Campus and Politics in Five Novels about the United States

Public opinion and many academics conceive the university as a space that is relatively isolated from social problems. Of course, this rather commonplace representation is historically justified: Humboldt used to say that academia should be isolated from political and government interests, if it was to fulfill its final goals —knowledge and culture—.The present essay, contradicting this idea, analyzes five novels: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, Changing Places by David Lodge, White Noise by Don DeLillo, Ravelstein by Saul Bellow, and The Human Stain by Philip Roth, in order to reconstruct a brief history of American academia between 1950 and 1998 which reveals its connection with politics. The concentration of political tensions in the image of the campus also makes it possible to identify the relationship between the private and academic lives of the works’ characters.