I’m sometimes told by people who work outside of universities that being a teacher-writer-editor in an English Department sounds great, and occasionally it is. Yet lately everything “great” about academia sounds ominous: the Great Resignation, The Great Faculty Disengagement, The Great Pause after the Great Pivot. Resignation and disengagement are paradoxical side effects of the profession’s dependence on enthusiasm—employees so dedicated and diligent that they volunteer for unpaid labor. Women...

“So take warning: you must work, or else you must pretend to work, which is what I do. Work, work, work if you'd save your soul and your body.” —Margaret Schlegel, Howards End (1910) Margaret’s plea to her somewhat work-phobic younger brother might sound a little odd, since she does not—work, that is. Instead, as she enigmatically puts it in the preceding line, she “pretends” to work, engaging in a host of cultural activities with an energy redolent of work, perhaps, but with few of its economic...

Shortly after starting as an executive assistant in development at a nonprofit organization in 2012—my first nonacademic job following a three-year postdoctoral position—I joked to my new boss one night after everyone else had gone home that she should only hire former academics because we have no idea how not to work all the time. She laughed, as I guessed she would. Ever the court jester, I like to think I know my audience and I knew that, while not an academic herself, she could relate. We were there working late together and, from the start, I found that I could identify with the way she identified with her work.

She followed not all, a part of the whole, gave attention with interest, comprehended with surprise, with care repeated, with greater difficulty remembered, forgot with ease, with misgiving reremembered, rerepeated with error. —James Joyce, Ulysses [1] With these phrases, the narrator of Joyce’s “Ithaca” renders Molly Bloom’s experience of “direct instruction” ( Ulysses, 562). From the perspective of her teacher, who is interested in outcomes, this experience is not a success. Molly’s...