Entropy In David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy

David Lodge, a well-known contemporary novelist and critic, is famous in literary circle for his campus trilogy:Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work. In these three novels, he depicts various ridiculous scholars and exposes the corruption of the academic world, and reveals the degeneration of the whole society. This thesis intends to analyze entropy reflected in the campus trilogy.Entropy is a concept in thermodynamics, and refers to the measure of the randomness in a system. The concept of entropy has been developed and applied in many fields, and in literature, it implies the measure of the degradation and uncertainty of the universe.This thesis consists of five parts including introduction and conclusion:The introduction introduces David Lodge’s life, his literary achievements and his campus trilogy. It also explores the origin and development of the concept entropy, and reviews the study on those three novels at home and abroad.The first chapter analyzes the entropy in David Lodge’s artistic world. Entropy in artistic expression is reflected in indeterminacy and fragmentation of writing techniques. In Lodge’s trilogy, indeterminacy is shown through his mixing of the fiction and reality and finishing novels with no particular endings; fragmentation is the reflected in his application of the collage and montage.The second chapter discusses the entropy in the academic circle from the entropy of scholars, literary criticism and university education. The scholars’corruption and absurdity in life and indifference and carelessness in scholarship are the embodiment of entropy of them. And the absurdity and meaningless of literary criticism predict the dead end of it. Meanwhile, the university education system goes to extremes, and the educational organizations are irresponsible for teachers, students and the education. These are also forecast of the decadency of the university education.The third chapter focuses on the entropy outside the academic world. Through reading the campus trilogy, the social turmoil and potential threats filled in daily life and the social environment are revealed in lines of description of the academic world. Social turmoil is direct reflection of entropy in the society. Those potential threats, such as environmental pollution, waste of resources, aircraft accidents threatening the living condition of human beings and materialization of human beings, indicate the entropy of the society is increasing rapidly.The last part summarizes what has been analyzed in previous three parts and points out that, the entropic world Lodge describes mirrors the reality to warn people that the entropic society is on the verge of danger. Human beings should notice the danger and try to figure out solution to slow down the rising speed of social entropy.