FROM A HOUSE OF KNOWLEDGE TO A FIELD OF POWER: GENDERED AUTHORITY AND INSTITUTIONAL INEQUALITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ANGLO-AMERICAN CAMPUS NOVEL

Abstract

This article examines the representation of the university as a gendered field of power in the contemporary Anglo-American campus novel. Drawing on A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Mona Awad’s Bunny, and Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice, the study argues that the university in campus fiction is not merely a neutral site of knowledge transmission, but a complex institutional space in which academic authority, symbolic capital, gendered recognition, pedagogical hierarchy, and exclusionary practices are produced and negotiated. The article employs feminist literary criticism, discourse analysis, Michel Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge, and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of academic field and symbolic capital. The analysis shows that female academic subjects in these novels occupy unstable and differentiated positions: they appear as researchers, students, doctoral candidates, creative writers, wives of academics, and intellectual agents whose voices are mediated by institutional norms. The study concludes that the campus novel exposes the hidden grammar of gendered power within the university by dramatizing who is allowed to speak, who is evaluated, who is recognized, and who remains structurally marginalized.