Shaping the University Imaginary : Configurations and Refigurations in British Fiction
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! ! ! ! ! ! Shaping the University Imaginary. Configurations and Refigurations in British Fiction ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie des Fachbereiches 05 der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen ! ! im Rahmen eines Cotutelle-Vertrages mit der Università degli Studi di Bergamo ! ! ! ! vorgelegt von Beatrice Seligardi ! ! aus Bergamo ! ! ! ! ! 2014 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Dekan/in: Prof. Dr. Magnus Huber 1.Berichterstatter/in: Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning 2.Berichterstatter/in: Prof. Dr. Alessandra Marzola Tag der Disputation: 28/05/2014 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS ! ! INTRODUCTION 1. WHAT IS UNIVERSITY FICTION: A PRIMARY FOCUS P.5 2. METHODOLOGICAL TOOLS FOR UNIVERSITY FICTION: AN OVERVIEW P.7 2.1. UNIVERSITY IMAGINARY P.7 2.2. LITERARY GENRE AND GENERIC APPROACHES TO UNIVERSITY FICTION P.9 2.3. TRIPLE MIMESIS AND MODES OF REPRESENTATION P.13 3. STRUCTURES AND PURPOSES: REFRAMING MIMESIS, IMAGINARY AND LITERARY GENRES THROUGH UNIVERSITY FICTION P.14 ! PART ONE ! CHAPTER I: CONFIGURING AND REFIGURING THE IMAGINARY: MODES, GENRES, REPRESENTATION STRATEGIES 1. METAPHORICAL CONFIGURATION: RETHINKING THE THEORY OF MIMESIS P.21 2. FORMULAIC PATTERNS AND HYBRIDIZATION IN LITERARY GENRES THEORY P.31 3. DRAMATISATION AS A STRATEGY OF REPRESENTATION P.35 ! CHAPTER II: THE 19TH CENTURY VARSITY NOVEL: A FORMULAIC GENRE BETWEEN REALISTIC BILDUNGSROMAN AND SUBVERSIVE COUNTER-NARRATIVES 1. PREFIGURING VARSITY NOVELS: THE UNIVERSITY IMAGINARY AND ITS CULTURAL DYNAMICS IN THE 19TH CENTURY P.41 2. CONFIGURING THE VARSITY NOVEL: DOMINANT FORM, FORMULA AND BILDUNG-MODEL P.45 3. THE MODES OF REPRESENTATION IN VARSITY NOVELS: THE EXAMPLE OF PEDAGOGIC REALISM IN TOM BROWN AT OXFORD P.50 4. GENRE DYNAMICS: COUNTER-NARRATIVES IN FEMALE VARSITY NOVELS P.56 ! "1 CHAPTER III: THE CAMPUS NOVEL PARADIGM: DAVID LODGE AND MALCOLM BRADBURY 1. PREFIGURING THE CAMPUS NOVEL: INSTITUTIONAL AND CULTURAL CHANGES IN 20TH CENTURY BRITISH CONTEXT P.69 2. CONFIGURING THE CAMPUS NOVEL: THE MAIN PATTERNS P.71 2.1. ROMANCE OR HAVING FUN IN ACADEMIA P.73 2.2. WHEN THEORY GOES FICTIONAL P.85 3. HYBRIDISATION AND THE MODES OF REPRESENTATION IN CAMPUS NOVELS: BETWEEN REALISM AND METAFICTION P.92 ! PART TWO ! CHAPTER IV: REFIGURING UNIVERSITY FICTION: THE DRAMATISATION OF THE UNIVERSITY IMAGINARY IN THE NOVELS OF A.S. BYATT 1. WOMEN AT CAMBRIDGE: BILDUNG-FORM AND FEMALE HYSTERIA IN THE SHADOW OF THE SUN AND THE GAME P.102 2. LITERARY THEORY AND ACADEMIC CHARACTERS: A METACRITICAL AND METATEXTUAL REPRESENTATION IN POSSESSION P.114 3. DRAMATISATION AS A MIMETIC STRATEGY IN THE FREDERICA QUARTET P.121 3.1. PERFORMING ACADEMIC LITERARY DISCOURSE: THE VIRGIN IN THE GARDEN P.121 3.2. METAPHOR DRAMATISED AND WOMEN AT CAMBRIDGE IN STILL LIFE P.128 3.2.1. A WOMAN AT CAMBRIDGE P.129 3.2.2. THE DRAMATISATION OF LITERARY THEORIES ABOUT METAPHOR P.133 3.3. BABEL TOWER AND THE DRAMATISATION OF LITERATURE TEACHING P.140 3.3.1. LITERARY LECTURES P.141 3.3.2. CHARACTERISATION P.143 3.3.3. LAMINATIONS P.144 3.4. THE THEATRE OF ACADEMIA: DRAMATISATION AND THEATRICALITY IN A WHISTLING WOMAN P.147 "2 ! CONCLUSION P.159 ! LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS P.165 ! BIBLIOGRAPHY P.167 "3 ! ! "4 INTRODUCTION ! ! 1. What is University Fiction: A Primary Focus The literary representation of specific historical and social environments has always raised many interrogatives both to writers and critics: how is it possible to approach the relationship between the representation of social phenomena and their contingent materiality? Is literature a mere document that gives an account of history? Or is it pure fiction, governed by the inner laws of texts? These questions involve a huge constellation of meditations, speculations, theories and practices about literature that accompanies the history of Western culture. If we narrow the focus of the investigation, a question can be asked why literature seems to become so engaged with specific topics that find a very precise and specific place in reality. An example of such involvement are novels that revolve around academic life. University is a privileged space to encounter literature as practice, as theory, as life: it is a space of reflection, of speculation, of creation of meaning. But, of course, the university is also a social and historical institution, in which public, private, and emotional dynamics are mutually related like in every human community. In short, the university is a complex system. The complexity of its structure lies in the diversity of ontological and epistemological levels involved. Social, political, cultural, spatial, temporal dimensions determine the way in which the university has been perceived throughout the centuries. As we know from historians, universities started to be founded in Europe since the Middle Ages (Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge being the oldest). They have considerably influenced the dynamics of culture in Europe in several different ways: the academic institution of rhetorics has governed literary styles, forms and genres from Greek and Latin eras until modernity; the development of academic practices have interfered both with political/religious institutions and the editorial market, as testified by the creation of indexes, canons and targets; the education offered by academia has shaped the emerging dominant and powerful social classes, first the aristocracy and later "5 the rich bourgeoisie. It is therefore not surprising that the university has been mentioned or thematically discussed in Western Literature throughout the centuries. As such, the present study will set out to answer some of the questions mentioned in the opening paragraph above, when addressed to the university world: how writers, critics and readers react to the problem of representing in an artistic way a structure, like academia, that is so peculiarly interwoven with historical, social and political phenomena? Which are the main strategies of literary representation of university life? And why are these strategies shaped in a certain way and not in another? It is not the first time that critics investigate such field: there is a cluster of technical expressions used to refer to novels that deal with the university, with the most common one being university novels, campus novels, academic novels, Professorromane and varsity novels. Looking at the extant literature on the topic, it is clear that this field of study (i.e. the analysis of the representation of academia in literature) can be located quite precisely: it belongs mainly to the Anglosaxon world and it covers less than a century, starting from the 50s until nowadays. This distribution corresponds, more or less, to the characteristics of literary forms that we here propose to classify as university fiction, i.e novels that are centered on characters, situations and actions around the academic world. Like all literary phenomena, university fiction has developed due to certain historical, geographic, cultural and social conditions, with one of its main defining factors being the location in Anglo-American contexts. The reasons for such specific background have been convincingly discussed by David Lodge with reference to the campus novel, a late 20th Century variant of university fiction: ! We may also find an explanation for the fact that the campus novel is almost exclusively an Anglo-American genre. I know from personal experience that there is a good deal of interest in it among Continental European teachers and students of modern English and American literature, because I am frequently solicited for assistance by students in France, Germany, Italy and other European countries who are writing theses on the campus novel. And yet there have been very few campus novels produced by native writers in these countries, and those few, I am told, have not made much literary impact. I think there are two possible reasons for this. […] "6 Until relatively recently, Continental European universities were not designed as campuses, territorially defined and self-contained; they were made up of faculties randomly distributed through the cities to which they belonged. Most of the students who attended them lived at home, and for them and their teachers there was no clear boundary marking off academic life from the life of the city at large. The enclosed, often isolated, residential university or college on the Anglo- American model is a very different environment, and more readily productive of the kind of behaviour that is the raw material of fiction. (Lodge 2008) ! The field of inquiry in the present study encompasses a broader chronological spectrum than the one discussed by Lodge: we will take into account a period that starts in the second half of the 19th century and finishes at the very end of the 20th century. This period can be described as the time when the genre achieved specific and stable connotations that have been respectively classified as “varsity novel” and “campus novel”. Although a number of intergeneric changes have occurred in time, the Anglo- American context still prevails, i.e. we do not find any relevant result of university fiction in other cultural and geographical areas (think of European continental countries), where the university environment in definitely less campus based. This study will be restricted to the British context for several reasons: first of all, because Great Britain is the geographical area where university fiction took its origins in the 19th century; secondly because the British case study will be used as a specific field of enquiry in order to look at the development, evolution and changes of such literary forms and genres. ! 2. Methodological Tools for the Analysis of University Fiction: An Overview 2.1 The Concept of University Imaginary The situatedness of university fiction poses a methodological problem about the approach to such a topic. A concept that will serve as an analytic tool for the investigation of university fiction is ‘university imaginary’. In order to understand what we mean by this expression is better to go back to the ethymologic root for university, which is the Latin word universitas.