From this month's academic bookshelf, browsed carefully by David Cohen,a new work by the late Janice Hocker Rushing, a former professor of communication at the University of Arkansas.
And, of course, there's different ways to market mucky books...
Quoth the online blurb:
"Using the tropes of mythology and Jungian psychology, the author characterizes the many paths [female] academic lives take: as Muse for a faltering older scholar, as Mistress or wife, as the dutiful academic daughter. Their resistance to this power differential also takes many forms: as a Veiled Woman, silent in public but active in private, or the Siren, using her sexuality to beat the system. Ultimately, Rushing arrives at the myth of Eros and Psyche, where women's self understanding and personal development turns her erotic mentoring into an autonomous, whole, and free life, unfettered by any man. These women's stories and Rushing's literary and literate framing of their lives will ring true to many in the university."
If you say so. But wouldn't it have been easier to simply bill Erotic Mentoring: Women's Transformations in the University [] as a collection of racy tales about students who had a fling with their randy old instructors?
