Digital Commons Network^™

Reading The Culture Wars In The New Academic Novel, 1984-Present, Ian Butcher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The “new academic novel” emerged in the 1980s as what had previously been a cloistered, insular genre began to engage much more directly with the social and political import of universities and the people who work in them. I argue that an important strand of this development centres on a group of novels that through their depiction of recent developments in academia—the threat of political correctness, the so-called theory wars, the growth of contingent labour, and the elevation of a corporate logic above educational concerns—document the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant logic of American higher education and the American …