Authority And Narrative Irony In Changing Places:A Tale Of Two Campuses

Changing Places:A Tale of Two Campuses is the first "campus novel" by David Lodge. Revolving around the two plotlines in parallel, one of Philip Swallow and the other of Morris Zapp, the novel presents an ironic picture of the academic activities in the American and British higher education in the 1960s.Through analyzing characterization and plot structure, this thesis explores David Lodge’s comic satirical rendering of the academics, revealing the author’s critique of higher education in general. By presenting irony on academics’ desires for authority in their intellectual and sexual lives, Lodge reveals their mediocrity and selfishness and subverts the ideal of the academic group as social elite in the ivory tower. In the process of the academics’activities and career building, the academic people are immersed in various ignoble desires, displaying an increasing feature of cognitive dissonance:while claiming their social identity as intellectuals, they show little concern for the social function of the academia. In this sense, the novel reveals that they are not intellectuals capable of social critique, but mundane professionals in pursuit of personal gains.This thesis consists of five parts, including introduction, three chapters, and conclusion. Based on narrative irony theories and Michel Foucault’s genealogies of power-knowledge, this thesis explores how the "elite" academics are being satirized in Changing Places so that readers will get a better understanding about the relations between knowledge and power in universities.