Ellenberg Jordan Intvervew

Interview with Jordan Ellenberg - R A I N T A X I o n l i n e

*1.* Is /The Grasshopper King/ a campus novel? What's a campus novel, anyway?

*JE:* Campuses are interesting places for two reasons: people pursue difficult knowledge there, and kids grow up there. The part of their growing up that happens between 18 and 21 /seems to them/ to involve the acquisition of difficult knowledge, but actually most of what they learn is developmentally automatic. So from the juxtaposition of these two pursuits you get some irony, and this irony produces comic novels.

My sense is that "typical" campus novels—or at least, the novels people mean when they say "campus novel"—use that irony as follows: Look! professors think they are in search of difficult knowledge, but really they are more like adolescents at play; that is ridiculous!

/The Grasshopper King/ is maybe a bit different in that I really do believe that pursuing difficult knowledge is, at bottom, important and non-ridiculous; so I'm less interested in the ironic fate of the professors and more interested in the ironic fate of adolescents who take the analogy between their automatic development and their coursework too seriously.