Published in East-West Cultural Passage
One of the central features of the traditional professorial career, the academic conference, can provoke dramatically different responses; for academics of a certain age and established status, the conference is a source of nostalgia. And a number of academic novels, particularly David Lodge’s Small World, celebrate the conference in nostalgic term...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
In its vast range of variants, the genre of the campus novel continues to thrive and be reinvented by contemporary writers. This essay focuses on a specific subgenre, the contemporary Black campus novel, and I intend to analyze compelling examples of the dualism of nostalgia and counter-nostalgia. While some of these campus-set stories are centered...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
Traditionally, the academic community was a small but influential group of intellectuals more closely associated with their field of study than any university or college. Such elements as individual viewpoints, belonging to a community, collaboration in commonly realised goals, academic freedom, and university autonomy were respected (Billot). Curr...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
This article provides an examination of the ways in which academic portraiture is deconstructed in three contemporary visual narratives whose academic protagonists are women of color, the Netflix series Dear White People (2017-2021), which is based on the 2014 film of the same name, both of which were created by Justin Simien; the 2021 Netflix seri...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
The title of my article bears a double meaning. On the one hand, it refers to a group of Conservative politicians around Boris Johnson who studied at Oxford University in the eighties and who are identified in Jonathan Coe’s novel as the engineers behind the Brexit; on the other hand, Coe’s novel portrays a fictional group of scholars who are more ...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
The present article traces nostalgia across various campus and academic novels published during the last three decades and identifies different kinds of nostalgia – writerly and readerly nostalgia, vicarious nostalgia, ersatz nostalgia – not in the systematic manner of a classification but guided by the novels themselves. The readings are informed ...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
The article focuses on the campus novels Głowa. Powieść nocy zimowej (2016) by Tadeusz Cegielski and Rektorski czek (2018) by Joanna Jodełka, written to commemorate the foundation of the University of Warsaw and Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań respectively. This article first considers the generic peculiarities of the selected novels and then ...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
Dark academia is a fandom-created genre that draws on campus novels and thriller murder mysteries and extrapolates its aesthetic affects from the Gothic. At the heart of dark academia is a story set in a nostalgic academic fantasy that involves murder, a close-knit group of students who are obsessed with each other and detrimentally absorbed in the...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
In 2022, Rainbow Rowell’s Bildungsroman Fangirl (2013), listed among 10 recent campus novels by Michelle Carroll on PowellsBooks.Blog, may seem a somewhat nostalgic text, as it is set at the University of Nebraska in the 2011/12 academic year. While Fangirl has also been classified as a young adult novel, as a chronicle of the protagonist’s, Cath’s...
