Culture and identity : the academic setting in Philip Roth's The Human Stain and Francine Prose's Blue angel
The academic novel is a genre that continues to expand in both scholarship and 
critical review. The Human Stain by Philip Roth and Blue Angel by Francine Prose are 
examples of the evolution of this genre. Both novels are set on Northern New England 
college campuses and look at the absurdities and hypocrisies present in contemporary 
American society. 
In the introduction to this study, I look at the history and background of the 
academic novel and investigate some of the literary characteristics associated with the 
genre. I go on to give brief background information on novelists Philip Roth and 
Francine Prose and conclude with a synopsis of The Human Stain and Blue Angel. 
The first chapter explores some of the comments and observations about modern 
American culture articulated by each of these novels. I give particular attention to the 
issues of sex and sexuality, collegiality, family, racism, feminism, and political 
correctness. I view each issue in terms of how it affects various characters and discuss 
the role of the academic setting. 
In the second chapter I examine identity and the role of the college campus in 
identity construction. I specifically focus on Roth’s characters Coleman Silk, a professor 
of Classics and his lover Faunia Farley, a college janitor and on Prose’s character Ted 
Swenson, a professor of fiction writing. In each chapter I draw conclusions as well as 
form personal opinions resulting from research I have done for this study. I conclude with my thoughts on where the genre of the academic novel is headed 
and whether I believe that these two academic novels by Roth and Prose are effective 
vehicles to provide commentary on contemporary American society.
Tragedy and Farce in Roth's: The Human Stain
Abstract Philip Roth has called his recent three novels “a thematic trilogy.” They all deal, he explains, with the “historical moments in postwar American life that have had the greatest impact on my generation”: the McCarthy era, the Vietnam War, and 1998, the year of Bill Clinton's impeachment (McGrath, “Interview” 8).1 In American Pastoral (1997), a handsome, honest, hardworking businessman and Jewish athletic hero, Seymour (“Swede”) Levov, is ruined by the actions of daughter Merry, an anti-Vietnam War activist, who “brings the war home” to folks in New Jersey by setting off a bomb in the local post office.
Unity Identity Text Self
Abstract Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.