For all his education and his Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, he wasn't some milk-pale type from the groves of academe.
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The 1950s saw Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe (1952), Nabokov's Pnin (1955), Randall Jarrell's Pictures From an Institution (1954), and Lucky Jim (1954).
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The new activism thus illustrates what, beyond the groves of academe, may be America's biggest political problem: opponents' rising tendency to talk past each other, so that disagreement escalates into conflict.
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But I worry that in too many instances, the groves of academe are better at pumping their denizens full of an easy, intoxicating fervor than at preparing them for constructive engagement in a society that won't echo their convictions the way their campuses do.
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Artine Artinian and his wife, Margaret, circa 1998, at their penthouse. Artine Artinian (December 8, 1907 – November 19, 2005) was a distinguished French literature scholar of Armenian descent, notable for his valuable collection of French literary manuscripts and artwork. He was immortalized as a fictional character by his Bard colleague Mary McCarthy in the novel The Groves of Academe (1952) and by his friend Gore Vidal in the play The Best Man (1960).The New York Times.
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Within this grove Plato gave his lectures, and thus arose the phrase "the groves of Academe". Due to this, Akademos' name has been linked to the archaic name for the site of Plato's Academy, the Hekademeia, outside the walls of Athens. The site was sacred to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and other immortals; it had since the Bronze Age sheltered her religious cult, which was perhaps associated with the hero-gods, the Dioskouroi (Castor and Polydeukes), and for the hero Akademos. By classical times the name of the place had evolved into the Akademeia.
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The most famous sacred groves in mainland Greece was the oak grove at Dodona. Outside the walls of Athens, the site of the Platonic Academy was a sacred grove of olive trees, still recalled in the phrase "the groves of Academe". In central Italy, the town of Nemi recalls the Latin nemus Aricinum, or "grove of Ariccia", a small town a quarter of the way around the lake. In Antiquity, the area had no town, but the grove was the site of one of the most famous of Roman cults and temples: that of Diana Nemorensis, a study of which served as the seed for Sir James Frazer's seminal work on the anthropology of religion, The Golden Bough.
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A 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. The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy, published in 1952, is often quoted as the earliest example, although in Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, Elaine Showalter discusses C. P. Snow's The Masters, of the previous year, and several earlier novels have an academic setting and the same characteristics, such as Willa Cather's The Professor's House of 1925, Régis Messac's Smith Conundrum first published between 1928 and 1931 and Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night of 1935 (see below). Many well-known campus novels, such as Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and those of David Lodge, are comic or satirical, often counterpointing intellectual pretensions and human weaknesses.
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