Intertextuality, the Simulacrum and the Academy Novel: A Comparative Reading of Reality and Hyperreality in David Lodge’s Nice Work, Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran

Through intertextuality, academy life and literature, or the simulacrum and hyperreality, are foregrounded in David Lodge’s Nice Work, Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2., and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. The Academy Novel, as a genre, helps three writers in three continents comment on various issues. Amongst these are the two-world nations, the integrity of the university professor, the ivory-tower intellectuals, and the Pygmalion-Galatea professor-student relationship. Oddly enough, the dilemma of the three protagonist-writers has certainly kindled the creativity of the three authors. Intertextuality has been the mode to highlight the ethical and epistemological dimensions of the original-simulacrum binarism. A reading of the three works highlights commonly shared autobiographical strains, self-reflexiveness and magic realism, as related to the Academy Novel as a genre, as well as the use of intertextuality, paratextuality, and pastiche. Ironically enough, these undermine, in a metafictional way, the very reality of the three novels. However, the seemingly-passive theoretical discourses are certainly positive. Whether literary, technological or intellectual, these discursive practices seem to resist the dominant hegemony, be it capitalist, industrial, technological, religious or political. Indeed, intertextuality is the main technique used in the three novels to foreground the academy life and literature, in other words, hyperreality and the simulacrum, evident in the academy novel as a genre and in campus life as a whole.