Bluffworld

by Patrick Evans

‘Zum Bullshitter geht der Preis’—so said the great German author-philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). Or did he? Can we trust what we never quite knew about because we never quite got around to reading it in the first place? Is it safe to rely on what we overhear in the university common-room or even out there in the real world? And does it matter? In Bluffworld we are taken through the bildung of a master-bluffer, from his early days spent plagiarising student essays to his magisterial later lectures on the opening sentence of Moby-Dick and other works he’s been led to believe might well be great literature, whatever that is. We learn to spot the difference between bullshit and horseshit, to understand the power of seeming, to use ‘Quite’ and ‘Just so’ to trigger verbal smokescreens when outflanked, to sense the sublime power of unoriginality all around us. Finally, we see the inevitable terminus ad quem (whatever that means) of the Meister-Bullshit-Künstler(?), as our hero confronts the apotheosis of bullshit in the bewildering word-world of the corporate university. All this and much, much less! Time for another all-staff barbecue!

376 pages, Paperback

Published November 25, 2021

About the author

Patrick Evans lives in Christchurch and has taught New Zealand literature at the University of Canterbury since 1978.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific. It’s a satire on University careers and recent trends in management. Plenty of room for humour there! It is over the top, which makes it funny, but also close to true, and it is imaginative. It has a lot of footnotes, which whine about the author and mock him. They are very funny. I found it better to read a chapter through and then the footnotes, so as not to break the flow. Although it is based on the English department at a slightly disguised University of Canterbury, as the narrator says, “every academic department in the world has someone like me.”

[Helen Cummings · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel was so hilarious and would appeal to to anyone who had worked in an educational institution or a university.