Abstract
This chapter begins with the mythology of the “big man on campus,” as well as the prevalence of eccentric characters in the academic novel. This trope of the genre is rooted in the informal cultures of academic freedom: scholars, and to some degree students, enjoying wide personal latitude to conduct themselves as they see fit. These characters, paired with the work refusals discussed in the seventh chapter, make up one of the chief appeals of the academic novel. Eccentrics, youths beginning the world, hermits, degenerates, oddballs of all sorts—these characters are generally celebrated for their defiance of social norms (and sometimes for their defiance of drug and alcohol laws), providing a kind of wish-fulfillment for self-determination. The chapter studies fiction that complicates these tropes. Through readings of Don DeLillo’s football novel End Zone (1972) and Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys (1995), this chapter evaluates the meanings of eccentricity: to what degree does it signal mere personal exemption from social norms, and to what degree does it provide a broader utopian program? And how does this exemption/utopia framework help us understand the possible futures of the university?
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Notes
- 1.
This phrase puts me in mind of a brief piece reflecting on the experience of football: “Football: It’s about the Hitting.” John Churchill, a Rhodes Scholar and Executive Secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, describes the importance of this “immediate experience” from his time as a college athlete. He concludes, “The point, though, is not merely to recall such intensity, but to have awakened to the possibility of experience on that level, and to be able to carry that receptivity into the rest of life. I am convinced that much of whatever ability I have to savor the sheer flavor of life is rooted in the capacities I gained in the intense experiences of football, and that I owe them to football just as much as the pain I feel every morning in my knees.”.
- 2.
This character is, for better or worse, a distinctively American figure, the byproduct of a residential and cocurricular system that is specific to higher learning in the U.S., as well as to drinking norms that are perhaps more prevalent in the U.S. than in many other countries.
To demonstrate that exceptionalism further, consider how this American figure is read in other contexts. In the fall of 2018, I was teaching at the University of Hong Kong, including a seminar on the campus novel. In a discussion of Fariña’s bohemian twist on the big man on campus mythology, students indicated no recognition of the type, no idea that the big man on campus is a persuasive narrative for the function of the university. One student had studied abroad in Wisconsin, noted that she had not met the big man on campus in Madison, and asked how she would have known him had they crossed paths. I pulled up a clip of National Lampoon’s Van Wilder to demonstrate the principle, and they were, frankly, a little bit disgusted. The H.K.U. students acknowledged that they don’t spend every hour of the day studying, but they also stated that they understood the purpose of the university was for learning, not as a kind of surrogate playground. To give the mythology its real-world grounding, I explained that this was partly Brett Kavanaugh’s defense against Christine Blasey-Ford’s allegations of sexual assault, current news at the time of our seminar meeting—that he shouldn’t be blamed for going to parties at Yale because, after all, isn’t that what college is for?
- 3.
I am unaware of a big woman on campus narrative—equivalent to the Cameron Diaz vehicle, Bad Teacher (2011), for example. With a new generation of women comics who are increasingly adopting conventionally masculine forms of humor, especially regarding sex and sexuality, perhaps such a project will arrive soon in film. There could be a welcome effect of deconstructing the big man on campus mythology and the American pathologies that suffuse it.
- 4.
This two-stage method of ideology critique comes from Fredric Jameson’s “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979). He argues that works of mass culture—and the titles we’re discussing here function similarly, whether described as works of mass culture or literary fiction—operate first as “manipulation” of the audience but also as wish-fulfillment of a utopian desire. For instance, Jameson reads The Godfather (1972) thus: on the one hand it mischaracterizes “the economic realities of late capitalism” by framing the Mafia as “a criminal aberration from the norm, rather than the norm itself,” and on the other hand its family structure is seen “as a figure of collectivity and as the object of Utopian longing, if not a Utopian envy” (1979, 43).
- 5.
Bloch circumscribes this system in allegorical readings of two genres, detective fiction and the künstlerroman. Between “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel” and “A Philosophical View of the Novel of the Artist” (both 1965), he teases out the contrasts of concrete and abstract utopian thinking. Because detective work is predicated on the past (the crime, material history), it provides a model for concrete Utopian thinking, whereas the modernist künstlerroman is organized around the creation of something new (the modernist shibboleth “make it new,” a break from lived, material experience) provides a model for abstract Utopian thinking.
- 6.
This is especially true of the most prestigious American universities. According to one study, students whose families are in the top one percent of the income scale “are 77 times likelier to go to an Ivy [League university] than someone from a family that makes less than $30,000 a year” (Fischer 2019).
- 7.
See, for instance, Shawn Hubler’s “Colleges Slash Budgets in the Pandemic, With ‘Nothing Off-Limits’” in The New York Times, 26 October 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/us/colleges-coronavirus-budget-cuts.html.
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Beal, W. (2024). Campus Characters: Exemption and Utopia on Campus. In: Campus Fictions. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49911-1_2
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