This is a call for proposals to participate in a proposed panel at MLA in Toronto in January 2026.

Higher education had three socially pertinent effects in previous eras of capitalist development. It: offered graduates a pathway to upward mobility; conferred a “stake” in normative society such that graduates could “buy into” the dominant economic systems from which they stood to benefit; and was an incubator for mass social and political movements such as the 1960s student movement.

But much recent fiction evinces a change in attitudes to university – a weakening of the assumption that higher education is a pathway to social mobility for the individual and social justice/progress for the collective.

In Sally Rooney’s hit novel, Normal People, we see the remnants of faith placed in the seemingly meritocratic institutions like the university meld with a newly disenchanted reality. Connell projects forward to his life as a student at Trinity College Dublin, imagining conversations with his peers about “the Greek bailout” and “The Golden Notebook”; how, after graduating, he could go “somewhere else, London, or Barcelona”; how “people would say he had done well for himself (2018: 26). But his decision to go to Trinity, and to take a degree in English Literature (a subject about which he is passionate) rather than Law, is made on the basis that “the economy’s fucked anyway” and his “job prospects” in contemporary Ireland are bad no matter what he does (20). Meanwhile, the protagonist of Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service resists her father’s encouragement to put her college degree to use in a job that might give her “some paid vacation”, “quality health insurance”, “a car”, on the basis that “I just didn’t want to rent out my mind” to “some corporate marketing job” (2022: 58-9).

Rooney and Fishman are two of a legion of millennial novelists such as Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Raven Leilani, Halle Butler, Brandon Taylor, Jessica Andrews, and Natasha Brown in asking questions of the relationship between the university and social progress on the one hand, and late capitalist hegemony on the other.

We might see this fiction as responsive to and reflective of the fact that millennials are the first generation who will be poorer than their parents, even if they are better educated. They are at once less likely to benefit from the dominant capitalist order, and so do not have a stake in it, but are also more indebted to it – having literally accrued huge debts for college degrees. They are politically aware and articulate but often struggle to find outlets for their dissatisfaction.

We might posit, then, that the university and the types of knowledge we expect it to confer no longer offer us ways to remake the world, or even to make our place in an existing world. Instead, and as Sara Ahmed writes, gaining awareness of or knowledge on the world can be “a kind of estrangement from the world” and, relatedly, a “self-estrangement” (2010, 86).

This panel concerns the positioning of the university in contemporary fiction, based on the contention that, while, at its best and in the past, education might be seen to provide the theories, tools and organising infrastructures to dismantle oppressive elements of society, this fiction registers the university less as a bastion of progressive, enlightened ideas with actionable social imperatives and more as a driver of economy. This is another way of saying that we are interested in what happens when the types of world(s) the university previously promised no longer seem attainable or even attractive.

Papers might address the following, or any range of other, aspects of the problematic outlined:

• Comparison in Anglophone university literature
• Genealogies of disillusionment in the literature(s) of upward mobility
• Motifs of debt and the university
• Narratives of meritocracy and/or elitism in contemporary fiction
• The contemporary campus novel
• Depictions of higher education in historical fiction
• The university and minorities in fiction
• The Masters of Fine Art (MFA), the “Program Era”, and the contemporary künstlerroman
• The “quarter-life-crisis” as a crisis of knowledge
• Fiction and recent campus encampments
• Mental health and education in fiction