Postar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community [Hardcover]

As a literary genre, academic fiction has emerged in recent years as one of the most popular modes for satirizing the cultural conflicts and sociological nuances inherent in campus life. Drawing upon recent insights in ethical criticism and moral philosophy, Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community offers new readings of fictional and nonfictional works by such figures as Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, David Lodge, David Mamet, Ishmael Reed, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar and Jane Smiley.Introduction: Ethical Criticism and Postwar Literary Theory Reading the 'Heavy Industry of the Mind': Ethical Criticism and the Anglo-America Academic Novel Negotiating the University Community: Lucky Jim and the Politics of Academe Scholar Adventurers in Exile: Nabokov's Dr. Kinbote and Professor Pnin Searching for Goodness and the Ethical Self: Joyce Carol Oates's The Hungry Ghosts The Professoriate in Love: David Lodge's Academic Trilogy and the Ethics of Romance Performing the Academy: Alterity and David Mamet's Oleanna Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project: Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring Academic Nonfiction and the Culture Warriors: 'Teaching the Conflicts' in Gilbert and Gubar's Masterpiece Theatre Jane Smiley's Academic Carnival: Rooting for Ethics at Moo U. Conclusion: Ethical Criticism and the Academic Novel beyond the Culture Wars Notes and Bibliography

'...this book (and the satires it discusses) might be instructive to university faculty, who often take themselves too seriously.' - J.C. Kohl, Choice

KENNETH WOMACK is Assistant Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University's Altoona College. He has published widely on twentieth-century British and American literature as well as on bibliographical and textual criticism. In addition to serving as co-editor of Oxford University Press's The Year's Work in English Studies, he is editor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studil2