ИСТИНА ИЛИ ИЗБОР У ЗВАЊЕ: РОМАН АКАДЕМОВ ГАЈ МЕРИ МАКАРТИ
TRUTH OR TENURE: MARY MCCARTHY’S NOVEL THE GROVES OF ACADEME

Summary/Abstract: One of the most famous and most respected academic novels Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe describes the atmosphere at the typical progressive college of the forties and fifties in the USA. In order to enlighten the novel’s setting and topic, we gave a brief introduction to the academic novel genre, with its most prominent features. Since these novels have been written in realistic and satirical manner, their authors usually used real persons and real universities as the models. For that reason, these novels have fictional setting with fictional universities and characters. The authors themselves usually have had academic career, so their novelistic stories strikingly resemble the real ones. Mary McCarthy’s novel discusses ethical issues of the professors at a fictional progressive college. Her main character, literature professor Henry Mulcahy, after receiving the contract termination letter, tells a lie to prolong his engagement. He lied to his colleagues and to his students about his alleged membership in the communist party, and having in mind the academic freedom, he managed to maintain his job. The aim of this paper was to show McCarthy’s novelistic mastery in writing academic personalized satire and her character portraying talent. In comparison to her other works, this novel has been unjustly neglected although the contemporary critics agree that it is one of the most prominent academic satire novels in general.

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