INTELLECTUALS IN THE FACE OF HISTORIC TURMOIL: “THE REVENGE OF THE PRINTER” BY STANISLAV ROSOVETSKYJ AS ACADEMIC FICTION

Since mid-twentieth century the academic novel has been treated in English literary criticism as a separate literary genre centered on the life of professors. Often the action takes place on and outside of campus, revealing the professors’ private concerns. Satire is a characteristic feature of academic novels, which usually drives the action. In these novels university appears as a “microcosm of society at large.” Even though the academic novel is an emerging genre in Ukrainian literature, there are texts which fall into this category. In the article the author analyzes “The Revenge of the Printer” by Stanislav Rosovetskyj as academic fiction. The novel has two plot lines, one of which is set in late 1580s in the times of Ivan Fedorov, another is set in the summer of 1991. The plot lines are joined by the setting, which is St. Onuphrius Monastery in Lviv, which in the twentieth century was turned into the museum of book-printing. The novel has the following features of the academic fiction: the main setting and the object of satire is theIvanFedorovMuseum, a cloistered institution like the university campus; the protagonist Shalva Bukviani is an academic and a professor of history facing the choice to leave the institution or to conform to the changing ideology. Collectively, these characteristics allow to define the main theme as the role of individual in the times of historical turmoil. Special attention is paid to the image of Fedorov, whose life in the novel is portrayed as a literary biography, based on research of contemporary Ukrainian historians alternative to the Soviet narrative. Due to the image of Fedorov as “Renaissance man” in the novel, the image of contemporary scholar appears as Sick Soul (M. Andryczyk), “a small Soviet man” unable to engage in protection of cultural heritage in the time of sociopolitical change.

Drudgery Tales, Abjectified Protagonists, and Speculative Modes in the Adjunctroman of Contemporary Academic Fiction

This essay presents an analysis of narratives of contingency in the contemporary academic novel, particularly the mode of the “adjunctroman.” It contends that adjunct protagonists frustrate the most recognizable mode of academic fiction—the “Professorroman”—with sagas of a Sisyphean lack of progress, unsympathetic or abjectified antiheroes, and tales of instructional drudgery and intellectual woe. Such recent academic fiction may be self-published and may feature protagonists who are adjuncts, non-tenure-track faculty, or workers just passing through the ivory tower on their way to better employment elsewhere. Providing readings of novels by well-known writers of academic fiction such as James Hynes and Alex Kudera alongside lesser known authors such as Geoff Cebula, Gordon Haber, J. Hayes Hurley, and Julia Keefer, the essay ultimately argues that the adjunctroman reveals and at its best revels in the “crises” of higher education to begin imagining the twenty-first-century professoriat anew.

A Review: Writing Academic Fiction

A poetic accolade to three academic fiction writers: Patricia Leavy, Toni Bruce, and Christine Sleeter.

Heinrich Mann's Small town tyrant : the Grammar School Novel as a German prototype of academic fiction

This article considers the German Grammar School Novel from the first half of the twentieth century an all but forgotten Germanophone prototype of campus fiction. Whereas the Anglo-American campus novel of the 1970s, 80s and 90s features university professors as future-related agents of Western counterculture and free thought, the Grammar School Novel satirizes the German grammar school teacher known as Gymnasialprofessor as a representative of the past-related order of the autocratic German state apparatus from the beginning of the twentieth century. As Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel Professor Unrat / Small Town Tyrant (the source text of Marlene Dietrich's debut movie The Blue Angel) may be considered a foundational work of the German Grammar School Novel corpus, the main part of the article offers a sample analysis of this text.