DOCSLIB.ORG

Quest and Conquest in the Fiction of David Lodge

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Quest and Conquest in the Fiction of David Lodge Quest and Conquest in the Fiction of David Lodge Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philosophischen Fakultät II der Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg Vorgelegt von Ramona-Mihaela Sava aus Petrosani/Rumänien Würzburg 2006 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Rüdiger Ahrens, OBE Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Stephan Kohl Tag des Kolloquiums: 05.07.2006 Acknowledgements Above all I would like to express my deepest thanks to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Rüdiger Ahrens, OBE, whose guidance, support and encouragement greatly contributed to the completion of my dissertation. I am also indebted to the other members of my PhD thesis board, Prof. Dr. Stephan Kohl and Prof. Dr. Winfried Kreutzer. Further thanks are due to my fiancé, whose patience and loyalty accompanied me along these years. Last but not least, I want to thank my family for their unconditioned love and confidence. 1 Table of contents 1. Introduction .........................................................................................................4 1.1. David Lodge– an overview ...............................................................................4 1.1.1. Biographical approaches ....................................................................5 1.1.2. Between fiction and criticism.............................................................5 1.1.3. Realism and tradition .........................................................................7 1.1.4. Experimental elements.......................................................................8 1.1.5. Literary genres .................................................................................11 1.1.5.1. Catholic novels..................................................................11 1.1.5.2. Tales of the academy.........................................................14 1.1.5.3. Romance............................................................................15 1.2. Methodology: Foucauldian discourse analysis ...............................................18 1.2.1. The concept of discourse..................................................................19 1.2.2. Power and knowledge ......................................................................21 1.2.3. Truth.................................................................................................25 2. Religious discourse............................................................................................29 2.1. Quest and romance..........................................................................................29 2.1.1. The tradition of the literary genre ....................................................30 2.1.2. Characteristics of the romance.........................................................32 2.1.3. The Holy Grail .................................................................................34 2.2. Quest and conquest in Small World ................................................................37 2.2.1. An Academic Romance .....................................................................37 2.2.2. The struggle for promotion ..............................................................39 2.2.3. Sexual desire ....................................................................................41 2.2.4. The Perceval-question......................................................................42 2.2.5. Arthur Kingfisher and the Halcyon Days ........................................44 2.3. The Catholic Church as a powerful institution ...............................................47 2.3.1. The Catholic doctrine.......................................................................48 2.3.2. The fear of Hell and the confessional ..............................................49 2.3.3. The body: a site of control ...............................................................53 2.4. Subversion of Catholicism..............................................................................58 2.4.1 Erotic discourse.................................................................................58 2.4.1.1. Human sexuality and its representation ............................59 2.4.1.2. Transgression of the law ...................................................61 2.4.2. Cinema– a way of escapism.............................................................65 2.4.3. Pilgrimage, a form of tourism ..........................................................67 2.4.3.1. The journey as ritual..........................................................68 2.4.3.2. The way to Santiago de Compostela.................................71 3. Gender discourse ...............................................................................................75 2 3.1. Feminism. A theoretical introduction .............................................................75 3.1.1. Object of study, goal, definition.......................................................75 3.1.2. A historical overview on feminist criticism.....................................76 3.1.3. The dichotomy gender vs. sex..........................................................79 3.1.4. Feminist methodology......................................................................82 3.1.5. Foucault and feminists .....................................................................83 3.2. Patriarchal discourse: strategies of control .....................................................94 3.2.1. Hierarchy and relations of power.....................................................94 3.2.2. Pornography: depiction of whores .................................................101 3.2.3. Patriarchal violence: rape, incest and abuse...................................107 3.2.4. Female otherness: mutilation and pathology..................................113 3.3. Stereotypical representations of gender ........................................................115 3.3.1. Home-bound women......................................................................119 3.3.2. Reversed gender roles ....................................................................125 3.3.3. Family and/ or career .....................................................................133 3.4. Narratology and gender studies.....................................................................136 4. Ethnic discourse ..............................................................................................143 4.1. Key concepts: definitions..............................................................................143 4.1.1. Ethnicity.........................................................................................143 4.1.2. Nation.............................................................................................145 4.12.1.1. National identity– a discursive construct ......................146 4.12.1.2. Creating otherness.........................................................149 4.12.1.3. The colonised ................................................................151 4.2. Constructing Britishness ...............................................................................156 4.2.1. Army discourse ..............................................................................156 4.2.2. Ireland, a British colony.................................................................160 4.2.3. Internal others.................................................................................167 4.3. USA– a new Empire......................................................................................171 4.3.1. Britain: America’s other.................................................................173 4.3.1.1. The British Empire is falling down.................................173 4.3.1.2. Rummidge vs. Euphoria..................................................182 4.3.1.2.1. The promised land............................................182 4.3.1.2.2. University systems ...........................................188 4.3.1.2.3. An American centre .........................................192 4.3.2. Hawaii, the conquered paradise .....................................................196 4.3.3. Americans in Germany ..................................................................199 4.4. Other ethnic groups.......................................................................................207 4.4.1. Italians............................................................................................207 4.4.2. Australia .........................................................................................208 4.4.3. Orientals .........................................................................................209 4.4.3.1. Jerusalem.........................................................................210 4.4.3.2. Turkey .............................................................................211 4.4.3.3. Japan................................................................................213 4.4.3.4. Korea...............................................................................216 3 4.4. Hybridity: transgressing ethnic borders ........................................................218 5. Literary discourse............................................................................................226 5.1. Author and authority .....................................................................................226 5.1.1. Poststructuralist anti-authorialism..................................................226 5.1.1.1. Roland Barthes’s ”The Death of the Author” .................226
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Changing Places
    "Peter Schulze" [email protected] PLACES01 Peter Schulze Seite 1 von 1 Changing Places Author: David Lodge was born in London in 1935 and took his BA and MA degree at University College, London in 1955 and 1959. He holds a doctorate from the University of Birmingham, where he taught in the English Department from 1960 until 1987, when he retired to become a full-time writer. He retains the title of Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham and continues to live in that city. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His novels include The Picturegoers (1960), Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962); The British Museum is Falling Down (1965);Out of the Shelter (1970); Changing Places (1975), for which he was awarded both the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize; How Far Can You Go?, which was Whitbread Book of the Year in 1980; Small World, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984; Nice Work, which won the 1988 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Paradise News (1991) and Therapy (1995). David Lodge has written several books on literary criticism, such as Language of Fiction (1966), The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971), and The Modes of Modern Writing (1977). He has also edited Modern Criticism and Theory (1988). Many of his works have been published by Penguin, such as Write On (1986), a collection of occasional essays and The Art of Fiction (1992), a selection of articles originally published in the Independent on Sunday.
    [Show full text]
  • David Lodge's Campus Fiction
    UNIVERSITY OF UMEÅ DISSERTATION ISSN 0345-0155 — ISBN 91-7174-831-8 From the Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, University of Umeå, Sweden. CAMPUS CLOWNS AND THE CANON DAVID LODGE’S CAMPUS FICTION AN ACADEMIC DISSERTATION which will, on the proper authority of the Chancellor’s Office of Umeå University for passing the doctoral examination, be publicly defended in Hörsal G, Humanisthuset, on Saturday, December 18, at 10 a.m. Eva Lambertsson Björk University of Umeå Umeå 1993 Lambertsson Björk, Eva: Campus Clowns and the Canon: David Lodge's Campus Fiction. Monograph 1993,139 pp. Department of English, University of Umeå, S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden. Acta Universitatis Umensis. Umeå Studies in the Humanities 115. ISSN 0345-0155 ISBN 91-7174-831-8 Distributed by Almqvist & Wiksell International P.O. Box 4627, S-116 91 Stockholm, Sweden. ABSTRACT This is a study of David Lodge's campus novels: The British Museum is Falling Down, Changing Places , Small World and Nice Work. Unlike most previous studies of Lodge's work, which have focussed on literary-theoretical issues, this dissertation aims at unravelling some of the ideological impulses that inform his campus fiction. A basic assumption of this study is that literature is never disinterested; it is always an ideological statement about the world. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the dialogical relationship between self and other provides a means of investigating the interaction between author and reader; central to this project is Bakhtin’s notion of how to reach an independent, ideological consciousness through the active scrutiny of the authoritative discourses surrounding us.
    [Show full text]
  • Home Truths and the Writing Game
    T.C. SELÇUK ÜNİVERSİTESİ SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ İNGİLİZ DİLİ VE EDEBİYATI ANABİLİM DALI İNGİLİZ DİLİ VE EDEBİYATI BİLİM DALI A STYLISTIC APPROACH TO DAVID LODGE’S PLAYS: HOME TRUTHS AND THE WRITING GAME YÜKSEK LİSANS TEZİ DANIŞMAN Yard. Doç. Dr. A. GÜLBÜN ONUR HAZIRLAYAN GÜNAY ALLAHVERDİ Konya-2011 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .........................................................................................ii ÖZET ........................................................................................................................iii ABSTRACT ..............................................................................................................iv INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................1 CHAPTER I – David Lodge...................................................................................3 1.1. The Life of David Lodge .........................................................................3 1.2. His Place in Post-War British Literature .................................................4 CHAPTER II – What is Stylistics?........................................................................7 2.1. Definition of Stylistics .............................................................................7 2.2. Significance of Stylistic Approaches to the Literary Works ..................9 CHAPTER III – Home Truths ..............................................................................13 3.1. A Structuralist Approach to the Author Images
    [Show full text]
  • Thinking of England Shaun O'connell University of Massachusetts Boston, [email protected]
    New England Journal of Public Policy Volume 5 | Issue 2 Article 8 6-21-1989 Thinking of England Shaun O'Connell University of Massachusetts Boston, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation O'Connell, Shaun (1989) "Thinking of England," New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 5: Iss. 2, Article 8. Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol5/iss2/8 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. It has been accepted for inclusion in New England Journal of Public Policy by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Thinking of England Shaun 'Connell The works discussed in this article include: Latecomers, by Anita Brookner. 248 pages. Pantheon Books, 1989. $16.95. A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers, by Hugh Kenner. 290 pages. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. $12.95 (paper). Collected Poems , by Philip Larkin. 330 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989. $22.50. The Russia House, by John le Carre. 353 pages. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. $19.95. The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing. 133 pages. Vintage Books, 1989. $6.95 (paper). Nice Work, by David Lodge. 277 pages. Viking, 1989. $18.95. Out ofthe Shelter, by David Lodge. 271 pages. Penguin, 1970, 1989. $7.95 (paper). In his study of modern English writers, A Sinking Island, Hugh Kenner argues that English literature, as we have known and loved it, no longer exists.
    [Show full text]
  • Common Ground Text
    Your Time Starts Now: Questioning what’s real in David Lodge’s Birmingham by Lorelei Mathias QUESTION 3.b): “Rummidge is not Birmingham, though it owes something to popular prejudices about that city”,1 David Lodge. Discuss. Seven years ago, almost to the day. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the sun was just poking its head out over the green campus quadrangle. Inside Avanti, the half-empty campus diner, two people were perched high on stools, picking at cups of murky orange soup. One, a bespectacled middle-aged man named Don, turned to the other, a shy and awe-inspired girl of nineteen, and asked: “Have you ever read any David Lodge?” And that was my first whiff of Rummidge. In Edgbaston, just a year into my university education, sitting with Don Hughes – who was and still is one of Random House 199 COMMON GROUND Publishers’ friendliest sales reps. Rummidge, as Don went on to explain, is an intriguing comic world created by David Lodge. Rummidge University in particular, is the main back- drop for the trilogy of “campus novels”, Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work, written between1969 and 1989. In all these novels Rummidge is a version of Birmingham; a charac- ter in itself, born out of Lodge’s learned satire. There is Birmingham, which belongs on the geographical map of England – in the belly of Britain, just past the perplexing spaghetti junction and Cadbury World. And then there is Rummidge, which resides firmly on the literary map of Lodge’s comic imagination. But what do the two really have to do with each other? Back in 1999, over lukewarm soup with Don, I had little idea of the significance I would later attach to Rummidge and its creator.
    [Show full text]
  • Paradise News O La Difícil Búsqueda Del Paraíso Literario
    PARADISE NEWS O LA DIFÍCIL BÚSQUEDA DEL PARAÍSO LITERARIO MARÍA AÍDA DÍAZ BILD Universidad de La Laguna En una entrevista realizada a David Lodge en julio de 1989 este autor afirmaba: I think that realism is more fashionable and more viable now than it was ten, fifteen years ago. There was a feeling in the nineteen seventies that realism was totally finished and if you wanted to be taken seriously as a novelist you had to be antirealist or irrealist in some way, metafictional or whatever. There are people who still believe that, but I think that in some ways the whole postmodernist experimental movement has lost a certain amount of impetus, particularly in America where it started really. There are a lot of literary novelists now writing books in which the realistic convention is not seriously questioned or undermined1. La razón por la que hemos comenzado nuestro trabajo con estas palabras de David Lodge es porque describen perfectamente el desarrollo que ha seguido su producción creativa. Lodge inicia su carrera literaria en los años cincuenta. La escena narrativa británica está dominada por una serie de autores a los que los críticos definen con el calificativo de «Angry Young Men». La producción litera- ria de esta década se caracteriza, como se sabe, con algunas notables excepciones, por un rechazo de todo tipo de experimentación, como reacción frente al movi- miento modernista, y una vuelta al realismo. Lodge se ve, indudablemente, influi- do por esta tendencia dominante y así define sus primeras dos obras, The Picturegoers y Ginger, You’re Barmy, como «essentially serious works of scrupulous realism»2.
    [Show full text]
  • Consciousness and the Novel 2
    Contents Cover About the Book Also by David Lodge Dedication Title Page Preface 1. Consciousness and the Novel 2. Literary Criticism and Literary Creation 3. Dickens Our Contemporary 4. Forster’s Flawed Masterpiece 5. Waugh’s Comic Wasteland 6. Lives in Letters: Kingsley and Martin Amis 7. Henry James and the Movies 8. Bye-Bye Bech? 9. Sick with Desire: Philip Roth’s Libertine Professor 10. Kierkegaard for Special Purposes 11. A Conversation about Thinks . Notes Index Copyright About the Book Human consciousness, long the province of literature, has lately come in for a remapping – even rediscovery – by the natural sciences, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. But as the richest record we have of human consciousness, literature, David Lodge suggests, may offer a kind of knowledge about this phenomenon that is complementary, not opposed, to scientific knowledge. Writing with characteristic wit and brio, and employing the insight and acumen of a skilled novelist and critic, Lodge here explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction (mainly English and American) in the light of recent investigations in cognitive science, neuroscience, and related disciplines. How, Lodge asks, does the novel represent consciousness? And how has this changed over time? In a series of interconnected essays, he pursues this question down various paths: how does the novel's method compare with that of other creative media such as film? How does the consciousness (and unconscious) of the creative writer do its work? And how can criticism infer the nature of this process through formal analysis? In essays on Charles Dickens, E.M.
    [Show full text]
  • The Academic Novel in the Context of Contemporary Croatian Literature
    Journal of Language and Cultural Education, 2(2) ISSN 1339-4045 (print), ISSN 1339-4584 (online) Copyright © 2014 SlovakEdu The Academic Novel in the Context of Contemporary Croatian Literature Tina Varga Oswald, University of Osijek, Croatia [email protected] Abstract The academic novel found its footing as a genre during the 1950’s, and in the last few decades managed to affirm itself in other English speaking areas. Although the genre remains not well researched in Croatian literary studies, the translated work of British writer and theorist David Lodge enabled a passage into the British university community and thus became a representative specimen of British prose. In accordance with the genre, Marinko Koščec’s Wonderland and Dražen Ilinčić’s Posljednji korak paint a picture of the atmosphere in Croatian universities and make way for comparative research. Keywords academic novel, David Lodge, Marinko Koščec, Dražen Ilinčić Introduction The academic novel, also known as the university novel, the campus novel and the college novel, belongs to the genre of academic satire, and became fully affirmed in the early 1950’s, first in the United States, and then in Great Britain. Its earliest genre classification is linked to American literary theorist and historian John O. Lyons who in his book The College Novel in America (1962) considers the academic novel to be a novel about academic life “one in which higher education is treated with seriousness and the main characters are students and professors” (Lyons, 1962, p. xvii). Lyons begins his historic overview with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe (1828), and ends it with Louis Simpsons Riverside Drive (1962).
    [Show full text]
  • The Campus Trilogy, David Lodge
    The Campus Trilogy, David Lodge 912 pages, 144812980X, 9781448129805, David Lodge, The Campus Trilogy, 2012, Random House, 2012, 'One of the very best English comic novelists of the post-war era' Time OutThe plot lines of The Campus Trilogy, radiating from its hub at the redbrick University of Rummidge, trace the comic adventures of academics who move outside familiar territory. Beginning in the late 60sChanging Places follows the undistinguished English lecturer Philip Swallow and hotshot American professor Morris Zapp as they exchange jobs, habitats and eventually wives. Small World sees Swallow, Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the beautiful Angelica Pabst jet-set about the international conference scene, combining academic infighting and tourism, esoteric chat and romance. And finally, the feminist lecturer Robyn Penrose swaps the industrial novel for a hard hat in Nice Work as she shadows the factory boss Victor Wilcox. Sparks fly when their beliefs and lifestyles collide. file download henow.pdf 128 pages, David Lodge, Home Truths: a Novella, Fiction, Adrian Ludlow, a novelist with a distinguished reputation and a book on the 'A' level syllabus, is now seeking obscurity in a cottage beneath the Gatwick flight path. His, Mar 31, 2012, ISBN:9781448137213 ISBN:9781448129850, David Lodge, The Practice of Writing, Literary Criticism, In this absorbing volume, David Lodge turns his incisive critical skills onto his own profession, salutes the great writers who have influenced his work, wonders about the, 352 pages, Feb 29, 2012 Feb 29, 2012, ISBN:9781446496718, When it isn't prison, it's hell. Or at least that's the heartfelt belief of conscripts Jonathan Browne and Mike 'Ginger' Brady.
    [Show full text]
  • David Lodge Paradise News London: Seeker & Warburg, 1991. Pp. 294 Reviewed by Nora Foster Stovel Lodge Lovers Are in For
    David Lodge Paradise News London: Seeker & Warburg, 1991. Pp. 294 Reviewed by Nora Foster Stovel Lodge lovers are in for a treat with his new novel Paradise News. Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham for two decades and au­ thor of important critical and theoretical works, such as Language of Fiction (1966), The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971), The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), and Working with Structuralism (1981), Lodge is best known to the gen­ eral reader for his entertaining novels, including Ginger You're Barmy (1962) and How Far Can You Go? (1980), and to the academic reader for his delightful academic satires, such as The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1988). Paradise News follows the great Lodge tradition. Beginning rather like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Paradise News opens with an eclectic collection of Brits assembling at London's Heathrow Airport for a Travelwise package tour to Hawaii, the earthly paradise of the title. When one Travelwise agent, Leslie Pearson, surveying the motley crew, asks in per­ plexity, "What are they after?" his assistant, Trevor Connelly, offers, 'The free essess, innit? ... 'Sun, sand and sex/ Trevor elaborates with a smirk" (4). Bernard Walsh, a former parish priest who has lost his faith and now teaches theology at St John's College, Rummidge—described as a "religious supermarket" (29) offering every brand of belief—is the figure of the Pilgrim Chaucer or Lay Lodge. He is not after the free esses, at least not consciously. A good Samaritan, Bernard answers a call for help from his estranged Aunt Ursula, the family rebel or "Black Ewe," a GI bride who has not been seen or heard from in thirty years, now dying of cancer in Waikiki.
    [Show full text]
  • David Lodge. Between Paradise and Hell
    BABE -BOLYAI UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF LETTERS DAVID LODGE. BETWEEN PARADISE AND HELL (David Lodge. Între Paradis i Iad) Summary SCIENTIFIC ADVISER: PROF. VIRGIL STANCIU, PhD. PhD CANDIDATE: ADINA POPA Cluj-Napoca 2010 Table of Contents Introduction 2 Chapter I: Searching for Paradise 3 Chapter II: Crisis of the Self 4 Chapter III: Labyrinthine Hell 5 Chapter IV: Between Paradise and Hell 6 Conclusions 9 Bibliography 11 1 Key Words: consciousness, the self, paradise, hell, self-definition Introduction (...) the individual self is not a fixed and stable entity, but is constantly being created and modified in consciousness through interaction with others and the world. It may be, therefore, that every time we try to describe the conscious self we misrepresent it because we are trying to fix something that is always changing (...) David Lodge. Consciousness and the Novel , p. 91 The purpose of the PhD thesis is to investigate the problem of the ‘self’ and ‘consciousness’ as looking for the ‘centre’ of the being as delineated with philosophy, but especially linked to literature through the author: David Lodge. The main purpose is its representation through a number of the writer’s books. Starting from the first authors who dealt with the concept, David Lodge appears as a continuator of the theory of ‘consciousness’ though brought to a different realm. Thus, he supports the opinion that its study is better performed with literary works. He does not diminish in any way the importance of other sciences that have studied and continue to study ‘consciousness’. Lodge sees in philosophy and science other means of getting to the core of the matter.
    [Show full text]
  • Diplomarbeit
    1 Diplomarbeit Titel der Diplomarbeit “David Lodge as a Catholic Novelist” Verfasserin Judith Terezija Pimperl angestrebter akademischer Grad Magistra der Philosophie (Mag.phil) Wien, im Oktober 2008 Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt: A 344 020 Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt: LA Anglistik und Amerikanistik Betreuer: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Rudolf Weiss 2 Thanks Be To God 1… …and Professor Weiss… …and My Family… …for their patience, forbearance and support. for Sarah and Sophie 1 1 Kor 15:57. 3 List of abbreviations AAS ………………………. Acta Apostolicae Sedis Vat II / Vatican II …………. Second Vatican Council HV ………………………… Humanae Vitae GS ………………………… Gaudium et Spes SC ………………………… Sacrosanctum Concilium CIC ……………………….. Codex Iuris Canonici, i.e. Code of Canon Law CCC ………………………. Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church DH ………………………… Dignitatis Humanae 4 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1 1 Catholic novelist? ............................................................................................................... 2 2 History .............................................................................................................................. 12 2.1 History of Catholicism in England ............................................................................ 12 2.1.1 Ultramontanism .................................................................................................. 21 2.2 From Dusk till Dawn – Developments in the Church ..............................................
    [Show full text]