The Academy: Humor and Criticism. David Lodge’s Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses and The Art of Fiction

Abstract

The “academic novel” or “campus novel” emerged after the Second World War in Great Britain and the United States of America, and has evolved according to contextual circumstances. Set in university environments, the conflicts, intrigues, and anecdotes presented by this type of text reveal, through parody, humor, and self-referentiality, the vicissitudes of the daily lives of teachers and students in the university sphere.

In this context, populated by such characters, stories develop and intertwine, without sparing favorable or unfavorable, sarcastic, and ironic comments on academic life itself—its obligations and demands, setbacks, achievements, and frustrations experienced on a daily basis—and on those who construct it through their everyday work: men and women who have chosen, at best, to belong to this sphere of constant intellectual challenges.

In this paper, we will analyze and relate Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975) and The Art of Fiction (1998), by the English writer David Lodge. Through discourse analysis, this will allow us to perceive an interesting and fluid dialogue among fiction, literary theory, history, and the evolution of Anglo-Saxon literature, within a critique of academia and the university.