Humiliation

An Und Fuer Sich makes reference to David Lodge's novel Changing Places and a parlor game therein titled Humiliation, in which academics confess to a crucial work in their field they've never read. "The winner, of course, is the one with the most cringe-worthy confession." The winner in the novel is an English lit prof who admits to never having read Hamlet, which gets him fired. You get to play in the comment thread.

OK, I'll play. I'm a PhD student in Church History, late antiquity, and I've never read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

They can't fire me because I don't have a job. All they can do is put a dunce cap on me and sit me in a corner of the library until I read it. Which, in fact, I am happy to do.

Comments

[Paula Skreslet]

Stan's read it ... TWICE. As he puts it, it's the gift that keeps on Gibbon.