frequently understood themselves to be passing on wisdom to their readers, whether they wrote poetry or philosophical dialogues, and readers sought out literature as a principal means of becoming wise. Certainly, the joy of a story beautifully told or the delight in syllables ingeniously intertwined played a role as well, but these things were secondary to the aims of masters like Pindar or Plato. Contemporary education has lost this pursuit of wisdom through reading, and when schools read someone like Homer at all, he frequently becomes mere history or fiction.

Wisdom involves two elements: (i) gaining insight into the way of things, that is, the objective structure of reality or what the Greeks would call the Logos, and (ii) learning to shape our lives in conformity with this objective order.

Our ancestors understood that we inhabit a universe with real patterns and laws that all work together to form a whole, an order which could be discovered by the observant but never invented. In our own culture, we have limited this discoverable order to the purely mechanical operations of physical science, but our ancestors understood that life and morality, beauty and spirit occupy the same universe as rocks, rivers, and sky, and that all alike are subject to a pattern. In his masterpiece, The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis describes the way that ancient cultures the world over all noticed this way of things and sought to inculcate it through their literature. Borrowing a term from Chinese philosophy, Lewis calls this way of things the Tao, usually translated simply as “the Way.”

We can see an example of this expressed in the fourth commandment: “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.” Because it was created by God, the universe works in such a way that when children honor their parents, it goes well with them. This pattern in the fabric of the world is so obvious that nearly all cultures have recognized it. Our own culture may scoff, but we can no more change this pattern than we can change the law of gravity.

Many parents in the world of classical education are anxious that their children pull all the facts from the literature they read. We may call this “reading for knowledge” rather than “reading for wisdom,” and we should recognize right away that reading for knowledge is not a bad thing. We dutifully have our children read Caesar and part of the use of this is that they learn certain facts of history: how the Roman army, the Senate, and the government of the provinces functioned, for example. They read all this in Latin, and we are right to drill the knowledge of vocabulary, case, mood, and tense. Facts like these, along with names and dates, are the kind of thing one can put on flash cards—and you had better have those flash cards. Classical education spends a great deal of time and energy on reading for knowledge like this because we hope that our children will accumulate a central stock of shared facts, and without this stock they will not have the keys to unlock that great treasury of wisdom which is the Western canon.

If we teach our children only how to read for knowledge, however, we will justly receive the complaint that the work is boring and there is no point. (They’ll complain anyway, but we can do something about the justice of it.) This means that as our students read, we must walk with them through the text, helping them to see the world beyond it, identifying moments of insight into the laws of virtue, the patterns of good and bad relationships, the structures of temptation, or the ways that cities and peoples come to ruin. We can find this wisdom in any text of the Western canon, even when we read fiction or poetry—even (perhaps most of all) when we read faery tales.

We may contrast reading for wisdom with everything that is taught in many progressive schools. There, the objective of most discussions is to achieve something called “critical thinking” about what the students have just read (when they read at all). By telling his students to think critically about a piece of writing, the typical teacher in this kind of institution means that they should identify any bits of evidence in the text—real or imagined—for historical oppression along the axes of gender, race, or class, although this list now extends to an ever-growing set of grievance categories.

If the teacher has a slightly more philosophical bent, the instruction to think critically will focus on the “deconstruction” of the students’ worldview, especially where he finds elements of that worldview at all traditional, and most especially if the tradition is Christianity.¹ (Of course, the teacher never thinks about deconstructing his own social context that made deconstructionism so fashionable.) Students must read the text simply hunting for points where the text either reflects or challenges the worldview of the students—bonus points if it’s the worldview of your neighbors because then you’ll be able to add a sneer or a snort. If the point in the text reflects, the students are invited to critique the author. If it challenges, the students are invited to a smug admiration of so forward-looking a thinker.

What students are never taught to ask is whether anything they read is wise. As we read for wisdom, there may well be something like the deconstruction which the progressives so admire, but the point is never deconstruction for deconstruction’s sake. Virgil may have a profound insight into the real nature of things, into what it means, for instance, to have a call placed upon one’s life and to labor long without seeing the fruit of that call. This insight, because it is true, because it reflects something about the way of things, breaks into our petty self-contentment and exposes to us a bigger, deadlier, though more beautiful world, a world which was there all along, although we needed a Virgil to teach us how to see this side of it.

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