Girl, Interrupted: Queering the Campus Novel

Abstract

The campus novel has predominantly explored the development of adolescent boys. Where girls’ narratives have existed, intellectual development has typically been established as a secondary preoccupation, in favor of a central characterization of the campus as a space for heterosexual romance. I argue that this tradition is subverted in Sylvia Brownrigg’s Pages for You (2001) and Susan Choi’s My Education (2013), which reconfigure the campus novel by placing narrative concentration on girls’ intellectual development and queer sexual experiences. Consequently, these novels release girls from the limits by which their stories have conventionally been contained.