The Romance of Reading (in) Academic Fiction

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Scenes of explicit teaching make only limited appearances in the university novel since World War II. While it would be easy – if cynical – to attribute this minimization to the devaluation of teaching in the modern university, the importance of teaching and learning to sympathetic characters (and their lack of importance to corrupted figures) suggests that this lack of focus on the classroom stems from something else. Indeed, university novels tend to be fairly conservative aesthetically, and the demands of traditional narrative make extended classroom scenes difficult if not impossible to manage. Because of these narrative demands, learning and teaching take on different forms in the university novel, creating stories in which education corresponds to the struggle of teachers and students with and against administrators and buildings – stories that, therefore, resemble Leo van Lier’s observation about how remembering our own educations as stories contradicts more bureaucratic visions of learning. This observation holds true whether one considers better-known works of university fiction such as David Lodge’s <italic>Campus Trilogy</italic>, Mary McCarthy’s <italic>The Groves of Academe</italic>, and Julie Schumacher’s <italic>Dear Committee Members</italic> or lesser-known works produced by micro-presses and writers who are enabled by current technologies to publish electronically.</abstract>

Whither Teaching in the University Novel?

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In her seminal book on metafiction, Patricia Waugh describes this practice as an obliteration of the distinction between “creation” and “criticism.” This article examines the interplay of the “creative” and the “critical” in five American metafictions from the late 1960s, whose authors were both fictional writers and scholars: Donald Barthelme’s <italic>Snow White</italic>, John Barth’s <italic>Lost in the Funhouse</italic>, William H. Gass’s <italic>Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife</italic>, Robert Coover’s <italic>Pricksongs and Descants</italic> and Ronald Sukenick’s <italic>The Death of the Novel and Other Stories</italic>. The article considers the ways in which the voice of the literary critic is incorporated into each work in the form of a self-reflexive commentary. Although the ostensible principle of metafiction is to merge fiction and criticism, most of the self-conscious texts under discussion are shown to adopt a predominantly negative attitude towards the critical voices they embody – by making them sound pompous, pretentious or banal. The article concludes with a claim that the five works do not advocate a rejection of academic criticism but rather insist on its reform. Their dissatisfaction with the prescriptivism of most contemporary literary criticism is compared to Susan Sontag’s arguments in her essay “Against Interpretation.”</abstract>

 “I’m a I’m a Scholar at the Moment”: The Voice of the Literary Critic in the Works of American Scholar-Metafictionists

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This article considers two metafictional academic novels from the reader’s point of view. It argues that this critical vantage point is suggested (if not imposed) by the fictional texts themselves. The theoretical texts informing this reading pertain either to reader response or to theories of metafiction, in an attempt to uncover conceptual commonalities between the two. Apart from a thematic focus on academic conferences as pilgrimages and the advocacy of reading as an ethically valuable activity, the two novels also share a propensity for intertextuality, a blurring of the boundaries between fictional and critical discourse, as well as a questioning of the borderline between fiction and reality. The reading of fiction is paralleled to the reading of (one’s own) life and self-reflexivity emerges as crucial to both types of literacy.</abstract>

“C’est la vie, c’est la narration”: The Reader in Christine Brooke-Rose’s <italic>Textermination</italic> and David Lodge’s <italic>Small World</italic>

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Neo-Victorian novelists sometimes use postgraduate students – trainee academics – who research nineteenth-century writers as protagonists. This article discusses four neo-Victorian novels, Lloyd Jones’s <italic>Mister Pip</italic> (2006), Justine Picardie’s <italic>Daphne</italic> (2008), A.N. Wilson’s <italic>A Jealous Ghost</italic> (2005) and Scarlett Thomas’s <italic>The End of Mr Y</italic> (2006), in which female postgraduate students take the centre stage. In Victorian literature, which mirrors the gender bias in the academic world and in society at large at that time, most scholars are male. The contemporary writers’ choice of female trainee academics is worth investigating as it speaks to the visibly changed gender make-up of contemporary academia. However, this utopian situation is complicated by the fact that the writers have chosen to frustrate the characters’ entry into the world of scholarship by having them leave the university environment altogether before the end of the novel. The fact that these females all choose to depart the university forms a contrast with notions of the university found in Victorian novels, in which leaving or not attending university might have detrimental effects on the characters.</abstract>

Female Researchers in Neo-Victorian Fiction

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This article analyzes the manner in which James Hynes’s novel <italic>The Lecturer’s Tale</italic> (2001) can be read as a satire of what Bill Readings identified in his influential <italic>The University in Ruins</italic> (1996) as the “posthistorical university.” I argue that, in the contemporary context in which higher education establishments are becoming more like corporations and the idea of culture is replaced by the “discourse of excellence,” Hynes’s novel offers an insightful discussion of universities’ negotiation of the Scylla of the pursuit of profit and the Charybdis of self-absorbed literary theorizing and its association with political correctness, the exploitation of junior and non-tenured faculty, and the quest for academic stardom. At the same time, I discuss the way in which the Gothic elements that permeate the novel fittingly double and deepen the critique of contemporary educational establishments and professors.</abstract>

“Cash Is Better than Tenure”: (De)Constructing the “Posthistorical University” in James Hynes’s Gothic Academic Satire <italic>The Lecturer’s Tale</italic>

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In this personal essay, the author compares her academic experiences to those of characters in the campus novels she enjoys reading. The novels she discusses here share a thematic concern with happiness and all seem to indicate that professional fulfillment and academic status are not sufficient in order to achieve that state.</abstract>

In Pursuit of Happiness: Escape, Change, and Return in Contemporary Academic Novels, Or Why I Read Campus Novels, But Possibly Shouldn’t

An Interview with Alex Kudera, Author of <italic>Fight for Your Long Day</italic>

An Interview with Lucian Bâgiu, Author of <italic>Bestiary: Oriental Salad with Peacock/Imaginary Academics</italic>

<italic>Bestiary: Oriental Salad with Peacock/Imaginary Academics</italic> - Fragment -

Some Considerations about Why I Wrote an Academic Novel

The Marvelous Technique: A Campus Novel - Fragment -

Reviews: Higher Ed

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American, British and Canadian Studies

 Publishing House and Owner: Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania  Founded in 1999 as the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, American, British and Canadian Studies is currently published biannually by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, under the aegis of the Research Centre for Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies at LBUS and the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania. It is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone Studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 

American, British and Canadian Studies

Volume 26 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016)

The Romance of Reading (in) Academic Fiction

Whither Teaching in the University Novel?

“I’m a I’m a Scholar at the Moment”: The Voice of the Literary Critic in the Works of American Scholar-Metafictionists

“C’est la vie, c’est la narration”: The Reader in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Textermination and David Lodge’s Small World

Female Researchers in Neo-Victorian Fiction

“Cash Is Better than Tenure”: (De)Constructing the “Posthistorical University” in James Hynes’s Gothic Academic Satire The Lecturer’s Tale

In Pursuit of Happiness: Escape, Change, and Return in Contemporary Academic Novels, Or Why I Read Campus Novels, But Possibly Shouldn’t

An Interview with Alex Kudera, Author of Fight for Your Long Day

An Interview with Lucian Bâgiu, Author of Bestiary: Oriental Salad with Peacock/Imaginary Academics

Bestiary: Oriental Salad with Peacock/Imaginary Academics - Fragment -

Some Considerations about Why I Wrote an Academic Novel

The Marvelous Technique: A Campus Novel - Fragment -

Reviews: Higher Ed

Reviews: Affordable Housing in New York. The People, Places and Policies that Transformed a City

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