Marcos Campillo Fenoll (West Chester University of Pennsylvania)

The academic world has become an interesting topic in recent literature in Spanish, with protagonists that represent a professor’s research inquiry, professor-student relationships, college life, or students’ issues, in what some have denominated “campus novels” or “academic novels.” While this topic has been a well-known presence in English language literature since the 1950s, it has just recently started to appear in best-sellers from Spain such as Javier Cercas’ “La velocidad de la luz” or María Dueñas’ “Misión Olvido”, as well as “2666” by Chilean Roberto Bolaño, “El puñal de Dido” by Argentinean Carlos Balmaceda or “El vano ayer” by the Spanish writer Isaac Rosa; just to name a few. In some of these cases, writers of these novels are also (or have been) professors themselves, so their representations of the academic world becomes at times a reflection of their own personal experiences, with some biographical elements attached to them. This panel seeks to explore how writers in Spanish and Portuguese (from the Iberian Peninsula as well as Latin America) have portrayed and critiqued the academia and the world of higher education through their works, and how they have used this theme as a way to explore interpersonal and professional relationships that take place in this world, as well as the philosophical queries that are inherent to higher education. Presentations will explore any literary form (novel, short stories, drama) in both Spanish and Portuguese in which academia becomes the main setting of the work.

The academic world has become an interesting topic in recent literature in Spanish, with protagonists that represent a professor’s research inquiry, professor-student relationships, college life, or students’ issues, in what some have denominated “campus novels” or “academic novels.” This panel seeks to explore how writers in Spanish and Portuguese (from the Iberian Peninsula as well as Latin America) have portrayed and critiqued the academia and the world of higher education through their works, and how they have used this theme as a way to explore interpersonal and professional relationships that take place in this world, as well as the philosophical queries that are inherent to higher education.