Darkened libraries, exclusive elite schools, looming Gothic towers, charismatic professors, illicit affairs, the tang of autumn in the air… rivalries and obsessions that lead to murder. Why is dark academia such a thought-provoking and alluring genre? That’s exactly what these six authors are trying to answer in today’s round-up.
Layne Fargo, “The Ravages”: I started writing dark academia by accident. My second novel They Never Learn is about a college professor/serial killer who hunts bad men on the campus where she teaches—so it’s dark, and it’s set in academia, but I never would’ve thought to call it “dark academia” until it started showing up in dark academia-themed book lists and social media posts.
I think dark academia resonates right now because so many of us grew up believing that college was the One True Path to a good life, only to have our illusions shattered (elder millennial with not one but TWO useless graduate degrees here, I know whereof I speak!). Dark academia lets us have it both ways, simultaneously romanticizing campus life and exploring its shadow side. My story “The Ravages” is set in a rare books archive (which readers of They Never Learn may recognize…) rather than on a college campus, but the same principles apply. When reading dark academia, we can indulge our delicious bitterness about how higher ed did us dirty, while still enjoying the aesthetic fantasy of crunching across autumn leaves on the quad with a leatherbound tome in hand.
Helen Grant, “The Professor of Ontography”: A 2020 article about Dark Academia in the New York Times says that it is unclear where it began, but notes one enthusiast first encountered it in 2014; Wikipedia suggests 2015. I am slightly bemused by this, because at least in the literary sense the roots of Dark Academia extend back a very long way – for example, to the classic ghost stories of M.R.James, which often feature hapless academics, arcane books and manuscripts etc. But why is it particularly flourishing now? I have read that the decreased accessibility of higher education over the pandemic (and I suspect also the rising costs of it) have made academia feel like something to be yearned after – perhaps hopelessly. This seems plausible.
For me, I guess it’s something I’ve lived. I went up to Oxford in the 80s from a state school to study what then went by the arcane name of Literae Humaniores (basically Greek and Latin). The vivid atmosphere of my story, which one reviewer was kind enough to compliment, stems from the fact that I was actually there! I was wildly impressed by the dreaming spires, but mixed with that were some very emotionally grim experiences, and I think my story reflects that.
M.L. Rio, “Weekend at Berties”: A lot of odd things happened in 2020; one was that sales numbers and namechecks for my debut novel, If We Were Villains, had a dramatic upswing three years post-publication. Most books do well when they come out or don’t do well at all. Villains seemed doomed to the dustbin early on and I had pivoted away from my pipe-dream career as an author to my “day job” as an academic. But early in the pandemic something shifted. Suddenly “dark academia,” a term I had never heard, was everywhere. And so was Villains.
A bird’s-eye view of the “dark academia” phenomenon suggests that the core audience for the book and others of its kind experienced a painful academic withdrawal when COVID shut down the whole world. A certain breed of intelligent and intense young people yearning to go off to school or back to school were instead shut up in their bedrooms, confined to their bubbles, relegated to the peculiar hell of “remote learning.” To fill the void of in-person education, which absorbs so much of so many of us for so many years, they turned to literature.
Many people rediscovered a love of reading during lockdown, and at the same time discovered a global community of like-minded readers on social media. Publishers have finally caught up, but the rise of “dark academia” was, at the outset, almost entirely organic–driven not by marketing but by digital word-of-mouth. In retrospect it seems only natural that the vicarious experience of what we used to call a “campus novel” became a source of solace and escape; it seems only natural that readers would recreate the cultish devotion to arts and letters upon which the genre subsists. Art imitates life. You are what you read.
Tori Bovalino, “Phobos”: Within the US education system (and, to an extent, the UK’s), there is pressure for the smartest children to not just be intelligent, but to be exceptional. Academic elitism is the lifeblood of the American university system. When we’re picking universities in high school, they tell us to apply to safety schools and reach schools. When you write off education as being beneath you, it is not a huge jump to write off peers as beneath you, too.
When I was considering what to write for this story, I thought about my own self at 18, going into university: what I thought was important, and what actually ended up mattering to me. At 18, I was caught in the frenzy of academic elitism, thinking that if I didn’t go to an Ivy, I wouldn’t end up anywhere. I spent hours looking at rankings and statistics, forgetting about my own happiness and experience. The experience becomes less about learning and sharing knowledge, and more of a practice in gatekeeping, finding those who have often already had exceptional opportunities and exalting them even more. In this story, I wanted to explore some of the guilt and darker concepts of the stratification of academia.
Kelly Andrew, “The Hare and the Hound”: The rise of Dark Academia as a prolific genre has been largely propelled by both internet and aesthetic, and yet it can be difficult to define what, exactly, it is. Due to the wide range of affiliated subgenres—romance, mystery, fantasy, horror—the field tends to be painted in broad, enigmatic strokes, but the stories that fall under its dark umbrella trend toward the cerebral, often centering around insular depictions of campus academia. While the current uptick in Dark Academia is fairly new, the genre itself isn’t. Take, for instance, Arthur Conan Doyle’s timeless Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, or Mary Shelley’s gothic Frankenstein. Both of these literary classics feature protagonists who are obsessed with higher understanding, often to the point of social alienation. Over the past several decades, we’ve seen similar protagonists crop up in books and on screen (consider Hugh Laurie’s off-putting but brilliant turn as Dr. House, or Jenna Ortega’s recent rendition of Wednesday Addams). Truly, there’s no dearth of stories about brilliant outsiders and their hubris. The most recent triumph of the genre seems to correlate with a general frustration with real world academia. Now more than ever, people are uncertain of their future. For many, higher education has grown into an untenable, inaccessible behemoth—something to shackle yourself to financially, and often with very little reward. Much in the same way we tend to flock to zombie flicks as a palatable, shiver-inducing consumption of plague and panic, the dark academia genre allows us to enter the aesthetic world of gothic mystery and ivy league romantism without laying our own sanity on the line.
Kate Weinberg, “1000 Ships”: So I have a confession. I’m less wound up by why Dark Academia has become a big craze of late so much as the question, why wasn’t it always? Think about it. University and college life, the cusp of early adulthood, a period when the senses are tingling and everything feels more intense: first love, first heartbreak, self-invention, self-discovery. It’s life after the innocent self-centredness of childhood, but before the mundane world of real adulthood kicks in with its jobs and taxes, form-filling and responsibilities, the swapping out of sex and adventure for suburbia and either children or a dog. Then throw in some intrigue, dark actors, a betrayal, possibly a murder, all wrapped up in an aesthetic of toxic beauty, or “a morbid longing for the picturesque” as The Secret History’s narrator Richard Papen puts it so perfectly, and what you get is a world of heightened stakes, darkness and drama. Which, not coincidentally, is the best criteria for gripping, atmospheric stories.
As it happens I do have a pet theory for why Dark Academia has taken hold over the last few years. I’ve discussed this with fellow DA authors, M.L.Rio and Rebecca Kuang and we share similar views. Its rise coincided with the lockdown of Universities during the pandemic, which meant that for at least two years students were locked out of this campus experience, and indeed for some of it, actually locked in their rooms. I think a hunger grew for an experience that was being missed, and at the same time that sense of nebulous darkness and threat in the air was something that everyone could relate to. Since then, why are the number of readers still rising? Well, I guess people have just seen sense.
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