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Browsing Doktora Tezleri by Author "Erbayraktar, Sibel"

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    Doctoral Thesis
    Hegemony, class antagonism and capitalist policies in higher education: Post-war campus novels by Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge
    (Çankaya Üniversitesi, 2018) Erbayraktar, Sibel
    This study aims at analysing six post-war campus novels Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis, Eating People is Wrong (1959) and History Man (1975) by Malcolm Bradbury as well as David Lodge's campus trilogy consisting of Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988) within the framework of post-war class dynamics and hegemonic power relationships among academics. Based on the analyses, it is concluded that the books touch upon many dysfunctional aspects of higher education with direct and indirect references to the education policies of the time and the penetration of the capitalist ideology into the universities. The education acts, reports, procedures, as well as the governmental stance in each period will be examined in relation to how socio-political dynamics is criticised in the novels. Within these discussions, the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, T.S Eliot and Michael Young will be utilized. In each novel, the residues of the old class-based system in English academia, hegemony resulting from class antagonism, and capitalist competition will be the focus together with carnivalesque elements, such as excessive drinking and sexual affairs at the parties. The first novel, Lucky Jim, narrates the struggle of a lower-class academic, who tries to secure his position at a provincial university in England. However, he is excluded from the academic circle in various forms specifically by the bourgeois academics who find his manners vulgar. His reaction to culture and art is tested by the upper class whose sophistication and intellectuality are already suspicious because of their pretentious attitudes. His senior, professor Ned Welch also abuses Jim Dixon by assigning him all the petty and boring works at the department; thus, building a hegemonic pressure upon him using his seniority and prestige. Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People is Wrong which is again a novel from the fifties, deals with a very similar case, the exclusion of lower-class humanities professor, Treece, and one of his undergraduate students, Louis Bates, by the upper-class academics at his university. Starting from the seventies, the rise of a lower-class academic in Bradbury's History Man connotes that lower-class move up the social ladder via education, yet goes through a painful process in which he sometimes loses his organic ties with his own class by imitating the life style of bourgeoisie. The implication that the lower-class feel stuck between their working-class origins and bourgeois luxuries goes on in David Lodge's Trilogy with characters who display similar hesitant attitudes in defending egalitarian philosophy but adapting a bourgeois life style. Within the discussion of meritocracy, the lower-class academics in David Lodge's trilogy try to rise up the social scale through education. A common observation in all novels is that since majority of academics who find the prestigious positions at universities have already got the necessary network and educational background, the skilful candidates from lower class cannot find equal opportunities of employment at universities. The post-war campus novels, which are mainly considered as satirical and light comedies of their time, are specifically chosen for this study to exemplify the problems of the academics such as low-salaries, rivalry, hegemony and the exploitation of their labour power. The books also picture the conditions of post-war provincial universities, which welcome lower classes or financially disadvantaged individuals. However, it is observed in the novels that these universities cannot resist against capitalisation in higher education, and start to get smaller by losing their funds and members in time. Briefly, universities in England witnessed drastic economic and social changes during the post-war period, and the campus novels selected for this study include subtle criticisms of the fluctuations in higher education.