The public expression of contempt for professors is one of our cherished national pastimes and is that rare thing—bipartisan. We need a commander-in-chief, not a law professor, is a Sarah Palin applause line. Recently on its front page the New York Times invoked “the classic image of a humanities professor … tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular—and liberal” in a story on a sociological study of the power of typecasting. And in the annals of egghead bashing, the perennial butt of the foolproof punch line has long been the English professor. For decades Hollywood has dined out on this stereotype—Dennis Quaid’s bloated, bleary, and insufferable literature professor in Smart People is only a recent entry in a long parade of fatuity—but the Times has also loyally done its part. Their reports on the MLA convention are always good for a laugh, with their generous sampling of silly and sex-addled paper titles (who can forget “Wandering Genitalia in Late Medieval German Literature and Culture”?) that the Times cited a few years ago as proof that "eggheads are still nerds” with too much “sex on their minds (and time on their hands)." Whether the accusation is justified or not is less the point than the casualness of the contempt, the easy assumption of a license to scorn. Almost no group is more safely maligned and mocked.

This reflexive ridicule of the professor seems by now a middle-class entitlement, and even its targets are not above enjoying it. If this means self-humor replaces self-contempt then the development is not unwelcome. In an indelible scene from her much-discussed essay “Desperately Seeking Susan,” a memoir of her rocky friendship with Sontag, Terry Castle, a professor of English at Stanford, is brought by her famous friend to a SoHo loft with the promise of a “real New York evening.” It is a dinner party attended by Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson—“elfin spikes of hair perfectly gelled”—and various others, including “the freakish-looking lead singer from the cult art-pop duo Fischerspooner,” who wore “booties and tights, a psychedelic shawl and a thing like a codpiece.” Castle finds herself adrift. “Yet it wouldn’t be quite right merely to say that everyone ignored me. As a non-artist and non-celebrity, I was so ‘not there,’ it seemed—so cognitively unassimilable—I wasn’t even registered enough to be ignored. I sat at one end of the table like a piece of antimatter.” Sontag’s brief attempt to introduce her—“with the soul-destroying words, Terry is an English professor”—only made things worse: “I might as well not have been born.” Just after coffee, with Sontag oblivious and sleepy in her chair, she exits “back to the world of the Little People.”

Castle’s incisive sociological eye here for status hierarchy and her own place on the bottom rung testifies to her witty, merciless accuracy—one of the pleasures of The Professor and Other Writings, her irresistible new collection of personal essays. In it no one is left unbesmirched, including Sontag, whom she also reveres, for Castle always insists on the untidy and uncensored response. Her radical candor makes it hard to enlist her under any ideological or political banner, and this recalcitrance alone gives her book an invaluable civic function.

As is already apparent, Castle partakes of the culture’s sense of entitled contempt of the “English professor,” while also complicating that entitlement. Her essays turn her painfully won capacity to see herself and the world “mock-heroically” into a source of bracing truth-telling that, in turn, becomes an unexpected source of insight into the power of literature, art, and music in shaping a life. Castle’s book can be read as a ribald young-girl-from-the-provinces bildungsroman: how a person of “zero rakish charm,” socially and physically shy and maladroit, but also, thanks to insatiable book-worming and listening, possessed of an erudite, subtle, and pungent sensibility, made her clumsy way in and out of a raw blue collar world replete with a violently sociopathic step-brother and a pill-popping stepsister. “The prissy aesthete in me shuddered even to hear about these step-relations.” Like it or not, she had to spend the summer between a three-year fellowship at Harvard’s Society of Fellows and the start of her Stanford job on a relative’s “fold-out couch next to the gun cabinet and the pinball machine.”

Castle learned mock-heroism the hard way—above all, as the title essay recounts, by surviving a humiliating, scalding, passionate affair as a graduate student with a self-intoxicated, regal, promiscuous female professor—a “connoisseur, a sensualist, skilled in the arts of homosexual love,” a wounding eventually and partially healed by abundant reading in eighteenth-century satire. The books taught that “[n]othing was sacred … even the grandest and most imposing monuments might be defaced. We were all rolling around in the muck.” She dove in to join her already filthy teachers—Austen, Pope, Swift. Inspired by the “rococo lightness and drollery” of their tutelage, and of Watteau’s paintings and Mozart’s operas, in all “a deep moral seriousness humming away at the core,” she accepted the loss of her “Bambi” innocence and relished the plain facts of survival: “I was fat; I was mean; but I was alive.”