| Because it emphasizes satire as a means for critiquing the personal and institutional excesses of higher education, the genre of Anglo-American academic fiction provides an effective forum for testing the viability of ethical criticism as an interpretive paradigm. Promulgated by such critics as Wayne C. Booth, Martha C. Nussbaum, and J. Hillis Miller, ethical criticism supplies readers with a self-reflexive medium for illuminating the ethical foundations of literary works. Drawing upon the tenets of contemporary moral philosophy, this study also demonstrates the interpretive, pedagogic, and interdisciplinary value of the ethical paradigm.; In addition to featuring an introductory chapter that establishes the interpretive machinery of ethical criticism and the historical and critical reception of academic fiction, this study includes ethical readings of selected works by six of the genre's practitioners. Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954) reveals the manner in which the rampant political machinations at an English redbrick institution disrupt the scholarly community. Vladimir Nabokov's satire of poshlost art in Pnin (1957) and Pale Fire (1962) operates as a metaphor for the bankrupt value systems that undergird the academy's intellectual and artistic standards, while in The Hungry Ghosts (1974), the characters in Joyce Carol Oates's short stories subvert the possibilities of goodness and community in their academic worlds through their outrageous desires for power and preeminence over their colleagues.; This study also explores the ways in which the scholarly characters in David Lodge's trilogy of academic novels remain unable to balance their desires for institutional success with their instinctive needs for romantic fulfillment. By implicitly celebrating the merits of multiculturalism, Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring (1993) argues in favor of the ethical sensibilities of a pluralistic ideology that advocates intellectual freedom and inclusiveness over monoculturalism. Finally, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's nonfictional "melodrama," Masterpiece Theatre (1995), further demonstrates the ethics of multiculturalism and canon revision through their whimsical dramatization of the "culture wars." As the chapters in this study of the academic novel reveal, ethical criticism and its reliance on the secular humanism inherent in contemporary moral philosophy offer a broad range of useful applications to literary study. |
