Cultural Politics and Academic Crises in American Campus Fiction – Francine Prose’s Blue Angel and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons

Abstract

The article starts from the implications of a phrase in the first chapter of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain, a book that addresses issues of contemporary morality in the closed environment of the American academia: “Everyone knows.” Written in the aftermath of the Clinton-Lewinski scandal, Roth’s novel and the two books this article discusses reveal dual, often deliberately ambiguous depictions of gender and power dynamics in the ecosystem of the American college campus, a space that widens the gap between social structures, which grow more and more granular. The examined novels share concerns about cultural politics, offering a complementary perspective: while Francine Prose’s novel follows the tradition of the campus novel and retells the story from a mature academic’s point of view, Tom Wolfe’s book shifts to a young student’s side of the story. The article aims to demonstrate it is not a mere coincidence that these representative novels about social and moral crises faced on the campus were actually written in a time when campus fiction was also going through an aesthetic crisis. The crises on the campus and the crisis in campus fiction indicate a turning point, where creative solutions can be identified, despite their potential controversy.

Keywords

• campus fiction
• controversy
• crisis
• cultural politics
• gender roles
• morality
• power dynamics