Title: The (Anti-) Witch Hunt Campaigns and the Debates between Power, Morality and Knowledge in The Groves of Academe

Abstract: Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe is set in a fictional university campus in Pennsylvania in the early 1950s. Through the story of a lecturer who engages in a power struggle to keep his job, it allegorically reflects the “witch hunt” actions and their impact under McCarthyism at the time. The protagonist disguises himself as prey to McCarthyism on the university campus to gain power by carrying out a so called “anti-witch hunt” campaign, disregarding moral conscience and abusing knowledge in the process. This behavior not only reflects the political struggle and its essence of the specific era but also reveals the tension between power and morality, and the duality of knowledge. The specific places and spaces of university campus and the academic world provide special venues for the power struggles. This paper places the novel in the context of the times and attempts to explore the complex relationships between place/space and power production, as well as between power, morality, and knowledge.

Keywords: The Groves of Academe, “witch-hunt,” power, morality, knowledge, Mary McCarthy

Author: Yanfang Song, Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2024.04.007