La novela universitaria: foro de teorías sobre la ficción y de ficcionalización de teorías

Abstract

Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, both professors of Literature, novelists and literary critics, have chosen the campus novel as a medium to explore the possibilities of coexistence of realism and fictiveness. Their first hand knowledge of the social milieu together with a fine ear for the absurdities and pretensions of the critical modes they analyse provide a sweeping satire of the intellectual and social atmosphere created by anxious university teachers in desperate need to keep up or eager for promotion. The most relevant feature of their fiction is the attempt to incorporate elements taken to be an ultimate challenge to realism and showing them in a symbiotic relationship. Literariness, parody, pastiche, genre self-questioning, and what has come to be known as fictionality are some of the most obvious devices at play in the task of making the novel a mode of formal and imaginative experiment while laughing at the excesses under way.