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What she hadn’t expected when it came to a fraternity was a sunny-haired silent type like Dabney, learning his lines in a folding chair, in parachute pants, shoeless. Looking back on their relationship, Madeleine figured she’d had no choice. Dabney and she had been selected for each other in a Roya…

“Who’s your father?” he asked Madeleine. “Is it Virginia Woolf? Is it Sontag?”

“In my case,” Madeleine said, “my father really is my father.”

“Then you have to kill him.”

“Who’s your father?”

“Godard,” he said.

She preferred to think of her current boyfriendless state as salutary and head-clearing.

“Better cold than sentimental,” Thurston said.

“Do you think? Why?”

“Because we’ve read the sentimental, filial account of a cherished dead parent before. We’ve read it a million times. It doesn’t have any power anymore.”

“I’m doing a little thought experiment here,” Leonard said. “Say my …

[...] Going to college in the moneymaking eighties lacked a certain radicalism. Semiotics was the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism—with sex and…