Naslov
Campus Novel and the Idea of Humiversity

Autori
Ukić Košta, Vesna ; Petrić-Bajlo, Estella

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, ostalo

Izvornik
21. Dani Frane Petrića: Ideja sveučilišta (21st Days of Frane Petrić: The Idea of University) / Hrvatsko filozofsko društvo - Zagreb, 2012, 106-108

ISBN
978-953-164-126-9

Skup
21. Dani Frane Petrića: Ideja sveučilišta (21st Days of Frane Petrić: The Idea of University)

Mjesto i datum
Cres, Hrvatska, 23.09.2012. - 26.09.2012

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Poster

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
campus novel; humiversity; Coetzee; Disgrace

Sažetak
The idea of university has had a long tradition in human history. University teachers, among them physicists, philosophers, men of letters and the like, educate some future physicists, philosophers or men or letters. Their intellectual endeavours contribute the social authority of the universities, the supposed bastions of sciences, knowledge and humanistic attitudes. But, as noted by Z. Radman, what is prior to the existence of physicists, philosophers or men of letters is the existence of human individuals performing all those activities. (Radman, 1995: 80). As a result, our perception of the world is necessarily and only human, or, in other words, what scientists consider universe is rather to be labelled as humiverse. (ibid.). Nevertheless the Scientist (in Latour’s terms) sometimes identifies his position with that of God, not only in terms of the perception of the world, but equally so in terms of his power position as the social authority figure. This is what happens in one of the best known campus or academic novels, Disgrace (J. M. Coetzee, 1999), whose protagonist, David Lurie, a university teacher in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa, dedicates his life to abstract thought, “the dominant intellectual tradition of modernity.” (P. Armstrong, 2008: 221). Lurie invites his students of Romanticism to medidate on Wordsworth’s lines (from Book 6 of The Prelude) about Mont Blanc as a site representing the heights of human spiritual endeavour and power of the mind, the world of “pure ideas.” (Coetzee: 21). But this Platonic substratum of his teaching does not prevent him from sexual predation of his student Melanie Isaacs. By the end of the story the predator becomes the prey himself, after his own daughter is brutally raped. Having lost his university position, Lurie decides to live with his daughter in the countryside, devoting his life to unwanted animals (waiting for elimination in the so called animal shelter). Lurie is now being taught by his daughter that “there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals.” (74). This multi-layered novel is analysed in this presentation in the first place in the context of the genre of English university fiction. Campus novels have seen an enormous growth in Britain and the US since the 1950s but they also enjoy much longer history in the annals of literary studies (K. Womak, 2005: 326).

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

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