I’ve been reading a lot in these last weeks before school starts, a kind of last-ditch attempt to inhale as many novels as possible before I go plummeting back into the world of academic criticism.  But the last two books that I read were not pure escapism; instead of distracting me from the fact that in two weeks, I’ll be unpacking piles of boxes and trying, finally, to come up with a senior thesis topic, they reminded me of one of the more unsavory aspects of collegiate life: sexual harassment.

This may be the only theme that Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee’s famous novel about racial tension in South Africa, and The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen’s sprawling meditation on the American family, have in ...