Saturday October 2, 2004
Who's afraid of the campus novel?
Universities have served writers well, offering subjects for serious study - lit crit, pc, AI - and opportunities for farce. Aida Edemariam conducts her own research
Ever since Vladimir Nabokov published his lovely, sad, ruthless and very funny novel Pnin, the beginning of term has been a staple scene in the campus novel. "The 1954 Fall term had begun... Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as 'Description of nature', or 'Irony'; and in a pretty edition of Mallarm?'s poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and scrawled above it 'birds'."
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