Victors and Victims in the Classroom’s War of Words in Francine Prose’s Blue Angel

Abstract Anglo-American campus novels are populated by highly quarrelsome professors whose perennial race, inter alia, for jobs, tenure, power, prizes, and fame inclines them to wage inter- and intradepartmental culture and turf wars. Francine Prose’s Blue Angel (2000), a National Book Award Finalist and an exemplary Clinton-era novel, injects some new life into this competition trope by bringing it to bear on a few Euston College undergraduate students’ weekly round-table discussion of each other’s fictional stories during a creative writing workshop conducted by Ted Swenson, a middle-aged professor and writer in residence. This study builds on the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR to open up novel spaces of perception vis-à-vis the collisions and collusions marking the said ritualistic academic practice and to account for its ultimate failure. The students’ exchange of critical arrows, so to speak, betraying their desire to assert themselves and to inflict a crushing defeat on their rivals, brings out both the best and the beast in them. On the other hand, Swenson’s unbefitting passion for his troubled and troubling student, Angela Argo, I argue, is the curse of the course as it causes him to breach the protocol of debate, alienate his mentees, discredit the notion of leadership, and lose his job.