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Abstract
David Lodge's Changing Places remains canonical among contemporary (postmodern) novels, thirty years after its publication. It has managed to become the epitome of what the writer and critic understands by 'a good novel', namely a type of narrative that exerts so much power that the reader feels entrapped in the story, being challenged to read it 'more than once'. The present study tries to analyse some of the elements that make such a perfect construction possible, focusing, at fictional, metafictional, theoretical and critical level, on a 'tale' about an academic exchange of a British and an American professor, which may be a mere pretext for Lodge to explore the art of fiction while humorously approaching the issue of intercultural communication in a world that obsessively desires to change.
Keywords: change, reality, meta/fiction, identity, 'life and art'
In the Afterword of the book Schimb de Dame (the Romanian title of David Lodge's book, Changing Places, translated as "changing dames"), professor Virgil Stanciu calls the writer "a capitalist of the imagination", inspired by Lodge's own words about what a writer is, in Nice Work, the third book of the campus trilogy: Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988). Professor Stanciu explains that, without making any concessions to the taste of the public, just like Malcolm Bradbury, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, David Lodge is successful with every novel he publishes, probably due to his expertise in narratology and the poetics of the postmodern novel, to his rich academic experience, as a professor at Birmingham University, and to his "omnipresence in the London literary gossips", more or less in connection to the literary awards that he won or that he juried (Stanciu 2003: 269). Antithesis seems to have grounded Lodge's works, underlines Virgil Stanciu, i.e. the contrast between two different and opposed characters, life-styles, countries, nations, university systems, cultures, identified in the never-ending, yet comical dichotomies "masculine-feminine, conservative-anarchic, religiousfreethinker" (271). The irony resides especially in what not only his characters come to realise, but also in the fact that this contrast is Lodge's own dilemma: how should novels be written since there are two obvious opposing tendencies regarding this issue? One the one hand, capitalism, just like the English novel (whose foundation coincide)...