The Campus Novel

This Interdisciplinary Honors Seminar explores the genre of the campus novel as a privileged site where modern institutions of knowledge production and education narrate, critique, and reinvent themselves. From the mid-century American tradition—John Williams’s Stoner, Nabokov’s Pnin, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, David Lodge’s comic “campus trilogy,” Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, and Randall Jarrell’s satirical Pictures from an Institution—to the emergence of contemporary “dark academia” in works like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, this seminar examines how fiction renders the university as a “dispositif” (Foucault): a dynamic apparatus that organizes bodies, produces subjects, and distributes forms of value, power, and desire. We begin by mapping the conventions of the campus novel—its investment in scholarly ambition, professional precarity, eccentric intellectual communities, and the oscillation between the cloistered life of ideas and the pressures of the social world. We will read the genre’s signature themes not merely as narrative tropes but as formal responses to the modern university’s self-understanding: meritocracy and hierarchy, mentorship and rivalry, romance and research, scandal and bureaucracy.