Displaced Academe: Fictionalized Easts and Wests as Lieux de Mémoire
Displaced Academe: Fictionalized Easts and Wests as Lieux de Mémoire

Summary/Abstract: This essay engages with campus/academic/university novels (depending on the chosen classification) placed (conspicuously) outside the comic-satiric tradition of the genre: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December, André Aciman’s Harvard Square and Patrick McGuinness’s The Last Hundred Days. It proposes to highlight the ways in which the idea of and obsession with memory is fleshed out in these novels by drawing on Pierre Nora’s concept of “lieux de mémoire” and on Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting. The argumentation aims at evincing the self-referentiality at work in fiction, memory and language.

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