The job market is in shambles, funding is being cut to cultural departments everywhere, and Chat-GPT can write essays for me. What am I doing at university, pursuing an English Literature degree? It is easy to joke about ‘useless’ degrees, but the reality is terrifying: never before has a degree felt more insubstantial.
Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of bright-eyed teenagers still flock to universities across the country every year. It is no surprise that novels about university have become immensely popular—they reflect one of the most profound experiences of many people’s young adulthood. Starting primarily in the 1950s, the “university novel” uses the versatile setting of a university campus as the backdrop for any imaginable narrative — dramas, horrors, thrillers, romances, and the list goes on. The genre’s apex of popularity was in the 90s, with many works achieving huge mainstream success (think Donna Tartt’s The Secret History). From its very inception — with genre-defining books like Brideshead Revisited and The Groves of Academe — the university novel has navigated the dilemmas of institutions and faculties.
John Williams’ 1965 Stoner is perhaps one of the most moving, astute contributions to the genre. It follows William Stoner who enters an agricultural course at university but, after an encounter with a Shakespearian sonnet, begins studying literature and eventually becomes a professor in the subject. The character of Charles Walker encapsulates a change in academia: from encouraging the pursuit of knowledge to an institution crippled with power imbalances. Walker is a lying, immoral student that Stoner fails—but, because Walker is the protege of one of Stoner’s colleagues, Stoner gets professionally and personally punished for the rest of his career. This plotline highlights the vulnerability of any hierarchies within academia to being abused, and advocates for sensible hierarchy and academic ethics.
Nonetheless, Stoner ultimately presents university as a sacred space for learning. William Stoner’s decision to pursue academia, no matter how imperfect his experiences there are, saves him from an isolating life on family’s farm. The novel implies that universities can be transformative sanctuaries, particularly for the “dispossessed of the world.”
A very different university novel, Galatea 2.2. by Richard Powers, asks poignant questions about how literature and arts can operate meaningfully in a tech-centric world. Despite writing in 1995, Powers addresses the increasing use of AI in academia, which has made plagiarism and fraud worryingly normalized. He depicts two university professors who teach a machine to produce an analysis of a literary text indistinguishable from one produced by a human. Sound familiar? Interestingly, Powers highlights similarities between AI and the professors through the disconnected way they interact with literature—the AI is disconnected in its treatment of literature as “mere data,” whereas the professors’ disconnect is through their preoccupation with trivialities and ignorance of the intrinsic value of art and knowledge.
Whilst the books above are examples of what Mary McCarthy coined as a “Professoromane,” Brett Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction is the epitome of the “varsity novel”—one that focuses on student life. The novel follows three restless and hedonistic students around a fictional liberal arts college whose only curriculum seems to be a healthy dose of vapidity and anti-intellectualism. The students are pretentious, but refuse to work. One of the central characters, Lauren, changes majors every time she appears in the novel, viewing her academic pursuits as subordinate to, well, literally anything else. Though it parodies privileged and dysfunctional liberal arts academia, Easton Ellis is ultimately deeply sympathetic. His characters are crippled with drug addiction and corrosive loneliness and have been failed by a system who has sold them “university experiences” as commodities, rather than providing them with purpose and intellectual fulfillment. Though a melodramatic example, he certainly touches on a modern student’s feelings of aimlessness and abandonment by an institution that disregards academic growth and fulfillment, particularly for humanities degrees.
It is difficult not to feel panicked at the state of British universities right now, or the prospect of life after university. Does it help to know that students have felt like this since the 1950s, and these feelings are forever immortalized in some of the most interesting and entertaining books of the last 100 years? I am not sure, but they are certainly enjoyable reads.
Photo by Zhanhui Li on Unsplash