East-West in Academic Fiction: An Unequal Exchange?
East-West in Academic Fiction: An Unequal Exchange?

Summary/Abstract: The East-West exchange in academic fiction is seriously unbalanced, with Anglo-American novels far more common and more widely read, even in Eastern Europe, than academic novels from cultures other than the US and the UK and languages other than English. Or so I will argue, with considerable evidence to support this claim. I will discuss this imbalance and offer some suggested reasons for it, including one obvious reason—disparity in multilingual readers—and some more speculative ones including posited differences between east and west in how seriously they take the university as a setting and subject for academic fiction. I argue that Anglo-American writers, by contrast with their Eastern European counterparts, paradoxically take the university more seriously—that is, seeing the university, professors, and academic life as entirely suitable for representation in fiction, despite dissenting voices—and less seriously—that is, showing a willingness to satirize and burlesque academic life that, at least to some observers, is not just irreverent but irresponsible. Examples to support these theses will be provided but, in a way that may demonstrate their truth, most of these will be from the AngloAmerican literary world, with a much smaller number of European examples.

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