AN APOGEE OF CORPORIAL IN ACADEMIC NOVEL FLESH BY DAVID GALEF

In the article the results of studying a problem of corporeal in a work of contemporary American writer David Galef, a professor of English at Montclair State University (New Jersey), are presented. Since Galef is little known in Ukraine, a short review of his life and works is given. On a basis of theoretical and literary critical works, devoted to a problem of corporeal in fiction, a representation of a body and corporeal is analyzed in a novel Flesh (1995). The key images and metaphors are defined. The important image is an overweight female body – Max’s object of desire. A story is narrated by his friend Don Shapiro, a professor of literature in “Ole Miss”. For a more precise interpretation, the functions of paratextual elements of original and translated texts are also studied. A novel is specified with its autobiographical character. According to a list of necessary features, this work is classified as an academic novel – a satirical comedy about university life with the elements of parody and erotic. In Galef’s novel there are many naturalistic and even pornographic descriptions. Satirically and ironically depicting an academic life, Galef creates a small copy of a contemporary world, in which people are very concentrated on matters of body and appearance, but not a soul and moral values.

Poetic Madness in Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong

This article addresses the age-old correlation between poetic genius and madness as represented in Malcolm Bradbury’s academic novel Eating People Is Wrong (1959), zeroing in on a student-cum-poet and a novelist-cum-poet called Louis Bates and Carey Willoughby, respectively. While probing this unexplored theme in Bradbury’s novel, I pursue three primary aims. To begin with, I seek to demonstrate that certain academics’ tendency to fuse or confuse the poetic genius of their students and colleagues with madness is not only rooted in inherited assumptions, generalizations, and exaggerations but also in their own antipathy towards poets on the grounds that they persistently diverge from social norms. Second, I endeavour to ignite readers’ enthusiasm about the academic novel subgenre by underscoring the vital role it plays in energizing scholarly debate about the appealing theme of poetic madness. Lastly, the study concedes that notwithstanding the prevalence of prejudice among their populations, universities, on the whole, do not relinquish their natural veneration for originality, discordant views, and rewarding dialogue.

Image of a Russian Professor in Stanislav Rakъs’s The Eccentric University

This article focuses on the image of the Russian professors in The Eccentric University (2008), a novel by Stanislav Rakús. Based on previous research, the author presents a short survey of Russian images in Slovak Literature in the late nineteenth — early twentieth-first centuries, whose peculiarities are rooted in the history of interaction between the two Slavic nations. Thus, the early twentieth century idealistic image of the Russian was built on the basis of Russian literature. The first images of Russians based on personal experience were created by Czechoslovak legionnaires as a result of interaction with Russians between 1917 and 1920, while after World War II, they were presented through a dichotomy “brother — suppressor”, to be changed into more dynamic ones by the early twenty-first century. The Eccentric University, which the author approaches from the perspective of the academic novel and part of Rakъs’s academic trilogy, enlarges the list of literary images of the Russians in Slovak literature. The author analyses images of Maria Petrovna Golovčikova, a female professor of Russian nineteenth-century literature, and Alexandr Kirillovič Ћuprej, a professor of Russian literature, both immigrant scholars at a Slovak university in the 1950s. The author maintains that through these images, Rakъs addresses not only Slovak Russophilic stereotypes historically embedded in nineteenth-century literary images of Russians, but also gender and immigrant stereotypes that circulate in contemporary Slovak culture. The author concludes that an ironic portrayal of Russian professors is directed at the cultural memory activation, which together with other features typical for both campus and academic novel adds to the new (Rakús’s) invariant of the “university novel”.

Racial/Facial Discrimination in Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong

As unprecedented waves of immigrants poured into Britain in the wake of World War Two, racism reared its ugly head. Literary works, like several branches of learning, made a considerable contribution towards bringing the problems of otherness and foreignness to the forefront of public attention. Malcolm Bradbury’s academic novel, Eating People Is Wrong (1959), is a typical case in point. This essay attempts to turn the spotlight on the unjust and unjustifiable racist judgments and practices inflicted on black African students in the said novel’s provincial redbrick university and, by extension, in the social universe. Unlike previous scholarly research on Bradbury’s work, the present paper pursues a new line of investigation by leaning on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s analysis of metonymy in their Metaphors We Live By (1980). This interdisciplinary venture aims to gauge the extent to which metonymic concepts involving skin colour and certain body parts inform race-related attitudes and demeanour. More precisely, I maintain that by purposely boiling the appearance and identity of a Nigerian student called Eborebelosa down to a “black face” or a “black head,” some prejudiced white academics cast him in the role of an inferior other and an unwelcome alien. This is all the more lamentable as intellectuals are supposed to ensure the prominence and permanence of tolerance, equality, and justice, instead of assuming the role of complacent and complicit social actors.

INTELLECTUALS IN THE FACE OF HISTORIC TURMOIL: “THE REVENGE OF THE PRINTER” BY STANISLAV ROSOVETSKYJ AS ACADEMIC FICTION

Since mid-twentieth century the academic novel has been treated in English literary criticism as a separate literary genre centered on the life of professors. Often the action takes place on and outside of campus, revealing the professors’ private concerns. Satire is a characteristic feature of academic novels, which usually drives the action. In these novels university appears as a “microcosm of society at large.” Even though the academic novel is an emerging genre in Ukrainian literature, there are texts which fall into this category. In the article the author analyzes “The Revenge of the Printer” by Stanislav Rosovetskyj as academic fiction. The novel has two plot lines, one of which is set in late 1580s in the times of Ivan Fedorov, another is set in the summer of 1991. The plot lines are joined by the setting, which is St. Onuphrius Monastery in Lviv, which in the twentieth century was turned into the museum of book-printing. The novel has the following features of the academic fiction: the main setting and the object of satire is theIvanFedorovMuseum, a cloistered institution like the university campus; the protagonist Shalva Bukviani is an academic and a professor of history facing the choice to leave the institution or to conform to the changing ideology. Collectively, these characteristics allow to define the main theme as the role of individual in the times of historical turmoil. Special attention is paid to the image of Fedorov, whose life in the novel is portrayed as a literary biography, based on research of contemporary Ukrainian historians alternative to the Soviet narrative. Due to the image of Fedorov as “Renaissance man” in the novel, the image of contemporary scholar appears as Sick Soul (M. Andryczyk), “a small Soviet man” unable to engage in protection of cultural heritage in the time of sociopolitical change.

Drudgery Tales, Abjectified Protagonists, and Speculative Modes in the Adjunctroman of Contemporary Academic Fiction

This essay presents an analysis of narratives of contingency in the contemporary academic novel, particularly the mode of the “adjunctroman.” It contends that adjunct protagonists frustrate the most recognizable mode of academic fiction—the “Professorroman”—with sagas of a Sisyphean lack of progress, unsympathetic or abjectified antiheroes, and tales of instructional drudgery and intellectual woe. Such recent academic fiction may be self-published and may feature protagonists who are adjuncts, non-tenure-track faculty, or workers just passing through the ivory tower on their way to better employment elsewhere. Providing readings of novels by well-known writers of academic fiction such as James Hynes and Alex Kudera alongside lesser known authors such as Geoff Cebula, Gordon Haber, J. Hayes Hurley, and Julia Keefer, the essay ultimately argues that the adjunctroman reveals and at its best revels in the “crises” of higher education to begin imagining the twenty-first-century professoriat anew.

A Foucauldian-Shakespearean Reading of the Twin Motifs of Love and Madness in Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong

Undertaking a careful examination of Malcolm Bradbury’s academic novel Eating People Is Wrong (1959) by drawing on Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965) and on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this paper’s author argues that some individuals, capitalizing on the old-established connection between love and madness, choose to act insane to win others’ sympathy and affections and that their strategy may not always live up to their expectations. The strategy itself, it will be clear, is a reflection of their social superiors’ desire to punish or banish them, of the universal antipathy towards the mad, and of the proclivity for maltreating them. The author also aims to prove that madness is not always the inevitable result of unreciprocated love and that it may as well be brought about by a loveless life. The paper concludes that madness, be it real or sham, never ceases to preoccupy us and that no matter how hard we try to extend sympathy to the mad, they generally continue to occupy the bottom of the social hierarchy. In addition to the foregoing thematic pursuits, it is also hoped that the reader will be given a helpful insight into the academic novel subgenre, which deserves to gain more ascendancy in the literary scene.

Investigating the Use of Ancient Fertility Themes in Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong

Employing James George Frazer’s anthropological book The Golden Bough (1890) as a theoretical background, this paper examines the ways in which Malcolm Bradbury’s academic novel Eating People Is Wrong (1959) builds on ancient fertility rituals to delineate the divide between past and present moods and modes of thought and to illuminate the emotional and intellectual sterility afflicting the modern academy and its population. It will be clear that although their names and conduct resonate with echoes of the celebrations and rites of savage tribes and subsequent societies, Bradbury’s characters fail to enact the roles of ancient fertility divinities and to maintain the essential flavour of remote antiquity’s culture. This is best illustrated by the vain attempts of a number of ardent suitors to marry the leading but misleading character Emma Fielding, a latter-day fertility goddess who heartlessly hurts their hearts. While ancient fertility goddesses’ suitors or consorts were concerned about the welfare of the community on the whole, alongside their own welfare, their modern counterparts merely seek to enhance their narrow interests. Predictably, all the characters in the novel finish up helpless and hopeless. Finally, grounded on the premise that scholarly disciplines tend to crisscross in a mutually enriching manner, this investigation aims to prove how helpful it is for Bradbury to explore the academic soul and soil through the employment of studies from other fields and how interesting it is for the researcher to spot out this cultural trend and to bring it to the attention of the reader.