There's no such thing as safe sex, at least not where the academic study of literature is concerned. According to literary critic John Guillory, the relationships that form between literature teachers and their students may carry an erotic charge.
Anyone who has studied or taught the subject at university can readily confirm this from experience, observation, or hearsay. In his ponderously titled but surprisingly readable book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, Guillory argues that desire plays an important role in the transfer of knowledge from academics to their students in a university environment.
The potential for tensions of a sexual nature to arise between teachers and
their students goes back to Socrates and Alcibiades and has been underscored
most recently by Naomi Wolf's widely reported allegation of misconduct against
the famous literary critic Harold Bloom. Wolf claims that in 1983, when she was
a 20-year-old literature student at Yale University, Bloom perpetrated what she
refers to as a "one-time sexual encroachment" that involved him putting his
"heavy boneless hand" on her thigh.
Whatever the truth or otherwise of Wolf's specific allegation, it does serve to highlight a source of conflict well within the realm of possibility in both fact and fiction. Readers of J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace might well see a parallel between the Wolf-Bloom contretemps and the fictional relationship between a lecherous lecturer who works at a provincial South African campus and a female undergraduate student in one of his classes.
One of the feminist objections to Disgrace is the lack of substance given in the novel to the character of the female student. Of course the novel is not really about her, but even so this could be regarded as a case of partial vision like that of Jane Eyre, where the character of Mrs Rochester is vital to the plot but barely glimpsed in the narrative. It fell to Jean Rhys, in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, to breathe life into Charlotte Bronte's mysterious woman in the attic by giving her a novel of her own. It could be that Disgrace awaits just such a textual adjunct.
The kind of teacher-student relationship depicted, however incompletely, in Coetzee's novel is also the subject of David Williamson's play Dead White Males, in which a predatory lecturer meets his match in the form of an equally calculating female student determined to use her looks to improve her grades. Williamson links the moral corruption in his imaginary English Department with the wider intellectual decline in the field of study as a whole over recent decades.
Of course it is not just academics seducing students, and vice versa, that causes problems in the seats of higher learning. Michael Wilding's fine novel Academia Nuts belongs in the sub-genre of campus novels that exposes the absurdities of the Byzantine political intrigues engaged in by academics and their natural enemies among university administrators. It is an area also fictionalised to great effect by David Lodge and Andrew Davies, both of whom, like Wilding, are ex-literature academics.
Sex played a minor role in the biggest scandal of recent times in literature studies, which involved Paul de Man, a colleague of Bloom's at Yale and the prime example in Guillory's book of the literature academic as a charismatic guru figure. After his death in 1983, it emerged that de Man was a bigamist, but also something that in academic eyes is even worse, namely an apologist for the Nazi regime during the Second World War.
Like a character in a novel by Nabokov, de Man emigrated from his native Belgium to the United States after the war and reinvented himself as the high priest of deconstruction, a critical theory that throws such notions as objective truth, individual responsibility and political neutrality into question.
De Man's posthumous fall from grace inspired novels by Malcolm Bradbury (Dr Criminale) and Gilbert Adair (The Death of the Author). The exposure of de Man as a one-time Nazi sympathiser dealt a body blow to the theory he propounded, which just goes to show how hard it is to separate ideas and actions from the character of their originator.
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