Postmodernist Campus Novels: A Reading of David Lodge''s Changing Places and Small World

• Main Authors: Wei-Szu Liao, 廖偉斯
• Other Authors: Mei-hwa Sung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/67058908280026523622

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 97 === This thesis aims to discuss the contemporary British novelist, David Lodge’s two campus novels—Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, and Small World: An Academic Romance—and suggests him as a postmodern Menippean satirist by focusing on his narrative and metafictional techniques; his use of Bakhtinian definition on language and carnivalesque devices of Menippean satire. David Lodge is widely acclaimed as a writer of campus novels with a keen slant toward exploring the vice and folly in academic communities. Firstly, unlike the traditional realistic novelists, Lodge attempts to write his novels with the mixture of various narrative techniques, challenging the postmodernist concept of collage and hybridity. Secondly, Lodge not only endeavors to write the academic novel with a distinguished form but also makes an effort to diversify the traditional campus novel content—“the Cult of Oxbridge.” Thirdly, there is more zealous debate among critics about whether or not Lodge is a satirist than in all their discussions of other campus novelists combined. All these stimulating issues have helped motivate this study.