Tom 22 (2022): Zeszyt 1 (June 2022)

This article provides an examination of the ways in which academic portraiture is deconstructed in three contemporary visual narratives whose academic protagonists are women of color, the Netflix series Dear White People (2017-2021), which is based on the 2014 film of the same name, both of which were created by Justin Simien; the 2021 Netflix series The Chair, created by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman; and the 2022 film Master directed by Mariama Diallo. In all three narratives, institutional portraits of white men are overdetermined as symbols of a foundational, historical, and omnipresent white supremacist misogyny that permeates higher education. Furthermore, these portraits serve to frame these narratives by conveying characters’ positions as both products of and confrontational to an academic nostalgia for the past conveyed through the prevalence of portraits of wealthy white men – and the white male gaze – who have shaped and continues to shape and determine the white supremacist story of higher education in the United States.

Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love stages the classical scholar and poet A.E. Housman at the point of death, as, in the role “AEH,” he recalls his younger self, “Housman.” “Housman” is seen as an Oxford undergraduate; he is a brilliant classicist, driven by ambition to purge ancient texts from corrupt readings; he is also fired by love for a male fellow-student, Jackson, and by a vision of Classical studies as fostering an awareness of ancient virtue shown in athletic prowess and comradely self-sacrifice. His Oxford milieu offers ambiguous support for this combination of ideals; as a clerical worker in London, he fulfils his academic ambitions but forces upon himself and Jackson the recognition that his love is not reciprocated, and, in any case, could not safely be given public expression or acknowledgement. “AEH,” driven by a sense of nostalgia which is also a quest to recover and resurrect his former self, is increasingly led to confront love, in his own life and in the poetic texts upon which he has worked, as an invention – a precarious and perhaps unsustainable balance between coherence and breakdown, between a stoical embrace of modernity and a passionately modern turn to a receding past.

Dark academia is a fandom-created genre that draws on campus novels and thriller murder mysteries and extrapolates its aesthetic affects from the Gothic. At the heart of dark academia is a story set in a nostalgic academic fantasy that involves murder, a close-knit group of students who are obsessed with each other and detrimentally absorbed in their intellectual pursuits. Using nostalgia theory, I argue that the genre’s theme of darkness in tandem with its affects of nostalgia operate as simulacra for the anxieties experienced in academia and on campuses, specifically for its student body. Dark academia as a genre is a reaction to the political threats to the humanities education, which stands for a reification of the value of a more classical education for the love of learning. But, at the same time, while some bathe academia in a nostalgic light, others have criticized how dark academia turns a blind eye to structural issues inherent in academia for generations. However, dark academia is a contemporary genre that quickly evolves in response to those criticisms. By tracing the history of dark academia and its canon development over the years, I examine how dark academia self-critiques campus nostalgia and unveils the academy’s history of violence against women and racism against people of colour.

The article focuses on the campus novels Głowa. Powieść nocy zimowej (2016) by Tadeusz Cegielski and Rektorski czek (2018) by Joanna Jodełka, written to commemorate the foundation of the University of Warsaw and Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań respectively. This article first considers the generic peculiarities of the selected novels and then goes on to present the image of the university and academic community in these novels, in order to tap into the nostalgia surrounding the Golden Age of the Polish university. While promoting the idea of “the Polish university” as the source of clear values, a moral compass, and even a condition of the political re-establishment of the Polish state for the reader of mysteries, the novels prompt a re-evaluation of the present-day condition and reflections on the future of the academe for its members.

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.

Traditionally, the academic community was a small but influential group of intellectuals more closely associated with their field of study than any university or college. Such elements as individual viewpoints, belonging to a community, collaboration in commonly realised goals, academic freedom, and university autonomy were respected (Billot). Currently, the academic community is a specific type of community, which, as Zygmunt Bauman notes, agreeing with Benedict Anderson, is treated as “a figment of the imagination”² (34). Unlike in the past, this community works both locally and internationally, being involved in various networks of scholars and institutions. As a result, academic space nowadays has a less physical dimension and refers to the sphere of values, symbols, and meanings, and the community gathers around the thoughts and ideas of distinguished academics (Rogalski 32). In the 1950s, the academic community became a subject of interest in various university narratives,³ representing the uniqueness of multiple aspects of university life and practices and making critical use of them. In this article, I will concentrate on such aspects: makeup, internal organisation, way of life, affairs, and customs of the academic community.

In its vast range of variants, the genre of the campus novel continues to thrive and be reinvented by contemporary writers. This essay focuses on a specific subgenre, the contemporary Black campus novel, and I intend to analyze compelling examples of the dualism of nostalgia and counter-nostalgia. While some of these campus-set stories are centered on, for example, murder mysteries and social satire, generally the Black campus novel has a more specific focus: the fictional and satirical representation of Black students and academics at university, constituting a window into the social-political events.

With the support of literary and sociological works such as Derek C. Maus’s Post-Soul Satire and Elaine Showalter’s Faculty Towers, I scrutinize Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (2020). While Beatty’s novel creates a post-soul satire (Maus) of the contradictory aspects of US colleges and their effect on African American students, Smith’s On Beauty and Taylor’s Real Life are more centered on nostalgic elements of the coming-of-age process of students coming to terms with their sexuality, family, and their professional future. My article intends to navigate what Janice Rossen calls “a complicated web [that] can be discerned in the texture of university fiction.”

The title of my article bears a double meaning. On the one hand, it refers to a group of Conservative politicians around Boris Johnson who studied at Oxford University in the eighties and who are identified in Jonathan Coe’s novel as the engineers behind the Brexit; on the other hand, Coe’s novel portrays a fictional group of scholars who are more or less frustrated and dissatisfied with the university for various reasons and turn their backs on academia to find their luck elsewhere. In the first case, Oxford colleges such as Balliol where people are nostalgically hankering after England’s glorious past and dream of regaining England’s former glory, play a role as seedbed of Brexit; in the second case, we are dealing with a more private ‘exit’ of a group of talented academicians who no longer believe in the university as a place of self-realization. While nostalgia is a driving force of the first group, the second has a clear-eyed view of the growing hostility of their environment. Historically speaking, the existence of nostalgia here and the lack of nostalgia there are two sides of the same medal: they point to the heritage of the Thatcher era and the deep-reaching ‘reformation’ of British society whose effects can still be felt today. They also point to loss: the loss of social consensus in the first case, and the loss of what the university and a university career once stood for.

In the academic novel of the 1980s, which Elaine Showalter dubs the feminist towers, women characters are not limited to beautiful and seductive students or faculty wives, whose husbands’ academic career appears to be also their own goal. Although the very presence of women in academia is often interpreted as a threat to the male reign over the ‘small world,’ female scholars are determined to expose and fight against gender inequity and inequality in order to be perceived and valued as fully-fledged scholars. Paradoxically, even if women are considered serious candidates for different university positions, they cannot indulge in the same intense pleasures of academic life as their male counterparts due to the overpowering feeling of being the other.

An analysis of female scholar characters and their diverse attitudes towards feminism is based on two academic mystery novels written in the 1980s, Death in a Tenured Position by Amanda Cross and Graves in Academe by Susan Kenney. It is followed by an investigation of the reasons making academics feel nostalgia for the university of the 1980’s, i.e. the milieu before the emergence of the protective power of the Me Too movement and reports on sexual harassment of women in academia published by the NASEM.

The present article traces nostalgia across various campus and academic novels published during the last three decades and identifies different kinds of nostalgia – writerly and readerly nostalgia, vicarious nostalgia, ersatz nostalgia – not in the systematic manner of a classification but guided by the novels themselves. The readings are informed by theories stemming from different backgrounds – the social sciences, cultural and literary studies, psychology and cognitive science – in an attempt to create a productive dialogue, one that emphasizes the creative potential of nostalgia.

One of the central features of the traditional professorial career, the academic conference, can provoke dramatically different responses; for academics of a certain age and established status, the conference is a source of nostalgia. And a number of academic novels, particularly David Lodge’s Small World, celebrate the conference in nostalgic terms. At the same time the conference can be challenged on many fronts, including its cost but, even more, its role in catering to, and perpetuating, privilege in the academy, or what one observer calls “the continued feudalization of academia.” Lodge’s original title, We Can’t Go On Meeting Like This, may have been prophetic, as the challenges to continuing to meet “like this,” particularly the resentment of angry academic outsiders, may overcome the nostalgic enjoyment of the traditional conference.