Cette thèse en création est consacrée au campus novel (qu’on pourrait traduire par «roman universitaire»). Son premier volet explore la nature et la portée de ce sous-genre romanesque issu des littératures britannique et américaine. Le deuxième, les fragments romanesques Sur une clôture, constituent un court campus novel franco-ontarien, fondé sur l’expérience d’un bachelier en lettres françaises à l’Université d’Ottawa. Un retour réflexif englobant les lectures de corpus et théoriques, et le processus de création lui-même, conclut le tout. L’ensemble de la démarche s’inspire largement du roman This Side of Paradise (1920) de F. Scott Fitzgerald, et donc cette thèse présente en quelque sorte un effort de réécriture accompagné de notions théoriques et critiques. Sur une clôture, tout comme This Side of Paradise, se présente à la fois comme une fiction librement inspirée de l’expérience personnelle de son auteur et comme un commentaire social et une satire du système d’éducation, au temps présent. À cet effet, l’esthétique comme le sujet de Fitzgerald (mais aussi ceux d’extraits de plusieurs autres romans universitaires) sont repris, voire pastichés, et sont ensuite étudiés dans la rétroaction de cette thèse. Il en résulte un aperçu de la réalité contemporaine, subjective quant à son auteur, notamment du bilinguisme en Ontario, de la culture franco-ontarienne, et du sentiment (ou ressentiment) de la génération des Millénaires.

Alison, the protagonist, is a 21-year-old cello student from Northwest Ohio who studies at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Although she comes from a conservative Methodist upbringing, Alison has turned away from her beliefs and entered into a polyamorous relationship with Luke, a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, and his wife Cheryl. Through this relationship, Alison has been able to explore her nascent bisexuality and enjoy the affection she has been denied by her reticent mother and absent father. While the members of the triad hold lofty principles about openness and trust, the practice of that relationship—and its ever-shifting unwritten rules—fail to live up to their ideals.

This doctoral dissertation identifies a new sub-genre in Contemporary Spanish Peninsular Literature, the Spanish Campus Novel. The impetus for research was to ascertain whether or not the genre characterized the Spanish novels dealing with university life (SpCN). The texts in question build upon the British and American Campus Novel tradition while inflecting it with issues, styles and themes particular to Spanish literature. I examined nine examples of the Spanish Campus Novel (SpCN) to determine their distinctive characteristics: Carlota Fainberg, Antonio Muñoz Molina (1999); El inquilino (1989) and La velocidad de la luz (2005), Javier Cercas; Todas las almas (1989) and Negra espalda del tiempo (1998), Javier Marias; El enigma (2002), Josefina Aldecoa; Último domingo en Londres (1997), Laura Freixas; Mimoun (1988), Rafael Chirbes; and Soy un escritor frustrado (1996), José Angel Mañas. In spite of variances in the circumstances of the protagonists, the repetition of key elements created a justification for the academic novel classification. Chapter One reviewed criticism of the Anglo academic novel and established essential characteristics of the majority of the novels: campus location, academic protagonist, satire and humor, job-insecurity, political correctness and departmental politics. I reviewed the socio-political history of the Spanish university in order to contextualize the SpCN, both its paucity and its recent emergence. Chapter Two examines the works of Antonio Muñoz Molina and Javier Cercas; their protagonists share the commonality of living and working in the US. Chapter Three considers two novels of Javier Marías and how the author plays with the both the academic novel and fiction. Chapter Four reviews the novels by Josefina Aldecoa and Laura Freixas and the manner in which stereotypical professors (sexually predatory ones) imply certain cultural mores. Chapter Five investigates the lyrical novel of Rafael Chirbes and its contribution to the campus novel. Additionally, José Angel Mañas’ bleak comedy is investigated as unique, the only novel taking place in Spain. The conclusion summarizes the novels, the identified Anglo and Spanish characteristics and contextualizes the novels within current trends in recent Spanish Peninsular fiction. Lastly, an overview of four Latin American Campus Novels is suggested for further research / Spanish

The subject of this work is analyses and interpretation of David Lodge´s campus novels. In the concrete, the diploma paper is focused on sources and elements of comicality, especially humour, satire and parody, in Lodge´s free trilogy Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work. The starting point of this diploma paper is characterisation of the genre of the campus novel, with the inclusion of the social situation in the period of the genesis of this genre, and the short outline of its representatives, with emphasis on the novel of Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim. In the following the work considers the ways of the realisation of comicality in the text and from this basis the practical part derives. The main aim is to point out the ways of usage of comic in Lodge´s campus novels and this purpose is achieved in the analysis of the particular texts.

This thesis has three main sections, the first a full-length novel entitled The Gift of Death, the third the bibliography and two appendices. The second contains variously: a preface; a critical exposition/analysis of the preceding novel with subsections, considering in conceptual fashion three central themes: death considered through symbolic, ideological and other meanings; a positioning of the academy in the ‘Campus’ novel sub-genre; and a socio-cultural analysis of fiction as a field of production and associated struggles for entry determined by class, origin and periodic cultural preferences. The Gift of Death concerns a sixty-year-old’s attempt to write a novel. Procrastinating English scholar, archetypal baby-boomer Jim Dent, revisits the thwarted ambitions of youth. Inspired by novelist Sue Townsend’s death, once a friend, Jim recalls knowing other aspirant artists—writers and film-makers— living and dying in obscurity. He reflects upon a troubled past, on unsatisfactory elements of the present and the increasingly daunting task of composition. The Gift of Death reworks the tradition of the campus or varsity novel, detailing lives tied to the rhythms of the academy. The chapters explore various eccentrics whose lives Jim traces through tentative, inadequate notes. Expanding such recollections the narrative includes: schooldays; postgraduate studies and school-teaching in Leicester; a voyage to interview Basil Bunting; and friendships with oddball alcoholics writers, Cedric and Challis, never satisfied or fully recognized creatively. Finally, overwhelmed by self-doubt, Jim abandons his Sisyphean task. Reflecting upon failure, an unexpected turn of events associated with visiting Bunting emerges in the present, offering resolution of sorts. The Gift of Death’s primary themes/contexts are: self-reflexive, multi-chronic form; death, loss and mourning; the baby-boomer generation; struggling for professional entry into the field of fiction; lost provincial and local creativity; the juxtaposition of past and present; loyalty, friendship and memory; parental conflict; and finally procrastination and disappointment.

In view of the fact that David Lodge’s campus novels are renowned for their ability to make light of traditional gender stereotypes as well as for their purportedly liberal, pro-feminist, intertexual, dialogical and metatextual dimensions, this article seeks to explore more precisely the strategic and unavowedly political functions humour and the comic fulfil in Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work. What will be demonstrated is that Lodge’s light-hearted, tolerant and at times even progressive liberalism is little more than an effect produced by the textual surface structure. In the case of Nice Work, this discrepancy between the surface and the deep structure leads to the paradox that while voyeuristic structures and male bonding are overtly ridiculed, on a deep structural level they are effectively reaffirmed. Though Lodge’s novels are at the level of their surface structure sustained by a logic which uses the “comic mode” as a more or less subtle form to critique traditional gender stereotypes, literary conventions, the British university system and British industry, ultimately his ‘Rummidge trilogy’ reinforces an aesthetically, morally and politically conservative subtext.