Country: England, Britain, Europe; USA, North America.
Article contributed by
Charles Knight, Emeritus, University of Massachusetts (Boston)
The Literary Encyclopedia
The satiric campus novel, in its contemporary form, begins with a cluster of novels written in the 1950s: Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) and Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong (1959) in Britain; Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1953) and Randell Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (1954) in the United States. But education has been a subject of satire since Aristophanes mocked Socrates in Clouds (423 BC) and Lucian attacked philosophers and rhetoricians in the second century. Novels of education constitute a recognized category including hundreds of examples. The problem of making distinctions that identify the satiric campus novel is intensified by the tendency of the novel and satire to overlap. But a novel feels like satire when the reader senses that irony, analysis, and attack are more important than empathy for the central characters. Bernard Malamud’s A New Life comments sharply on the life, culture, and pedagogy of a mediocre college, but its main concern is with its central character’s efforts to redefine his identity, so that its satire seems secondary. What gives the satiric campus novel its distinct character is that universities constitute the primary arena of attack.
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