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Jim Dixon, the protagonist of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, is a historical type associated with the post-World War II agenda of broadening the class basis of the British education system. Yet this character also generates meaning through the prism of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau points out that the resistant relationship between individuals and systems of power in their societies often can be glimpsed through the private individuals’ consumer practices and the spaces in which these practices occur. Jim Dixon lives in---and resists---the hegemonic structure of the University at which he is employed yet where he is made to feel that he does not belong to the various spaces he occupies. He functions as a figure of resistant aliened otherness in the spaces and temporal zones that the book has constructed for him. The novel explores the avenues through which Jim subverts authority, ultimately inviting the reader to resist as well.
June 2003: Casey Clabough, a 2005 Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Assistant Professor of English at Lynchburg College (USA), is the author of the books Elements: The Novels of James Dickey and Experimentation and Versatility: The Early Novels and Short Fiction of Fred Chappell, as well as a broad range of essays in journals such as Contemporary Literature, The Sewanee Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review.