Bumming and Booing 
John Mullan
- Wordsworth: A Life by Juliet Barker
- The Hidden Wordsworth by Kenneth Johnston
- Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s by David Bromwich
David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his former department, Classics and Modern Languages, has been rationalised out of existence). He is obliged to spend most of his time teaching this new subject, in which he has no interest, no belief even, but is allowed to offer one special course per year ‘irrespective of enrolment’. Against the spirit of the institution and the times, he chooses ‘Romantic poets’. One of this bleak book’s slices of academic vérité is Lurie’s class on Book vi of The Prelude, the crossing of the Alps, delivered to sullen and silent students. The more they refuse to respond, the more excitable becomes his commentary on Wordsworth’s exploration of ‘the limits of sense-perception’. ‘For as long as he can remember, the harmonies of The Prelude have echoed within him,’ but in the classroom the echo stays inside his head.
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John Mullan, who edited Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe for Everyman, is a professor of English at University College London. How Novels Work will appear in October.
Other articles by this contributor:
High-Meriting, Low-Descended · The Unpolished Pamela
Unpranked Lyre · The Laziness of Thomas Gray
Taking Sides · on the high road with Bonnie Prince Charlie
Zone of Anecdotes · Betrothed to Christ and in a muddle
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