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Aristi Trendel was born in Greece. She left her native country when she was nineteen and travelled widely. She lives in France where she is an associate professor of English at Maine University in Le Mans. She has published short stories, poems and literary criticism. You may not give me an appointment, but we'll meet in the dateless night. In the mean time, I am sending you this love-prompted letter steeped in grief, a bunch of blue pages in golden and black, but it's as if I've opened up a vein with a ballpoint pen instead of a razor blade and poured my blood in them, red like the begonia that sprouted from Bee's cheek in my dream, like the rose that sprang from the Greek poet's lips. This is the truth I wanted to bring home to you, a native truth you may tuck away in a remote corner of your foreign heart, my ideal darling and beloved teacher. Anthee, a young woman, mother and wife, shuts herself in a tree house in an Alsatian forest, a mirador, a hunters' post to write a letter to Madame A., her literature professor and specialist of first person narratives. She recounts to the elderly lady her torrid love affair with her MA advisor, Deborah Bellona, Madame A.'s colleague. With her red Biro Anthee investigates the passions of the body and mind.

This book offers a new approach to the genre of the campus novel. Through a critical analysis of eleven novels, Aristi Trendel argues that the specificity and complexity of the pedagogic rapport between professor and student calls for a new genre: the Master-Disciple novel. After the 1980s, the professor-student relationship was highly scrutinized and politicized, making the Master-Disciple novel essential to critical theorists and educators. Furthermore, the Master-Disciple novel broadens the scope of the campus novel as the master-pupil rapport can develop beyond the halls of academia. Though some of the novels analyzed in this book have been thoroughly discussed before, Trendel reads them through the lens of the pedagogic rapport and in constant dialogue with a broad range of themes, such as gender, sexuality, and power. The book will be important for academics, students, and all who are interested in the bond between teacher and student.