Academia Betwixt: Liminality and Transgression in David Lodge’s Changing Places

Abstract

David Lodge’s Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975) captures academia’s inherent liminality through its exchange academics on two campuses. This paper examines how Lodge frames academic exchange as a ritualized border-crossing, drawing on Arnold Van Gennep’s rites of passage and Victor Turner’s interstructural situations to analyze characters suspended between places and their liminal experiences, Philip Swallow’s transformative sojourn in America and Morris Zapp’s humbling exile in England. The novel’s geo-poetic contrasts – Euphoria’s sun-drenched ambition versus Rummidge’s industrial simplicity – portrays campuses as two distinct geographies where the forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization unfold. Lodge’s formal experimentation – epistolary chapters, film scripts, and metafictional play – creates an alternative “narrative liminality” where readers inhabit a “third space” between fiction and reality. The analysis highlights key scenes which extend this liminality beyond the text. Ultimately, Changing Places transforms the campus novel into a comic but insightful study of transgression in which geographic, institutional, and textual border-crossings reveal the unstable fault lines beneath academic life.

NOTE: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 41st AAAS Annual Conference “Space Oddities: Urbanity, American Identity, and Cultural Exchange,” held at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria, November 21-23, 2014