The role of students in anglo-american campus novels

Аннотация

The prose of the Anglo-American University became one of the most brilliant literary events of the early XX and XXI centuries. Although the study of its origin and evolution has previously attracted the attention of literary critics, including Russian critics, university prose has become one of the intellectual hits of recent decades. David Lodge, a well-known British novelist and practitioner of the university novel, points out that the campus novel genre arose in the United States in the early 1950s with the publication of Mary Macrthy's “The Groves of Academe” (1952), a controversial response to Raymond Jarrell's “Pictures from an Institution”in 1954. At the same time, V. Nabokov, Russian immigrant was working on a book about a teacher at the American “Pnin” University (1956). Given the uncertainty of a particular genre in this book (it’s hard to say it’s a seven-chapter novel or a general theme - a collection of stories combined with a home search), we find all the key features of university prose that flourished in our time in the early 20th century. The twentieth century is primarily a kind of intellectual hero who is unfit and unfamiliar to the university environment. The protagonist’s more or less fierce opposition to the university community is reflected in modem examples of university prose, such as “Muu” (Moo, 1995) by J.W. Smiley, like the tendency to diary entries, is characterized by the feature of chronicles. The desire to uncover the internally conflicting nature of the university community’s existence and the self-determination of its members predominate - for example, Francis Prous’s “Blue Angel”in 2000 or Philip Roth’s “Human Stain” in 2000. The severity of the conflict in Nabokov’s work largely depends on the position of the professor - the immigrant in a foreign cultural environment - and is metaphorically portrayed as a hero “sitting on the wrong train”. The beginning of this book is undoubtedly full of symbolism. For Nabokov’s protagonist, the whole life is a “continuous struggle with inanimate objects,” which also emphasizes the protagonist’s unstable, unstable character in the world in which he was cast.fl] It is no coincidence that in Nabokov's narrations the emergence of this kind of maxima: "Man can exist only wrapped around himself."