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universities |angels |devils |Fall |Faust |projects

Streszczenie

In novels by C.S. Lewis, Simon Raven and Robertson Davies, universities are depicted as plausible, and theologically over-determined, settings for battles between cosmic forces, good and evil – battles foreshadowed in earlier “Faustian” dramas and involving “middle spirits”, ambiguously poised between gods and devils, as they relate to humans. Human desires for knowledge, creativity and personal freedom, arguably the consequences of a theologically definable (and perhaps fortunate) “Fall”, are shown to be institutionally entrenched in (Anglophone) universities and caught up in socially recognisable and “modern” contradictions. They are seen also, and to that extent plausibly, as offering opportunities for diabolic agencies whose effects take shape, within the outworkings of apparently human projects, as a set of systematically unintended, and tendentially disastrous, consequences. Representations of such conflicts, and of their violent consequences, vary, between the three novelists under discussion, in terms not only of the writers’ personal creeds and convictions, but also of social plausibility and diverse modes of narration and emplotment.

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stereotypes |academic fiction |genre |Oxford University |collegiate story

Streszczenie

J. I. M. Stewart’s novel The Aylwins, the story of an Oxford don deeply troubled by the fact that his son has been expelled from school for cheating, is a fine example of academic fiction or, as its narrator puts it, “a collegiate story”. The novel encompasses many instances of academic life: dons customarily dining together in the common room during vacations, the turmoil caused by the Provost’s terminal illness, scholars engaged, more or less willingly, in college politics and their cordial, yet somewhat patronising, attitude towards an outsider to academia like the narrator himself who is the protagonist’s close friend. The purpose of this paper is to present The Aylwins in terms of stereotypes about life in academia as discussed in The Academic Tribes by Hazard Adams.

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academic fiction |humour |Simon Critchley |Michael Frayn |Sigmund Freud

Streszczenie

Michael Frayn’s comic novel The Trick of It (1989) explores the relationship between academia and creative writing and the derivative, secondary nature of literary research. Through its main academic character and only narrator, Frayn’s text recurrently identifies the role of a scholar with the role of a humourist in that both share a higher-than-average degree of self-awareness and detailed knowledge about the world. Through such identification, present in the novel both implicitly and explicitly, The Trick of It underscores the secondary and limited nature of academic work, yet it also gives an ultimately positive image of it. By pairing academic research and humour, Frayn’s novel shows that literary scholarship is as a discipline that, much like humour, can enlarge our understanding and enjoyment of whatever it refers to.

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Dubliners |Joyce industry |intellectual theft |gender imbalance in academia |(un)creative writing

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The subject of the article is the satirical portrayal of Joyce scholarship in Evelyn Conlon’s short story “Two Gallants”, offered for the tribute volume of Dubliners 100, a writerly joint venture edited by Thomas Morris in 2014. The analysis acknowledges the intertextual richness of Conlon’s creation, as she engages not only with the master text, but with other writers’ responses to Joyce’s work. Questions related to repetition, referencing and repurposing of the words of others prove central to the story’s plot, in which a female scholar has to guard her research against an ungallant tandem of plagiarist colleagues. The motif of feminist revenge looms large in the narrative which ties the fate of a cheated servant maid with that of her modern granddaughter, lashing out against unfair academic practice.

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academic fiction |David Lodge |dualism |the two cultures

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This article discusses several types of dualism in David Lodge’s campus novel Thinks… (2001). Underlain by a conflict between “the two cultures”, the plot and the narrative mode serve to illustrate different approaches to human consciousness, which are grounded in the humanities and the sciences, respectively. The novel brings together a novelist arguing for the uniqueness and opacity of the self and a cognitive scientist who denies the autonomy of the self and rejects the dualism of body and mind. This opposition is dramatised in the debates between the chief antagonists and in the development of their relationship, which constitutes the basis of the plot. It is argued that Lodge’s novel points to areas of convergence between the two approaches but ultimately demonstrates their disjunction while arbitrarily making a case for the humanities.

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gender |the #MeToo movement |academic novel |toxic masculinity |crisis of masculinity |sexual harassment

Streszczenie

James Lasdun’s pre-#MeToo novel The Horned Man (2002) tells the story of a British academic, Lawrence Miller, teaching Gender Studies at a college in upstate New York, where he is also a member of the Sexual Harassment Committee. Reflecting on sexual politics at a US university campus, and a broader “continental drift of the sexes”, involving the “engineering [of] the New Male”, Miller’s first-person account both chronicles the changing reality in the West at the turn of the 21st century, and departs from reality, as it becomes increasingly unreliable and Kafkaesque. Tracing the novel’s intertextual and cultural references, the paper interprets the complicated and confusing tale of confusion, suspected conspiracy, mistaken and appropriated identity, cross-dressing and femicide as a symbolic expression of a struggle between “new” and “old” masculinity. Lasdun’s prescient engagement with issues which in the “real world” had to wait almost two decades for the emergence of the #MeToo movement to become widely discussed is read from a feminist perspective as a representation of the ongoing tortuous process of transition towards more equitable gender relations.

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Realism |postcommunism |postcolonialism |Romanian academic/campus fiction |metafiction |magical realism

Streszczenie

The last two decades have witnessed an intensified academic interest in a potential rapprochement between Postcolonial Studies and Postcommunist Studies, the former a firmly established discipline in global academia, while the existence of the latter as a discipline in its own right is still debatable. As the possibility of this alliance is – as was to be expected – both contested and supported by various scholars, this article attempts to investigate this issue as illustrated by the postcommunist Romanian academic novel. Aware as it is of contemporary intellectual debates, the genre of the academic (or campus) novel seems particularly suitable for shedding light on the matter: academic fiction frequently engages in a more or less explicit dialogue with academic criticism. A brief overview of the main arguments against and in favor of the Postcolonialism/Postcommunism juncture will constitute the first part of the article, followed by a survey of Romanian academic novels published and films released after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Finally, the applicability of postcolonial concepts to postcommunist cultural phenomena will form the concluding argument.

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academic novel |teaching literature |image of the teacher |teacher-student relations

Streszczenie

The article discusses selected academic novels (Lucky Jim, The History Man, Changing Places, The Professor of Desire, Disgrace, Submission) from the perspective of more recent pedagogic literature (Tompkins, Palmer, Brookfield, Showalter). It focuses on approaches to teaching, roughly dividing them into fear-driven, anger-driven and passion-driven (problems with this typology are noted), both in the relevant literary works and in theoretical literature. The main question is how academic teachers relate to their students and how this affects the teaching/learning process. Special emphasis is placed on problems related to teaching literature.