Changing Places is the first "
campus novelA campus novel, also known as an academic novel, is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s...
" by
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
novelist
David LodgeDavid John Lodge CBE, is an English author.In his novels, Lodge often satirises academia in general and the humanities in particular. He was brought up Catholic and has described himself as an "agnostic Catholic". Many of his characters are Catholic and their Catholicism is a major theme...
. The subtitle is "A Tale of Two Campuses", and thus both the title and subtitle are literary allusions to
Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
'
A Tale of Two CitiesA Tale of Two Cities is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it ranks among the most famous works in the history of fictional literature....
. A successful sequel,
Small WorldSmall World: An Academic Romance is a humorous "campus novel" by the British writer David Lodge. It is a sequel to Lodge's 1975 novel, Changing Places....
, was published in 1984.
Synopsis
Changing Places is a comic novel with serious undercurrents. It tells the story of the six-month academic exchange between fictional universities located in
RummidgeRummidge is a fictional city used by David Lodge in some of his novels, particularly Changing Places, Small World: An Academic Romance, and Nice Work...
(modelled on
BirminghamThe University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...
in England) and Plotinus, in the state of Euphoria (modeled on
BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
in
CaliforniaCalifornia is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
). The two academics taking part in the exchange are both aged 40, but appear at first to otherwise have little in common, mainly because of the differing academic systems of their native countries.
The English participant, Philip Swallow, is a very conventional and conformist British academic, and somewhat in awe of the American way of life. By contrast the American, Morris Zapp, is a top-ranking American professor who only agrees to go to Rummidge because his wife agrees to postpone long-threatened divorce proceedings on condition that he move out of the marital home for six months. Zapp is at first both contemptuous of, and amused by, what he perceives as the amateurism of British academia.
As the exchange progresses, however, both Swallow and Zapp find that they begin to fit in surprisingly well to their new environments. In the course of the story, both men have affairs with the other's wife. But before that, Swallow even sleeps with Zapp's daughter Melanie, without realizing who she is. She, however, takes up with a former undergraduate student of his, Charles Boon.
Swallow and Zapp even consider remaining permanently. The book ends with the two couples convened in a New York hotel room to decide their fates. The novel ends without a clear-cut decision. However, from the sequel
Small World: An Academic RomanceSmall World: An Academic Romance is a humorous "campus novel" by the British writer David Lodge. It is a sequel to Lodge's 1975 novel, Changing Places....
, Swallow and Zapp returned to their respective countries and domestic situations.
Biographical basis
David Lodge has stated that the character of Morris Zapp was inspired by the literary critic
Stanley FishStanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island...
.
External links