Oy Pioneer!

A Novel

Marleen S. Barr

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780299189105
• eBook ISBN: 9780299189136
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

What would happen if a feminist Jewish wit and scholar invaded David Lodge's territory? Marleen S. Barr, herself a pioneer in the feminist criticism of science fiction, provides a giddily entertaining answer in this feisty novel. Oy Pioneer! follows professor Sondra Lear as she makes her inimitable way through a world of learning—at times fantastic, at times all too familiar, often hilarious, and always compulsively interesting.
    As if Mel Brooks and Erica Jong had joined forces to recreate Sex and the City for the intellectual set, the story is a heady mix of Jewish humor, feminist insight, and academic satire. Lear is a tenured radical and a wildly ambitious intellectual, but is subject nonetheless to the husband-hunting imperatives of her Jewish mother. Her adventures expand narrative parameters according to Barr's term "genre fission."
    Mixing elements of science fiction, fantasy, ethnic comedy, satire, and authentic experience of academic life, Oy Pioneer! is uncommonly fun—a Jewish feminist scholar's imaginative text boldly going where no academic satire has gone before—and bringing readers along for an exhilarating ride.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• 1 Plastic
• 2 The Long Good-bye
• 3 The Spy Who Didn’t Love Me
• 4 Slaughterhouse One
• 5 The Ultimatum; or, Springtime for Hundschnort
• 6 Garbage
• 7 Chickens
• 8 Into the Woods
• 9 Heat
• 10 Surprise, Disguise
• 11 Surprise, Reprise
• 12 The Land of Milk and Honey—and More
• 13 More
• 14 Someone Is Sleeping in My Bed
• 15 Chicken Redux
• 16 Ejection Seat
• 17 La (Un)Dolce Vita
• 18 Coming Out of the Closet
• 19 Sexual Harassment
• 20 Big-Mouthed Bigfoot Escapes
• 21 Welcome to the Hotel California
• 22 I Don’t Want to Suck Your Blood
• 23 Back to the Salt Mine
• 24 How the West Was Lost
• 25 The Homecoming
• 26 A Course Taught by a Horse? Of Course, of Course
• 27 Blackhole(a), Blackhole(a)
• 28 New York Is Where I’d Rather Stay, I Get Allergic Smelling Hay; or, Escape from the Planet of the Goyim
• 29 Murder in the Apartment (Not in the English Department); or, “H” Is for Homicide
• 30 Fear of Flying; or, The Return of the Native
• 31 The Dating Game
• 32 The Tsurisauruses
• 33 Smile, You’re Not on Candid Camera; or, The Empire Strikes Back
• 34 The Sounds of Silence
• 35 Murder in the English Department
• 36 Episode II—Attack of the Clones; or, Don’t Bet on the Prince?