Where are you going, Dottor Dapertutto? From the Campus Novel to the Professorroman
Abstract
The campus novel being a distinctive product of Anglo-American literary culture, other linguistic and cultural domains offer only fewer instances of this subgenre. This essay concentrates on a selection of these works – Remo Ceserani’s Viaggio in Italia del dottorDapertutto (1996), Paule Constant’s Confidence pour confidence (1998), Javier Marías’ Todaslas almas (1989) and Dietrich Schwanitz’sDer Campus (1995) – in order to compare them with one of the most popular campus novels, Small World (1984) by David Lodge, so as to identify the common features that might serve as a blueprint for a definition of this subgenre in an international perspective. In doing so, the essay focuses on three further aspects. From a stylistic point of view, it examines how these more or less contemporaneous works exemplify widely different types of writing. It also investigates the importance of the Anglo-American model for these Italian, Spanish, French and German authors, whose careers as university lecturers have developed within British or North American campuses. Finally, it explores the relevance of gender discourse within the academic milieus where these authors live and their novels are set, in order to show how these texts ignore, or even ridicule, it.Downloads
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