The university in fictions: reading, aesthetic education and the campus novel

This thesis attempts to address two commonly held views in the scholarly literature
of campus novels: that they do not engage in serious critiques of the university and
that they are insufficiently realistic. It does this through readings of John Williams’s
Stoner, Saul Bellow’s Herzog and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. The readings of the
novels in its third, fourth and fifth chapters demonstrate that these novels contain
auto-critical moves beyond their enactment of a university’s reality that engage
with and critique the persisting importance of university education as Bildung
project, where Bildung can be understood as a transformative nurturing of one’s
subjectivity. Through a reading of auto-immunity in Spivak to sharpen the
understanding of how auto-criticality takes place in these novels, the thesis argues
that the auto-critical moves undertaken by the novels enact what Gayatri Spivak
defines as aesthetic education, which is the ability to tolerate contradictions. All
three novels demonstrate the self-contradictory nature of aesthetic education but
they differ in the degree to which they attempt to conceal or resolve this
contradiction. In addition to this, the readings demonstrate that the novels’
engagement with Bildung enables a meta-contextualisation of two sub-fields within
University Studies. Lastly, the readings form a trajectory that leads to the
proposition of a way to live with the problems of Bildung that each novel deals
with: Bildung is valuable because it allows for its own undoing, and the awareness
that we have upon the undoing of our subjectivity facilitates a flexibility in how we
try to achieve our political goals.