In the 2022 novel “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin ’00, Sam Masur pitches a business proposal to his friend Sadie at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. “Everything I Never Told You” (2014) by Celeste Ng ’02 uses the River Houses near the John Weeks Footbridge to set a graduate-student love interest. And Selin Karadağ from “The Idiot” (2017) by Elif Batuman ’99 meets up with senior crush Ivan on the Widener Library steps.
Harvard’s campus has long served as the setting for narrative works by alumni as well as many others.
Beth Blum, Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities, teaches an English Department course that explores books, films, television episodes, and even comics that engage with Harvard as object of cultural intrigue and critique. In her course, students discuss themes of belonging, tradition, privilege, and competition, research authors’ personal histories in the Archives, and even experiment with writing their own Harvard narratives.
In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Blum discusses the longstanding appeal of the genre, for both writers and readers.
What counts as a “Harvard Novel”? How do you define the genre?
I see the Harvard novel as a subset of campus fiction, which is simply any fiction set on a college campus — a classic example would perhaps be “Lucky Jim” by Kingsley Amis from 1954. These books are often either concerned with the tribulations of a professor who is up against a heartless administration, facing their own personal challenges and interpersonal dramas, or with the perspective of a student entering this new world and having to adjust to the realities of a very intense microcosm of the university.
Some stories are explicitly about Harvard and firmly set in the Yard, like Erich Segal’s 1970 hit “Love Story.” Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty,” which she wrote while at Radcliffe, is set at the fictional “Wellington College,” a place which shares some traits with Harvard but combines these aspects with those of an imaginary New England liberal arts college environment. Sometimes Harvard is simply part of a character’s formative backstory, as in “Everything I Never Told You” or “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.”
What are some common themes you see across these types of novels?
One point that quickly comes across is that attending Harvard is often a family affair. It is entwined with parental expectations and sacrifices, but also with sibling dynamics. This is something we see in “Everything I Never Told You.”
Another prominent theme is student-teacher relationships and the experience of pedagogical projection or transference. In [the 1973 film] “The Paper Chase,” the protagonist, Hart, becomes increasingly obsessed with pleasing his domineering law professor, only to realize at the end that the professor barely knows who he is.
The “street-smart outsider underdog” versus “privileged Harvard insider” is another common trope. This is connected to the contrast between creative idealism and institutional assimilation.
Harvard novels can often become a sort of morality tale, where the protagonist learns to embrace their internal values over those imposed by the structures of academic competition.
Belonging is another tremendously prominent motif. The value of community, of the interesting people one meets here, becomes a focal point of the literature.
To what do you attribute the longstanding appeal of Harvard’s campus?
As my students have pointed out, the University is itself an object of beauty and history. But that romantic history can feel incongruous with the gritty realities of daily living, and the best Harvard stories bring this to the fore.
“As my students have pointed out, the University is itself an object of beauty and history. But that romantic history can feel incongruous with the gritty realities of daily living, and the best Harvard stories bring this to the fore.”
For instance, the protagonist Selin in “The Idiot” describes the University handyman having to work around the decorative antlers hanging from the ceiling of the dining hall, trying to avoid being gouged by them. The clash between apprehending Harvard spaces as romantic historical objects, as anticipated by the incoming student, and the pragmatic need to maintain such spaces, with all the labor this maintenance entails, can create poignant opportunities for contemporary fiction.
Another common tactic is to use the University’s compression of time into this four-year space to create opportunities for drama. For students, there is a limited amount of time to make the most of their courses and relations here, so the stakes feel high and lend themselves to suspense and narrative action.
Do you think these books translate the same for Harvard students versus outside readers?
In my course, we’ve found that the experience of reading many of these texts is completely different for a Harvard affiliate than for a reader unfamiliar with Harvard settings. We’ve even found that the experience of reading these works as student versus faculty is very different.
For students, one of most important and consistently compelling aspects of Harvard that comes up a lot in class discussions is the housing system, the different quirks and identities of the various Houses, the drama of House and roommate selection — a sort of updating of the medieval “wheel of fortune,” the arbitrariness of fate.
Whereas for a faculty member such as myself, the Houses are much less central to my daily experience of the University. Reading these texts affords me insights into these everyday aspects of my students’ lives.
How can it benefit current students to read these texts?
One risk of the course is that campus customs can start to feel faintly ridiculous, as if you are living in your own campus satire. But I think this is actually a healthy side effect, as it encourages a little bit of irony and detachment from institutional pressures.
But more seriously, the course makes students experience campus life, and the educational journey, in a new way. Harvard landmarks we pass every day make appearances in the writings, from W.E.B. Du Bois’s undergraduate writings on the Johnston Gate for his English 12 class, to the use of the same Johnston Gate as “the wall” for punishing rebels in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
One of their assignments asks them to uncover a “Harvard story” in the University’s archive, and then attempt to reconstruct how an author’s encounter with campus culture may have informed their philosophy or artistic output. One student looked at the courses listed on E.E. Cummings’ Harvard transcript and how it may have influenced the development of his modernist aesthetic. Another examined T.S. Eliot’s critiques of Harvard’s “elective system” of education, and how they relate to his literary criticism.
On a broader level, reading these texts can help students situate themselves within a cultural tradition that they are themselves helping to shape and define, and to reflect on this institutional affiliation that will forever be a part of their lives.
If someone wants to dive into reading a “Harvard novel,” where would you recommend starting?
As a scholar of modernism, my temptation is to recommend William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” a modernist novel published in 1936 and narrated as flashbacks by Quentin Compson to his Harvard roommate, Shreve.
But a book that I’m actually reading right now is “The Class” by Erich Segal. Like his earlier “Love Story,” it’s set at Harvard, but this novel follows five different students; it starts at their 25th class reunion and then flashes back to their freshman experiences. The double-temporality becomes both a reflection on the novelty of the student experience and a testament to how formative that experience became in the characters’ lives.
I definitely plan to incorporate it into future iterations of the course. I can’t wait to hear what the students will make of it.
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