영국 대학소설과 영국사회 - 킹슬리 에이미스의 『운 좋은 짐』과 데이빗 로지의 『훌륭한 일』

British Academic Novels and the British Society: Kingsley Amis"s Lucky Jim and David Lodge"s Nice Work

&nbsp;&nbsp;The academic novel has been particularly successful in Britain since the 1950s, and its success perhaps bears on the fact that higher education became a socially and politically charged issue and universities lent themselves to be the symbol of changes and reforms in the postwar British society. This paper examines Kingsley Amis&quot;s Lucky Jim and David Lodge&quot;s Nice Work, in an effort to explore how and in what attitude they describe the academic world and social changes in their ages, focusing on the nature of the relation between the university and its &quot;outside&quot; in these novels. These two novels are representative in a sense that they reflect moments of dramatic changes in the history of British universities, one the moment of "big bang" and the other the moment of "black hole".<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Lucky Jim portrays one of the so-called redbrick universities in the 50s, when universities were being rapidly created and expanded thanks to grants and other supportive policies of the postwar British welfare state. Its depiction of the academic world maintains a satiric tone, revealing that universities were still controlled by complacent and self-appointed elite groups and refused to give a real opportunity to newcomers from lower social classes. It seems, however, that the novel couldn&quot;t properly hold its critical perspective towards the outside world, and that failure also caused its criticism of the university to be rather imbalanced. On the other hand, in Nice Work, universities were suffering from severe predicaments imposed upon them by the Thatcher Government in the 80s. In addition to drastic budget cuts, the increasing sense of ideological marginalization and irrelevance in the &quot;real world&quot; pestered members of the academic world. Quite contrary to Lucky Jim, Nice Work ended up presenting a pastoral or utopian vision of universities, but it could do so only after it implicitly endorsed the dominant &quot;reality&quot; of the &quot;real world&quot; which is just another name for the highly competitive and inhumanely efficient industrial world. Thus, what is the most problematic in both of the novels is the relation between the academic world and the society, and it might also be connected with the generically specific angle of the &quot;academic&quot; novel.