by Vicki Urquhart

What British Lit instructor hasn’t given the assignment to create another Chaucerian tale? In The Lecturer’s Tale, James Hynes has a rollicking good time telling his own bawdy, fantastical, and mysterious tale. Alternately a satire and allegory, this bizarre portrayal of a dysfunctional English department will offend some academicians and amuse others. From power-hungry eccentrics to lesbian feminists, Ivory Tower scholars, and Serbian intellectuals, the English department at Midwestern University in Hamilton Groves, Minnesota, has it all.

Hynes’s story shamelessly oozes with symbolism and literary allusion, as these professors vie for promotion to higher, more coveted positions in the academic hierarchy. Hynes evokes Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and of course, James Hogg, the dissertation subject of protagonist Nelson Humboldt. The novel is divided into two predominant and distinctly different parts and a third smaller section. Part I offers a humorous yet sympathetic look at the too real plight of members of Midwest’s adjunct and untenured faculty, believable dialogue, and discussions of the canonical worthiness of “truth and beauty.”

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