Heroes in campus of battle: biographical representations of university professors during the Culture Wars

Abstract

Analyzing the representations of university professors as outlined by some artistic works published in the context of the Culture Wars, during the 1990s and 2000s in the USA, the aim of the present paper is to indicate a series of characteristics shared by such representations and their possible contextual motivations. The corpus of this imagological analysis covers the following works: The Human Stain, by Philip Roth; Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow; the documentary Derrida, by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman; the biography Derrida, by Benoît Peeters; and Stoner, by John Williams. After suggesting the sociohistorical reasons behind certain similarities in the representations of university professors in this American context, involving secrets, scandals and spectacularization, it will be indicated how these works use complex discursive strategies to promote awareness about a process of self-fashioning, not only from the perspective of their characters and narrators, but also from their authors themselves. At the end of the exhibition, the possibility of bringing this notion of self-fashioning closer to what contemporary literary criticism has called autofiction is presented and discussed.