The Professor's Novel: David Lodge's Small World

Mews, Siegfried

doi:10.2307/2905052

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“…This should not come as a surprise since, as Sanford Pinsker (1999) stresses, even in academic novels taking place at a campus, one cannot help to notice that they are examples of a genre "in which professors are hardly ever seen preparing lectures, teaching classes, or grading papers" (442). Siegfried Mews (1989) offers a canonized academic novel as his example of the academic novel leaving university campuses behind: David Lodge's Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), taking place mainly at conferences. One could also mention Malcolm Bradbury's "novella Cuts (1987) which […] explores, with humour, but with an equal sense of doom, the traumatic experience of a faculty member who is cut off from his environment by economic necessity and unwillingly enters the world of television and hard finance" (Petraşcu 2015: 63).…”

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confidence: 99%

"We are trained to be cynical" : Arthur Koestler's The Call-Girls as a campus novel

Vernyik¹

2018

Brno Studies in English

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Arthur Koestler's The Call-Girls (1972) is, at present, mostly ignored, or if discussed, either dismissed wholesale, or approached only in terms of its role in the development of Koestler's political and philosophical thinking. The aim of this analysis is to show that it is possible to interpret the text as a highly specific campus novel, limited to a single setting: an academic conference. Although the conference's topic is "saving the world," the novel's characters neither achieve that aim, nor get any closer to a solution. Therefore, the book can be taken for a satirical treatment of the hypocrisy and futility of academic conferences, rather than a political plea, as previously understood.

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confidence: 99%