engleski

Satire and the Academic Novel

The terms “campus novel” “university novel”, and “college novel” are synonymous and depict literary works belonging within the sub-genre of the academic novel. This contemporary fictional form began in the United States with novels written in the 1950’s, among them Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution. As expressive acts embedded in “the ideological discourses of their moment of production” (Howard 1991: 153) these novels are both a source of pleasure for lovers of academic fiction and a valuable source of information regarding major issues in higher education, namely repressive government policies during the McCarthy era and the subversion of education in America through the liberal indoctrination of students in progressive colleges. The aim of this paper is to show how these two novels engage in shaping the public awareness of the inadequacies of public education as they mirror the discourse of the 1950’s by exposing the fallacies of progressive education as well as the witch-hunt of intellectuals and the cut-throat “non-ethics” of survival. Thus, McCarthy’s and Jarrell’s work not only help us to grasp the terms of the discourse of the past in “the historical circumstances of their original production and consumption” but also “to analyze the relationship between these circumstances and our own” (Greenblatt 1990: 228-229). Ideally, the academic discourse should be based on seeking the truth in pursuit of knowledge but both the selected novels, as well as the non-fictional contemporarious materials, revealed it to be corrupted by Cold War rhetoric. The analysis will draw upon the new historical principles regarding the necessity “of describing and analyzing the specific cultural conditions in which literary texts are produced and received” in order to reveal “the way culture is both reflected and acted upon in the society of which it is part” (Brannigan 39). This bringing together of fiction and history helps us to recover “the original ideology which gave birth to the text, and which the text in turn helped to disseminate throughout a culture” (Myers).

crisis, anglophone, literature, postmodern

nije evidentirano