The Pain Of The Ivory Tower

Since 1990's, higher education has developed vigorously and become a field that affects the view of the society. With the transition of the society, the system reform of the higher education has been merged into the law of market movement. The change of the social ideas has resulted in much awkwardness and heavyheartedness hitherto unknown emerging from college education. In this outward situation, the intellectuals' state of mind and standards of behavior on the campus have greatly changed. It is in this realistic situation that plenty of novels with the subject matter of academic intellectuals come into being, which has become a literary phenomenon that could not be ignored. However, the studies in those novels are rather weak, there is only occasional commentary on some of them. There is no systematic study to this day. This thesis is mainly to study the intellectuals' existence situation, the change of their mental state and the subjective and objective reasons for affecting the trend of their spirit by analyzing those novels on the subject of academic intellectuals.The thesis is composed of three chapters. Chapter One has briefly analyzed the reason why the novels on the subject of academic intellectuals have a poor harvest before 1990's but become plentiful after 1990's. Based on the texts of those novels and on the basis of close reading, Chapter Two has mainly concluded that there is a clear common point in these novels, that is, they concern the present reality, describe the intellectuals' rise and fall and their unrest hearts hitherto unknown during the transition of the society, especially the expanding and struggling of their individual desires in the face of the seduction of the times, and meanness and vulgarity of the way that they achieve their private desires. These novels have depicted the intellectuals' spiritual degeneration in the course of indulging their desires, expressed the tendency of their money worship in the background of market economy, the contradiction between academy and authority and their rivalry for powers and desires, their desires-indulgence and sex-immersion. They have also revealed their anxiety and struggle in their desire whirls, expressed their spiritual imbalance, the sense of disillusion brought about by unbalanced collapse of their spiritual world, laid bare their soul fighting and spiritual fatigue. These novels have also touched the intellectuals' inner world and the depth of their soul, deeply dissected and rationally scrutinized their dark mind and defective characters. It follows that those novels have a distinct tendency of describing the ugly.Chapter Three has probed into the purpose and causes of these novels from two aspects: the objective social context and the writers' subjective creation, in another word, the potential expression of the tendency of describing the ugly. Meanwhile, it has analyzed the influence of the language environment of the consumption culture on the personalities of the intellectuals since the 1990's and the writers' critical scrupulous attitudes toward the images of these intellectuals.