- Institute of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Education, Žižkovo náměstí 5, 771 40 Olomouc, Czech Republic
- English Literature, English language and literature, Czech Language and Literature, English and American literature, American Fiction 1980 - present, Malcolm Bradbury, and 12 moreMichael Chabon, Jewish American Literature, Political Language and Political Correctness, Howard Jacobson, Postmodernism, Henri Bergson, John Morreall, Jonathan Coe, British Jewish history, Donald Trump, Philip Roth, and Poetryedit
- Almae materes: Mgr., Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic (Mt. Mercy University, Cedar Rapids, IA - year abroa... moreAlmae materes:
Mgr., Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic (Mt. Mercy University, Cedar Rapids, IA - year abroad)
M.A., Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
Ph.D., Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
I teach British and American literature and cultural studies. My research interests include contemporary fiction, multicultural literature and the campus novel.edit
Research Interests:
The title of the fourth short story collection by the British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair, Death & Texas (2014), appears somewhat imprecise, as Texas is not the spatial setting in all eight stories, for some of them take place elsewhere... more
The title of the fourth short story collection by the British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair, Death & Texas (2014), appears somewhat imprecise, as Texas is not the spatial setting in all eight stories, for some of them take place elsewhere in the USA or even in other countries. Death is arguably a central theme in all the eight stories, as some of the characters face the threat of death or mourn the death of their close ones. Other stories contextualize the theme of death in relation to violence in history, especially from the point of view of their Jewish protagonists, writers or artists concerned with history as well as the rendering of historical events in popular culture. This article thus aims to survey the representation of Jewishness and the reflection of world history in the collection.
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Summerland (2002), Michael Chabon’s only young adult novel, focuses on Ethan, an eleven-year-old boy living in the fictional community of Clam Island, Washington, with his father, a devout baseball fan. While the initial setting of the... more
Summerland (2002), Michael Chabon’s only young adult novel, focuses on Ethan, an eleven-year-old boy living in the fictional community of Clam Island, Washington, with his father, a devout baseball fan. While the initial setting of the novel appears strikingly mainstream American, once Ethan sets off on a quest to the Summerlands, one of the four existing parallel worlds, the text features phenomena associated with numerous other cultures and their mythologies. Baseball itself has a mythical status in the novel, and as some commentators have suggested, this sport was initially played by Native Americans; similarly, several characters originate from the myths of North American minorities, for example Sasquatch, a cryptid deriving from First Nations folklore, or the Native American trickster figure Coyote. Moreover, some features of the novel, such as the name of Ethan’s friend, Thor, allude to Norse mythology. Furthermore, as friendship develops within a group of diverse characters who have to save all the four worlds by winning a baseball game against their adversaries, led by the demonic figure of Coyote, the text not only embraces a variety of subcultures present in contemporary America, but also exemplifies a universal story about the fight between good and evil.
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Howard Jacobson is a British Jewish novelist whose works tend to focus on Jewish characters living in contemporary Britain. However, after the election of Donald Trump as American president, Jacobson strayed away from his usual theme in... more
Howard Jacobson is a British Jewish novelist whose works tend to focus on Jewish characters living in contemporary Britain. However, after the election of Donald Trump as American president, Jacobson strayed away from his usual theme in order to react to the event that he considered
“an affront to writers everywhere.” The result is Pussy (2017), a brief satire about the childhood and young adulthood of Prince Fracassus, who resembles Trump in appearance, speech and character. Moreover, as the novel closes with Fracassus’ being elected the Prime Mover of the Federation of All the Republics, other personalities of contemporary political life appear thinly disguised as minor characters. This paper thus compares the recent socio-political reality with its reflection in the novel,
additionally commenting on the text’s common features with the classics of British literature that some reviewers identified as Jacobson’s inspirational sources.
“an affront to writers everywhere.” The result is Pussy (2017), a brief satire about the childhood and young adulthood of Prince Fracassus, who resembles Trump in appearance, speech and character. Moreover, as the novel closes with Fracassus’ being elected the Prime Mover of the Federation of All the Republics, other personalities of contemporary political life appear thinly disguised as minor characters. This paper thus compares the recent socio-political reality with its reflection in the novel,
additionally commenting on the text’s common features with the classics of British literature that some reviewers identified as Jacobson’s inspirational sources.
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In 2022, Rainbow Rowell's Bildungsroman Fangirl (2013), listed among 10 recent campus novels by Michelle Carroll on PowellsBooks.Blog, may seem a somewhat nostalgic text, as it is set at the University of Nebraska in the 2011/12 academic... more
In 2022, Rainbow Rowell's Bildungsroman Fangirl (2013), listed among 10 recent campus novels by Michelle Carroll on PowellsBooks.Blog, may seem a somewhat nostalgic text, as it is set at the University of Nebraska in the 2011/12 academic year. While Fangirl has also been classified as a young adult novel, as a chronicle of the protagonist's, Cath's, first year at college, it may arouse memories of a comparable experience in any college graduate, academics included. Like many classic campus novels, Fangirl is concerned with the writing process, as the storyline focuses on a creative writing course Cath takes in her first semester. An author of fanfiction based on a Harry Potteresque fantasy, Cath submits a piece of her fanfiction as an assignment, and is shocked to be accused of plagiarism by her professor. Gradually, Cath's progression to writing a different short story for the course parallels her learning to deal with family problems as well as her anxiety in the college environment that is new to her. In turn, not only does the novel not completely idealize college life, but it also highlights Cath's need to negotiate her obligations as a student and her responsibilities outside campus.
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The posthumously published short story collection Shylock Must Die by the British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair works with Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice in a variety of creative ways. The short stories borrow from The Merchant... more
The posthumously published short story collection Shylock Must Die by the British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair works with Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice in a variety of creative ways. The short stories borrow from The Merchant of Venice especially the theme of antisemitism and Shylock as the main Jewish character but are usually set in the 20th or 21st century rather than in the Renaissance. Some stories react to notable productions of the play across the globe, e.g. in Stockholm in 1944, London in 2012 or in Venice in 2016, the year of the quincentennial commemorations of the foundation of the Venetian ghetto. The stories also include tragicomic elements as typical features of Jewish literature.
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Shakespeare's plays have attracted numerous reinterpretations not only on the stage, but also in other genres. Recent retellings of The Merchant of Venice by British Jewish authors, such as Arnold Wesker's play The Merchant (1976) or... more
Shakespeare's plays have attracted numerous reinterpretations not only on the stage, but also in other genres. Recent retellings of The Merchant of Venice by British Jewish authors, such as Arnold Wesker's play The Merchant (1976) or Howard Jacobson's novel Shylock Is My Name (2016), focus on a complex portrayal of Shylock as the main Jewish character. However, Clive Sinclair's short story "Shylock Must Die" (2014) adopts a different strategy by foregrounding two other Jewish characters, as Shylock's daughter Jessica is described from the point of view of the moneylender Tubal. In Sinclair's version, Tubal is refashioned as a private detective who, despite his experience, can hardly believe how cunning Jessica turns out to be, as she tricks him into participating in her own scheme. While Shakespeare's play assigns a significant amount of agency to Portia, Sinclair's short story takes liberty in shifting the focus to another female character. As the story reports events that followed Jessica's wedding, it may even be considered a sequel to The Merchant of Venice, and the story's title itself suggests it has even less to do with comedy than the original. For all these reasons, "Shylock Must Die" presents a radical rewriting of Shakespeare's text.
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In a 2017 article on the marketability of literary studies, Michael Fischer writes that one of the most convincing defences of the discipline is that it develops empathy. Thus, using Howard Jacobson’s Booker Prize-winning novel The... more
In a 2017 article on the marketability of literary studies, Michael Fischer writes that one of the most convincing defences of the discipline is that it develops empathy. Thus, using Howard Jacobson’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question (2010) as an exemplary Jewish British text, I argue that its inclusion in contemporary literature courses through the lens of theoretical readings on empathy may contribute to broadening the students’ perspective in order to battle the rising antisemitism.
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As the British Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson has called himself the "Jewish Jane Austen," this essay aims to examine the relevance of this characterization by arguing that Jacobson may be seen as continuing in the tradition of the... more
As the British Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson has called himself the "Jewish Jane Austen," this essay aims to examine the relevance of this characterization by arguing that Jacobson may be seen as continuing in the tradition of the English novel of manners, as exemplified by Austen. In particular, the plot of Jacobson's sixteenth novel Live a Little (2019) resembles Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), as it features a development of a romantic relationship between two characters who first show little interest in each other. However, as Jacobson's couple of protagonists are in their nineties, another text that provides a useful frame of reference is Austen's last novel Persuasion (1818), which deals with the themes of aging and the passage of time. In turn, this essay approaches Live a Little as a novel of manners reminiscent of Austen, but updated for the early 21st century.
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Howard Jacobson is a contemporary British Jewish writer whose autobiographically inspired novels feature protagonists who are men of Jewish background with an extensive knowledge of English literature like the author, who read English at... more
Howard Jacobson is a contemporary British Jewish writer whose autobiographically inspired novels feature protagonists who are men of Jewish background with an extensive knowledge of English literature like the author, who read English at Cambridge. The narrator of Jacobson’s second novel Peeping Tom (1984) is Barney Fugleman, a literary critic whose urban Jewish heritage alienates him from the pastoral tradition embraced by much of canonical English literature. Yet, to his shock, when Fugleman undergoes hypnosis, he is revealed to be a reincarnation of Thomas Hardy, a writer he once dismissively called “prurient little Victorian ratbag.” However, as the novel discloses some similarities between Fugleman’s and Hardy’s lives, it may be read as a reflection on English Jewish sense of belonging. While the text initially portrays Jewishness and Englishness as binary opposites, it gradually highlights that both of them are inseparable aspects of Fugleman’s bifurcated identity.
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As before 1945, only a tiny percentage of the population had access to higher education, a novel set in a university only reflected a highly restricted class and gender privilege. In contrast, the postwar expansion of higher education in... more
As before 1945, only a tiny percentage of the population had access to higher education, a novel set in a university only reflected a highly restricted class and gender privilege. In contrast, the postwar expansion of higher education in the anglophone world resulted in job openings at newly established universities and led to a new genre, the campus novel, or academic novel, whose focus was on professors rather than students. Currently, a new trend appears to be in progress in the United States, as the genre continues to flourish, but the distinction between the postwar professor-centered novels and the earlier student-centered ones no longer seems to apply. One of the major examples that illustrates this trend is Chad Harbach's bestselling debut novel The Art of Fielding (2011), set in a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin. Although one of the major characters is Guert Affenlight, a former Harvard professor and current president of the college, the novel centers on Henry Skrimshander, a freshman and a gifted baseball player. While The Art of Fielding has been called a novel about baseball and college life, as Guert finds himself attracted to a mixed-race male student and Henry strives to do his best on the team and fit into a new environment, the issues raised in the text move far beyond this simple description. Thus, I argue that as the percentage of Americans with some experience of higher education is increasing, the college campus has become a convenient space for the fictional representation of the diversity of contemporary American society.
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Howard Jacobson is a British Jewish writer, journalist and former professor of English literature who has authored sixteen novels, starting with his 1983 comic campus novel Coming from Behind, as well as six works of non-fiction. In all... more
Howard Jacobson is a British Jewish writer, journalist and former professor of English literature who has authored sixteen novels, starting with his 1983 comic campus novel Coming from Behind, as well as six works of non-fiction. In all his works, Jacobson communicates insights into a variety of cultural as well as social topics, often motivated by his own experience. While Jacobson received more credit as a writer after being awarded the Booker Prize for his eleventh novel The Finkler Question in 2010, this recognition does not seem to have initiated a significant interest in his early writing. This paper thus aims to re-evaluate Jacobson's first novel by contextualizing it within the author's oeuvre as well as in the tradition of the British campus novel. Devoting close attention to the portrayal of British Jewish identity, intertextuality, and the use of comic and satirical elements, this article seeks to answer the question to what degree Jacobson's debut novel laid foundations for his later fiction.
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Two campus novels written in the same decade, Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988), both feature protagonists who temporarily leave isolated academia to confront the larger world outside. In White Noise,... more
Two campus novels written in the same decade, Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988), both feature protagonists who temporarily leave isolated academia to confront the larger world outside. In White Noise, Jack Gladney, an American professor of Hitler Studies at a fictional midwestern college, finds himself unprepared to deal with an ecological catastrophe as well as the threat of death. In Nice Work, Robyn Penrose, a temporary lecturer
in English literature and women’s studies at Lodge’s fictionalized version of the University of Birmingham, confronts the inconsistencies in her thinking after meeting Vic Wilcox, the manager of an engineering firm. Both academics are satirized for their limited viewpoints and portrayed as benefitting from their experience through the realization that their academic careers have alienated them from the real world.
in English literature and women’s studies at Lodge’s fictionalized version of the University of Birmingham, confronts the inconsistencies in her thinking after meeting Vic Wilcox, the manager of an engineering firm. Both academics are satirized for their limited viewpoints and portrayed as benefitting from their experience through the realization that their academic careers have alienated them from the real world.
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Research Interests: Scottish Literature, Postmodernism, The Gothic, Doppelgänger, Gothic, female Gothic, Gothic in literature, the Gothic as a subculture, the fantastic, horror, the vampire figure in literature and film, the femme fatale, feminist readings of vampire narratives, and 3 moreDoppelganger/double, Alice Thompson, and Scottish Women's Fiction
Michael Chabon's second novel Wonder Boys (1995) focuses on Grady Tripp, a professor of creative writing whose personal and professional problems culminate during a writers' festival on campus. A first person account of a series of... more
Michael Chabon's second novel Wonder Boys (1995) focuses on Grady Tripp, a professor of creative writing whose personal and professional problems culminate during a writers' festival on campus. A first person account of a series of unexpected events that Grady and his student James Leer experience in and outside of Pittsburgh during one weekend, the novel received mixed reviews. Whereas Robert Ward praised the text for being " the ultimate writing-program novel, " Michael Gorra denounced it, in a rather simplified way, as " another novel about a writer messing up his life. " Most famously, Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post review appreciated the novel's style and effective use of comic elements, but concluded that the text portrays a limited experience similar to the author's own, thus urging Chabon " to move on, to break away from the first person and explore larger worlds. " While Chabon later seemed to follow Yardley's advice in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), an ambitious historical novel which earned him the Pulitzer Prize, this paper aims to reconsider Wonder Boys by drawing on its previous criticism and analyzing it as an amalgam of the campus novel, the picaresque as well as both Grady's and James's Bildungsroman.
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David Lodge’s campus novel Changing Places (1975) was translated into Czech by Antonín Přidal (under the name of Mirek Čejka) as early as 1980. The novel includes numerous references to anglophone literary texts, many of which the general... more
David Lodge’s campus novel Changing Places (1975) was translated into Czech by Antonín Přidal (under the name of Mirek Čejka) as early as 1980. The novel includes numerous references to anglophone literary texts, many of which the general Czech reader would not be familiar with. My analysis of the translation reveals that to bridge the gap between the source and target cultures, Přidal employed multiple
strategies, such as translation by omission, explanation, substitution or generalization. Besides discussing the possible motivation for these strategies, I use the skopos theory to argue that in spite of omitting some of the nuances, Přidal produced a functional translation aimed at the general reader. As the 2008 edition of Přidal’s translation makes
no changes to the instances of intertextuality analysed in this paper, the implication is that even at present, anglophone literary texts may not provide an easily shared point of reference.
strategies, such as translation by omission, explanation, substitution or generalization. Besides discussing the possible motivation for these strategies, I use the skopos theory to argue that in spite of omitting some of the nuances, Přidal produced a functional translation aimed at the general reader. As the 2008 edition of Přidal’s translation makes
no changes to the instances of intertextuality analysed in this paper, the implication is that even at present, anglophone literary texts may not provide an easily shared point of reference.
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Joy Harjo (b. 1951) is a Native American poet and musician. She identifies herself as belonging to the Muscogee/Creek nation and stresses that her family members are also related to the Cherokee nation. In 2002, she received a PEN/Open... more
Joy Harjo (b. 1951) is a Native American poet and musician. She
identifies herself as belonging to the Muscogee/Creek nation and stresses that her family members are also related to the Cherokee nation. In 2002, she received a PEN/Open Book (known as the Beyond Margins Award through 2009) for her book A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales. From the first poem in this collection, she makes clear that the word “story” is central to her view of poetry. More specifically, many of her narrative poems read like stories about various moments of her life or reflect on the tradition of storytelling and ritual in Native American communities. Consequently, a related feature of Harjo’s poetry is an interest in the past. While she occasionally reminds her audience of the violence committed against Native Americans throughout history, she sees remembering the past primarily as a source of one’s identity and power, for example by emphasizing that the
members of her nation would start to introduce themselves by explaining who their ancestors were. Thus, in my paper, I examine the
ways in which Harjo’s poetry illustrates the author’s concepts of story and memory.
identifies herself as belonging to the Muscogee/Creek nation and stresses that her family members are also related to the Cherokee nation. In 2002, she received a PEN/Open Book (known as the Beyond Margins Award through 2009) for her book A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales. From the first poem in this collection, she makes clear that the word “story” is central to her view of poetry. More specifically, many of her narrative poems read like stories about various moments of her life or reflect on the tradition of storytelling and ritual in Native American communities. Consequently, a related feature of Harjo’s poetry is an interest in the past. While she occasionally reminds her audience of the violence committed against Native Americans throughout history, she sees remembering the past primarily as a source of one’s identity and power, for example by emphasizing that the
members of her nation would start to introduce themselves by explaining who their ancestors were. Thus, in my paper, I examine the
ways in which Harjo’s poetry illustrates the author’s concepts of story and memory.
Research Interests:
The modern campus novel, sometimes also referred to as the academic novel, emerged after World War II as a comic and satirical genre that focuses on professors rather than students and highlights the flaws of the rapidly expanding... more
The modern campus novel, sometimes also referred to as the academic novel, emerged after World War II as a comic and satirical genre that focuses on professors rather than students and highlights the flaws of the rapidly expanding academia. The article focuses on two campus novels of the 1960s, Bernard Malamud's A New Life (1961) and Malcolm Bradbury's Stepping Westward (1965), both of which feature a young instructor's quest into the unknown territory of a distant university. In Stepping Westward, the protagonist is James Walker, a British writer who accepts a one-year teaching post at an American university; in A New Life, the main character is Sy Levin, who moves from the East to the West of the United States to teach freshman composition at a small agricultural college. While both of the novels satirize provincial American universities for their utilitarian attitude to higher education, Bradbury's text extends its satire to his protagonist, who is mocked for his lack of independent thinking and assertive behavior. The two texts also illustrate the differences between the light-hearted British campus novel and its potentially darker American counterpart. Whereas Stepping Westward portrays the protagonist's stay at the university as a temporary escape from his marital and familial duties, A New Life presents a more complex story, of Sy's struggle for a new life, which he eventually achieves, even though in completely different terms than he might have expected.
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Ana Castillo's most critically acclaimed novel So Far From God (1993) can be considered a recent example of the family saga genre, as it reports the life story of Sofi and her four daughters. However, rather than concentrating on an... more
Ana Castillo's most critically acclaimed novel So Far From God (1993) can be considered a recent example of the family saga genre, as it reports the life story of Sofi and her four daughters. However, rather than concentrating on an upper-middle-class white family in a patriarchal setting, Castillo has appropriated the established genre to write a text of Chicana resistance, portraying working-class women as the bearers of spiritual values and social progress. Thus, the focus shifts from male to female characters, who are seen as powerful and independent rather than dominated by men; in fact, Sofi's husband is absent for the most of his daughters' lives. In turn, while all the traditional themes of family sagas, such as the history of a family depicted through several generations as well as romance and marriage, are present in the text, they are depicted in a new context. Finally, instead of portraying the family as striving to use money and property as a means of social advancement, Castillo shows the majority of her characters as caring about their wider community. Thus, this paper seeks to examine more closely which particular changes the author has made within the set of the genre's conventions.
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The paper analyzes Michael Blumenthal’s only campus novel Weinstock among the Dying (1993) as an example of a combination of a campus and mid-life crisis novel, which reflects the middle class experience. The book is set at Harvard and... more
The paper analyzes Michael Blumenthal’s only campus novel Weinstock among the Dying (1993) as an example of a combination of a campus and mid-life crisis novel, which reflects the middle class experience. The book is set at Harvard and focuses on Martin Weinstock, a thirty-eight-year-old lecturer of creative writing who finds the atmosphere at Harvard sterile and self-important, but he also becomes aware of his own personal problems. In particular, Weinstock has to reconcile with his extended family and accept his Jewish heritage in order to realize he must leave the university to find satisfaction in life. In turn, the novel combines biting satire of the prestigious educational institution with a complex psychological portrayal of the protagonist.
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Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) focuses on two Jewish cousins who first meet in their late teens: Samuel Clay, who had been brought up by his mother in Brooklyn,... more
Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) focuses on two Jewish cousins who first meet in their late teens: Samuel Clay, who had been brought up by his mother in Brooklyn, and Josef (Joe) Kavalier, the only member of his Prague-based family that escapes to America before WWII. While the cousins succeed in the developing comic book industry to which many Jewish Americans have contributed, their personal identities are complicated by other features of American life during WWII. Whereas Sammy suffers from the absence of his father and struggles with the realization of his homosexuality which is not easily accepted by contemporary society, Joe finds it too hard to function as his American girlfriend’s partner while dealing with the successive announcements of his family members’ deaths in Europe. Thus, this paper examines how the historical circumstances and familial backgrounds of the two protagonists influence their identity formation.
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The article contextualizes Ishmael Reed's 1993 satirical campus novel Japanese by Spring against the background of the Culture Wars, arguing that the novel illustrates the dangers of assimilation in American academia. Set at the fictional... more
The article contextualizes Ishmael Reed's 1993 satirical campus novel Japanese by Spring against the background of the Culture Wars, arguing that the novel illustrates the dangers of assimilation in American academia. Set at the fictional Jack London College, named after a writer known for his white supremacist views, the book perceives assimilation as a threat to ethnic minorities' sense of identity. Thus, the protagonist, an African American instructor and a former supporter of affirmative action named Chappie Puttbutt, is satirized for his willingness to assimilate in order to obtain tenure. Besides denouncing African Americans in his scholarship and dreaming of moving to an all-white neighborhood , Puttbutt decides to learn Japanese in reaction to the rising influence of Japan in the globalized economy. In Reed's satirical hyperbole, the college is eventually bought by a Japanese corporation and the new administration's effort to Japanize the campus echoes parallels with institutionalized white supremacy. Besides examining the criticism of assimilation in Japanese by Spring, this article relates it to Reed's contemporaneous essay collection Airing Dirty Laundry (1994), in which the author comments extensively on the drawbacks of monoculturalist views and their perpetuation by higher education.
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This article analyses Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000), alongside Zadie Smith's On Beauty (2005), as campus novels that respond to wider socio-political issues. In particular, both texts reflect racial anxiety on the American campus... more
This article analyses Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000), alongside Zadie Smith's On Beauty (2005), as campus novels that respond to wider socio-political issues. In particular, both texts reflect racial anxiety on the American campus at the turn of the century. The Human Stain focuses on Coleman Silk, a classics professor at the fictional Athena College who is, towards the end of his career, unjustly charged of using a racial slur against African Americans in the classroom. Ironically, the novel reveals that Silk himself is an African American that has been passing for a Jewish American for his whole academic career. Similarly, On Beauty deals with two art professors fighting on the opposite sides of the Culture Wars at the fictional Wellington College. While the liberal one is a white Englishman who has married an African American woman, his conservative opponent is an anglicized Trinidadian visiting lecturer who condemns affirmative action. Thus, both novels illustrate not only the complexity of how race is perceived in academia, but especially the problematic attitudes to race both individuals and institutions embrace.
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Both Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952) and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) are campus novels satirizing the political environment of their time. Roth’s novel presents the life story of Coleman Silk, a classics professor at... more
Both Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952) and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) are campus novels satirizing the political environment of their time. Roth’s novel presents the life story of Coleman Silk, a classics professor at fictional Athena College who is towards the end of his career unjustly charged of using a racial slur against African Americans in the classroom. The case is taken up by his department head and Silk is forced to resign. This more recent indictment of American political correctness provides interesting frames of comparison with McCarthy’s earlier novel. In this text, literature professor Henry Mulcahy, who is to lose his job at the fictional Jocelyn College, spreads the rumor that he is being dismissed because he was once a member of the Communist Party. Mulcahy’s motivation is a belief that the college and faculty are too politically correct to be seen as persecuting the Left. Not only does Mulcahy keep his job, but the college president is forced to resign. While almost half a century apart, both novels provide a harsh satire of American academia, highlighting ways in which the obsession
with political correctness can be abused with devastating results. Most revealingly, in the earlier novel the corrupted faculty member abuses the well-intentioned institution, whereas in the more recent text the innocent individual is victimized.
with political correctness can be abused with devastating results. Most revealingly, in the earlier novel the corrupted faculty member abuses the well-intentioned institution, whereas in the more recent text the innocent individual is victimized.
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While English is the lingua franca and an established language in numerous countries, it is its American variant that keeps spreading rapidly to other parts of the world due to the wide ranging influence of the USA in politics, economics... more
While English is the lingua franca and an established language in numerous countries, it is its American variant that keeps spreading rapidly to other parts of the world due to the wide ranging influence of the USA in politics, economics and popular culture. The nine authors of this volume present various aspects associated with the perception of the USA, whether it be American English, a theme in American literature and culture or an analysis of their reception in and/or influence on the Czech Republic or Austria. As all of the contributors work or study at an educational institution that prepares future teachers, most of the chapters either discuss the students’ or pupils’ point of view on the topic or provide another connection to the process of foreign language teaching.
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The novelist Howard Jacobson, who received the 2010 Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, has often been characterized as the “British Philip Roth,” although he himself prefers to be viewed as the “Jewish Jane Austen.” This monograph... more
The novelist Howard Jacobson, who received the 2010 Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, has often been characterized as the “British Philip Roth,” although he himself prefers to be viewed as the “Jewish Jane Austen.” This monograph concludes that both comparisons may be used to comment on various features of Jacobson‘s oeuvre. Like Roth, Jacobson tends to focus on male Jewish protagonists and intimate relations between the sexes. Like Austen, he portrays a certain social class, whether it be the British Jewish minority or the social world of British writers and university professors. Apart from reflecting on the tension between Britishness and Jewishness as inseparable aspects of his characters‘ identities, Jacobson‘s novels contribute to the traditions of British and Jewish humour.
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This monograph provides a chronological overview of the campus novel from the 1950s to the early 21st century. All of the six chapters compare two representative texts from each decade—one British and one American. The findings show that... more
This monograph provides a chronological overview of the campus novel from the 1950s to the early 21st century. All of the six chapters compare two representative texts from each decade—one British and one American. The findings show that the authors of American campus novels (e.g. Nabokov, Malamud, and DeLillo) are more diverse than their British counterparts (e.g. Amis, Bradbury, and Lodge). The monograph also addresses the coexistence of the comic and the satirical within the genre. The conclusion emphasizes that although Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, one of the most recent campus novels, can hardly be characterized as a comic novel, all of the texts analyzed in this volume are satirical in their effect, as they try to name and potentially reform various problematic aspects of academia.