{"id":1217,"date":"2021-03-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-30T01:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=1217"},"modified":"2025-05-03T13:48:33","modified_gmt":"2025-05-03T01:48:33","slug":"bluffworld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2021\/03\/27\/bluffworld\/","title":{"rendered":"Bluffworld"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Patrick Evans <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Victoria University Press<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, March 27th 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Flannery (MA, DL) was once a tenured faculty member in the English Department of an unnamed Antipodean University with Oxfordian pretensions. But this once-secure bastion of intellectual elitism has, like Colleges of Art the world over, been deemed a threat to management and restructured out of existence. Now Tom spends his days stocking a colleague\u2019s secondhand bookshop with the remnants of the University library, posing for tourists in his academic regalia, and writing his memoirs \u2013 the very work we are now reading \u00ad\u2013 in the public toilets next to his former office.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bluffworld, therefore, purportedly charts the rise and fall of Tom\u2019s professional and personal life (although copious editorial footnotes that call out unattributed plagiarism and lapses in style and taste questions also question the writer\u2019s veracity). Although of humble, working-class origins, Tom is blessed with a gift of empathy for writing he has never read and an instinctive ability to tailor his writing to suit the needs of individual lecturers. But what really sets him on the path to a successful academic career is the fact that he is aware<\/em> that he \u2013 and everyone else in the Humanities \u2013 are full of crap. Thus armed he manages to fake his way through his masters and into a lectureship, gaining tenure by dint of outlasting the old guard. But changes are coming and, as departments are rebranded and downsized to make room for burgeoning administrative structures, Tom recognises the alluring nonsense of management-speak draws from the same font on which he has built his career. And in the final, desperate battle for the survival of the Humanities, he chooses his side, secure in the knowledge that it is bullshit all the way down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the maxims passed on to aspiring authors is \u2018write what you know\u2019, and as an eminent figure in New Zealand\u2019s literary establishment, Patrick Evan\u2019s skewering of traditional and contemporary university structures will be instantly familiar to anybody who has spent time in an academic setting. Tom bluffs his way through lectures using a combination of CliffNotes, overheard tea-room conversations and a passing familiarity with the opening paragraphs of key literary works. The English Department responds to demands to get more \u2018bums on seats\u2019 by introducing a barbeque course entitled American Gustation (part of the Cultural misunderstandings paper), and the faculty listens in thrall to the VC\u2019s inspirational vision going forward of a cyber-smart campus plugged into a wired-up world. And then there is the subject of Tom\u2019s non-existent thesis, a fictional writer\u2013 albeit based on a highly successful plagiarist \u2013 whose absence comes to be internationally recognised as influencing the work of the Fenham group.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astute, merciless, and incredibly funny, with appropriately unacknowledged echoes of everything from Decline and Fall<\/em> and Porterhouse Blue<\/em> to Sterne\u2019s Tristram Shandy<\/em>, Bluffworld <\/em>is a masterclass in literary dissimulation from a master of the art. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Patrick Evans  Victoria University Press Otago Daily Times, March 27th 2021 Thomas Flannery (MA, DL) was once a tenured faculty member in the English Department of an unnamed Antipodean University with Oxfordian pretensions. But this once-secure bastion of intellectual elitism has, like Colleges of Art the world over, been deemed a threat to management and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[350,370,500,18,354],"class_list":["post-1217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-350","tag-fiction","tag-nz-author","tag-odt","tag-patrick-evans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1217"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1983,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217\/revisions\/1983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}