The ‘Culture Wars’ and Beyond: Theory on the US Campus

Abstract

This chapter will examine the place of theoretical controversies in fictional representations of the ‘culture wars’, the acrimonious debates over political correctness, multiculturalism, feminism and affirmative action that have divided US academic culture since the 1980s. Such debates are by no means confined to departments of literature, or even to academic culture at large, but campus novelists of this period frequently use the professional in-fighting of literary academics as a convenient shorthand for wider controversies. Often explicitly harking back to the academic comedies of David Lodge, prominent US campus novelists of recent years — including Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, David Damrosch, James Hynes, Richard Powers, John L’Heureux and Perceval Everett — find that the small worlds of literature departments are both the best and worst microcosms for culture at large. On the one hand, debates about the literary curriculum and professional tenure, about what gets taught and who gets to teach it, raise questions of value, tradition, power and inclusivity that resonate far beyond the small worlds of academe. It is only a small step from debating the fate of the ‘western canon’ — as influentially championed by Harold Bloom — to debating the fate of western civilization. On the other hand, to put it this way is to risk taking literary intellectuals almost as seriously as they take themselves, and recent US campus fiction roundly satirizes those academics who imagine that the future of the west hangs on their next conference paper or job interview.