Courses / Module

How have writers used the university as a setting for novels about young people’s experiences and aspirations? How has our understanding of what university education might mean for the individual evolved over the twentieth century and into our own time? Is the university a utopian place where students enjoy unique opportunities to educate themselves and to form relationships with their peers? Does university education enable young people to overcome inequalities of class, gender or race? Or do universities tend merely to reproduce, or even reinforce, social inequality? Beginning with Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), a bleak account of an English working-class man’s obsession with Oxford University (called “Christminster” in the novel), we will then explore Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) – a classic account of the freedoms and pleasures enjoyed by two young male students at Oxford before the Second World War. Moving forward to the contemporary elite American university, as it is depicted in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2006), we will explore how the increased presence of women and people of colour in institutions of higher education has contributed to complicating our ideas about “universal” cultural values. We will conclude with a recent best-selling narrative about an Irish university, Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), which demonstrates the impact of economic crisis and Irish politics on the lives of the students depicted in the narrative.