Academic and Campus Novel

4 Key excerpts on "Academic and Campus Novel"

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  Books and Beyond

  The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading [4 volumes]

  • Kenneth Womack(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  A ACADEMIC FICTION Definition. The campus novel enjoys a long and distinguished history in the annals of literary studies. A review of academic fiction’s emergence as a literary form, par- ticularly during the nineteenth century, accounts for its archly satirical manifesta- tions during the latter half of the twentieth century, the era in which academic satire enjoyed its most fruitful period, with forays into a variety of creative spheres, including fiction, poetry, drama, and film. The analysis of exemplary works by Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, A.S. Byatt, and Jane Smiley demonstrates the nature of campus fiction’s abiding influence. History. “As a literary genre,” Mortimer R. Proctor writes in The English Uni- versity Novel, the academic novel “has always reflected conditions within Oxford and Cambridge far more closely than it has followed any literary trends or move- ments” (1957, 185). The universal conception of Oxford and Cambridge as unique intellectual societies—in short, the fictive terrain of “Oxbridge”—inspired centuries of fictions devoted to university life, from Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford through the romanticized academic novels of the early nineteenth century. While these narratives poked occasional fun at the ineffectuality of university faculty or the unreality of college life, their plots generally involved sentimental, often melodramatic, portray- als of Oxford and Cambridge. The genre of English university fiction finds its more satiric origins, however, in the various educational reform movements of the mid- nineteenth century, as well as in the admission of women to the sacred groves of Oxford and Cambridge in the latter half of the nineteenth century. During this era, Oxford and Cambridge witnessed a decline in the hegemony of their influence upon English society and culture.

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  Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences

  • Melanie R. Anderson, Lisa Kröger, Melanie R. Anderson, Lisa Kröger(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The campus novel is a novel set primarily at a college or university and, despite Lyons’s protestations, concerns both the academic and the social lives of students. This genre takes advantage of the similarity in confusion and naiveté between the student protagonist and the reader to introduce the new and frequently self-contained world through which the student will undergo some transformation. In a recent critical essay, Jeffrey Williams notes the division between the academic and the campus novel and the growing interest in the former category at the present time. Williams produces the distinction as such:

  “campus novels”… tend to revolve around campus life and present young adult comedies or dramas, most frequently coming-of-age narratives [while] “academic novels”… feature those who work as academics, although the action is rarely confined to a campus, and they portray adult predicaments in marriage and home as well as the workplace, most familiarly yielding mid-life crisis plots.

  (562)

  Williams’s key characteristic for the campus novel, the transitional “coming-of-age narrative,” has been at the center of discussions about many campus novels, and the degree to which this narrative structures Jackson’s Hangsaman has framed most of the existing critical work on the novel. The challenges to the coming-ofage plot within the college or university setting have certainly been the subject of the campus novel since its early forms, from Owen Johnson’s Stover at Yale (1912) to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), through May Sarton’s The Small Room (1961) to Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), and Jeffrey Eugenides’s recent take on the genre in The Marriage Plot (2011). Jackson’s Hangsaman

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  Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory

  The Novel from Structuralism to Postmodernism

  • M. Greaney(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  4 The ‘Culture Wars’ and Beyond: Theory on the US Campus This chapter will examine the place of theoretical controversies in fictional representations of the ‘culture wars’, the acrimonious debates over political correctness, multiculturalism, feminism and affirmative action that have divided US academic culture since the 1980s. Such debates are by no means confined to departments of literature, or even to academic culture at large, but campus novelists of this period frequently use the professional in-fighting of literary academics as a convenient shorthand for wider controversies. Often explicitly harking back to the academic comedies of David Lodge, prominent US campus novelists of recent years – including Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, David Damrosch, James Hynes, Richard Powers, John L’Heureux and Perceval Everett – find that the small worlds of literature departments are both the best and worst microcosms for culture at large. On the one hand, debates about the literary curriculum and professional tenure, about what gets taught and who gets to teach it, raise questions of value, tradition, power and inclusivity that resonate far beyond the small worlds of academe. It is only a small step from debating the fate of the ‘western canon’ – as influentially championed by Harold Bloom – to debating the fate of western civilization. On the other hand, to put it this way is to risk taking literary intellectuals almost as seriously as they take themselves, and recent US campus fiction roundly satirizes those academics who imagine that the future of the west hangs on their next conference paper or job interview. Departments of literature in these novels can thus appear as apocalyptic intellectual battlegrounds or as talking shops with delusions of grandeur, depending on the novelist’s changing angle of vision. Many of the leading combatants in the culture wars – including Alan Bloom, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Gerald Graff, 41

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  The Contemporary Academic Mystery Novel

  A Study in Genre

  • Elzbieta Perkowska-Gawlik, Ludmila Gruszewska-Blaim(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  mind and flesh, private and public needs, and duty and desire” (83)� In the academic mystery novel, these antagonistic relationships are presented as motives of various criminal offences, including 30 In The English University Novel (1957), Mortimer R� Proctor notes that from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War many novels depicting university life glorified the unique atmosphere of the place which allowed for personal and intellectual growth of young people� In the university fiction of this period set in Oxford, a deep belief that the ambience of the place permeated with the intellectual traditions, “the dignified culture, and the stim- ulating friendships” was the key factor to students’ well-being and development “produc[ing] what one can only call the cult of Oxford” (Proctor 154)�

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