| This dissertation focuses on the main trait of the academic novel---its fictionalizing of the lives of professors (hence the term Professorromane )---to argue for the serious significance of a genre too often dismissed as light-weight and self-indulgent. The academic novel is a distinctive collection of novels that has been overlooked by the same world it brings to life---the British and American academy. Over a hundred novels here reflect a peculiar insight into human relations, crises of being and belonging, identity formation and disintegration. This dissertation consists of seven chapters, following an Introduction laying out the thesis of The Comic Campus, The Tragic Self. Thereafter, Chapter 1 details the Comic Campus more closely in Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson (1911) and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954). Chapter 2 covers the Deviant Professor of desire (eros) and suffering (thanatos) in a wide range of novels including, as examples, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Richard Russo's Straight Man (1997). Chapter 3 introduces the Struggling Professor reflected in the depressive Failure and conflicted Feminist, examples including Bernard Malamud's A New Life (1961) and Amanda Cross's Death in a Tenured Position (1981). Together, these three chapters cover the academic novel amid a range of backgrounds including Oxbridge and the Ivy League, the provincial redbrick university, the struggling liberal arts college and the Midwestern super-campus. We learn that the academic novel is multi-genre in the way the university has become a multiversity. At the same time, the academic genre as a whole never loses sight of its cohesion around ideas of normative and deviant tropes---the professors of desire and suffering, the struggling and feminist professors. We then move to academic tropes that impact the campus and the tragic professors---the tensions that maintain and threaten the university. Chapter 4 addresses the significant cultural war between Creativity and Criticism in academia, between the novelist and the critic, for instance in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys (1995) or J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003). Chapter 5 examines a comparison of Britain and America through, for instance, the hybrid campus of Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985) and the university and factory of David Lodge's Nice Work (1988). Two questions then arise. Chapter 6 presents A Question of Genre in relation to 'the academic play' as a charged and dark counterpart to the academic novel, in texts including Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and David Mamet's Oleanna (1992). While the divisive nature of the academic power structure---including tenure and the 'academic star' system---is examined in Chapter 7's A Question of Power, in relation, for instance, to Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue (1974) and Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000).;The Conclusion consolidates arguments for and against the academic novel as a distinctive genre. In the end, academic comedy for the campus breeds a fundamental tragedy for the professor. Lastly, an Appendix draws on the academic novel's foundational history, first in 'school stories' of the nineteenth century, secondly in varsity novels of Oxbridge and their equivalent Ivy League novels. |
