Ian McEwan Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

" Themes of sexuality, particularly in excessive and extraordinary forms, can readily merge into the grotesque to ameliorate their depiction and thematic impact. Ian McEwan’s early fiction best exemplifies such inclinations. The psychologically violent and excessive world of McEwan’s early fiction is basically conceived in the milieu of sex and through grotesque representations. In this relation, the present work selectively focuses on “Solid Geometry” from First Love, last Rites (1975) and “Reflections of a kept Ape” and “Dead as they Come” from In between the Sheets (1978) to illustrate the implication and range of the grotesque in McEwan’s short fiction. The selected stories are discussed for their portrayal of the grotesque, as represented through transgressive partnership and deviant sexuality. The portrayal of sexuality in McEwan’s early short fiction offers a variety of the grotesque types of narrative mingling the mode both with the fantastic and the caricature."

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- Ian McEwan, The Grotesque, First Love Last Rites, In Between the Sheet

While the tragedy of Enduring Love's plot might seem obvious, the significance of Ian McEwan's novel's tragic elements is that they could be found in several layers and do not merely lie in the unfortunate incident with which the first chapter commences or even its aftermath. The life of Joe Rose, the novel's protagonist, changes drastically after the traumatic experience, and the neglected elements in his life reappear as tragic elements. In this study, modern tragedy and Joe Rose's situation as a modern tragic hero caught in uncertainties are discussed to point out the inevitability of John Logan's tragic fall, and Joe's failure in the time of crisis and his own life.

- by Midia Mohammadi
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- Modernist fiction, Novel, Ian McEwan, Tragedy

In Reading as Interaction, Nathalie Schwering argues that the activity of reading turns fiction into a physiological reality: reading fiction can produce real emotions in readers, and these emotions can bias readers’ moral judgments of characters, texts, and even authors. Ian McEwan’s texts teem with moral issues of trust, guilt, confession, deception and complicity, unreliability, and the blurring of reality and fiction, and because of this, reader reactions to them can be emotional and divided, and debates about them tend to be heated. Schwering uses findings from behavioural biology and moral psychology to identify narrative strategies that bias readers in specific ways, and to analyse the impact of affective and cognitive biases, heuristics, and moral emotions on readers’ judgments. She argues that understanding the biological roots of narrative manipulation can help us question our own reactions, biases, and judgments as well as those of others, and that these skills transgress the boundaries of reading fiction.

- by Nathalie Schwering
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- Moral Psychology, Literary Theory, Reader Response, Ian McEwan
- by Tayler Malivuk
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- Contemporary British Literature, Ian McEwan

“They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.” (3). The first lines of Ian McEwan’s masterpiece On Chesil Beach present the background of British courtship that, until the sexual revolution in the 1960s, consisted of repression and license. In July 1962 two young newlyweds, Florence and Edward, raised in two distinct realities, are to spend their wedding night at a Georgian hotel and consummate their marriage according to society’s expectations. It was still a time during which talking about sexuality was unconceivable, and the young would reach the age of marriage lacking the self-confidence to act as spontaneously as the instinct would command. Chesil Beach on the Dorset coast is where the scene is to take place; it plays a crucial role along the entire novel, as it becomes emblematic not only of the call of the upcoming sexual revolution, but also of the perfect place of escape, and, finally, of the ultimate chance to make up for one’s mistakes. The innocent protagonists both fear the wedding night, whose procedures are mostly unknown to them. Edward’s fright is not to measure up the intercourse, but he dreams fervently of the pleasure in having it. Quite the opposite, Florence, who has been preparing for this night with the help of a wedding manual, is seriously troubled by being touched in her most intimate part. Moreover, being their private fears rather divergent from each other, the future of the couple is bound to be unfavourably marked for the rest of their life. The purpose of this essay is first to demonstrate how the provenance from two different worlds might affect relationships, which will be accomplished by introducing the characters of Florence and Edward. Secondly two themes, the beach and the relationship between father and son-in-law, will be examined so as to demonstrate how leading in the narrative they are, and how every detail in McEwan’s fluent and modernist writing cannot be neglected.

- by Federica Rosa Brusin
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- Literature, Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

This paper sets out to investigate the representations of the Tallis house in Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001). The Tallises' country house, one of the main story settings, undergoes a significant transformation over time, assuming a different role and function in each part of the novel. Englishness, decadence, bucolic nostalgia and the idealised visions of England as a rural, pastoral idyll can be numbered among the ingredients that McEwan blends in the depiction of this mansion and of its surrounding estate: not only do they constitute an integral part of its foundations, but also of its evolution on both the fictional and historical levels, since they contribute to creating the myth that still characterises the famous stately homes of England.

- by Federico Prina
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- English Literature, Literature of the 1930s, Ian McEwan, Englishness
- by Paolo Senna
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- Ian McEwan

The unedited presentation text for my first effort at treating Islam and the terror of the other at a shared conference between The Sorbonne and United Arab Emirates University in 2009. This paper focuses on Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, with minor reflections on John Le Carre's A Most Wanted Man, looking at how the novels "grapple . . . with the implications of the implicit and explicit forms of power now wielded by Islam as a nation among nations."

Adaptation is a crucial practice, both materially and epistemologically. But especially in regards to the latter, the impact of adaptation processes has not yet received the attention it demands. Knowledge production is a central concern of the so-called Anthropocene, because it lays out the frames in which adaptation to climate change and other global environmental crises are realized (or not). By comparing adaptations of climate change in Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004) and Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) as well as Solar by Ian McEwan (2010) and Freedom by Johnathan Franzen (2010), this paper aims at demonstrating how narrative adaptation and material adaptation to climate change are intertwined. In fact, these contrasting narratives share a conviction that the gap between the sciences and the humanities and the ensuing failure of communication (within and outside of academia) plays a crucial part in the failure to understand and adapt to the changing conditions on planet Earth. By regarding adaptation as a negotiating practice that is part of knowledge production and representation, this paper aims to revisit expectations and bias on both sides and to point out that neither science nor fiction is entirely determined by scientists or literary scholars. It will show how analyzing the adaptation of climate change can give insight into the cultural framework necessary for an adaptation to global disaster.

- by Solvejg Nitzke
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- Climate Change, Adaptation, Ecological catastrophe fiction, Ian McEwan

Reseña de la novela de Ian McEwan 'Saturday' (2005), entendida como retrato alegórico de la vida cotidiana e historias vitales de la clase media de Occidente en el contexto histórico y cultural de principios del siglo XXI. A review of... more

- by José Angel García Landa
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- Ian McEwan, NOVELA INGLESA
- by Hannah Courtney
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- Narrative, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Literature And Science
- by Müzeyyen Altunbay
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- Franz Kafka, Ian McEwan, Edebiyat, Hamamböceği
- by Irena Ksiezopolska
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- Ian McEwan, Madness and Literature, Unreliable Narrator, Enduring love
- by Florian Klaeger
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- Condition of England Novel, Postmodern Literature, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift

The amount of criticism which overshadows Freudian concepts has never reduced the relevance it carries in the assessment of human inscape. It successfully explains the reasons behind the complexities of human behaviour. Ian McEwan, who is known for his vivid, picturesque, and striking narrative style, is a prodigy in exploring the human psyche. His prestigious work Atonement remarkably stands out in its portrayal of the interior realms and unpredictable workings of the socially conscious. This paper attempts a detailed study of the behavioural patterns of the characters and the role of the unconscious in controlling them. This study concludes that, though humans are the victims of the unconscious trauma, a positive sublimation can unquestionably save individuals and make them fit for society.

- by Dr. M. Mary Jayanthi
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- British Literature, Philosophy, English Literature, Literature
- by Gaëlle Le Doré
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- Comparative Literature, English Literature, Theatre Studies, Literature
- by Sibylle Baumbach
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- Cultural Studies, Cognitive Science, Mythology, Theatre Studies

Ian McEwan‟s 2016 novel, Nutshell portrays an unusual narration in the voice of a foetus. The novel can be regarded as a postmodern reception of Shakespeare‟s Hamlet as is claimed by both reviewers and McEwan himself. Yet, McEwan has accomplished more than reviving Gertrude and Claudius of Hamlet, operating on Shakespearean poetics, and working with many other extratextual materials. While presenting intertextual playfulness, the novel also demonstrates the characteristics of psychological thriller and murder fiction and various treatises on art and literature. These meditations are quite noteworthy in that McEwan pushes the very limits of literary devices; that is to say, he integrates fiction and nonfiction into his novel. The story is told from the point of view of an unborn baby and is based on his impressions of what he hears and feels. The narrator is at a point between reliability and unreliability in that he sometimes vocalizes childish anxieties while observing the bitter aspects of the life he is part of and makes grave interpretations. Hence, Ian McEwan clarifies the fact that seeing cannot be the only source of true knowledge. Then, one can conclude that he is making a criticism of the enlightenment by allowing the reader to empathize with the experiences of a foetus and accentuating the significance of senses other than the eye. This article intends to show how Ian McEwan utilises postmodern literary devices to examine dualities, such as truth-falsehood, reality – illusion, art – life, innocence – guilt, good – evil, Eros – Thanatos, as instruments to question the so-called persistence of classicism.

- by Funda Civelekoglu
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- Contemporary British Literature, Ian McEwan

This is a review of Ian McEwan's novel ATONEMENT (2001), with special attention to its narrative structure, and of the 2007 film ATONEMENT, directed by Joe Wright, discussing some issues specific to the filmic adaptation of this novel's... more

- by José Angel García Landa
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- British Literature, Film Adaptation, English Novel, Metafiction

Since stories increasingly take on pic¬torial and mixed-medial forms, nar¬ratology needs to investigate to what extent nar¬ra¬tive devices exceed the boundaries of a specific me¬dium. One way to examine this issue is to focus on film adap¬tations of nar¬rato¬logically complex novels or stories. This article presents a detailed com¬parison of the nar¬ration in McEwan's (1981) The Comfort of Strangers and Schrader's (1990) film based on a scenario by Harold Pinter. It is shown how the novel creates deliber¬ate con¬fusion (via free indirect speech and thought) about the agency responsible for the con¬veyance of crucial infor-mation, and how the film finds non-verbal means to achieve the same effect.

- by Charles Forceville
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- Film Analysis, Narratology, Harold Pinter, Ian McEwan

The three main settings of McEwan’s Solar, a novel described as “the first great global-warming novel” (Walsh 2010) are significant: from London, to the Artic Pole, up to the desert in New Mexico, these places are all described through the interior monologue of the anti-hero Michael Beard, a character allegorical of humanity’s greed for selfish over-consumption. As Beard moves in the real environment only through the non-places of supermodernity (Augé), the paper ana- lyses the descriptions of settings to underline how McEwan uses them to write about climate- change in a new “novelistic” way (McEwan).

- by Elisa Bolchi
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- Climate Change, Ecocriticism, Ian McEwan

The present paper is committed to the topic of time and narrative. We will firstly draw a contextualizing outline, emphasizing the conditions which brought about the postmodern shift, followed by a cursory survey concerning the cultural aspects of postmodernism. In the second part of the paper, we will review some of the major works in the field of time and narrative. In the last part, we will finally investigate a postmodern British novel (Ian McEwan's Atonement) by using structuralist and phenomenological instruments of analysis.

- by Alex Ciorogar
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- Structuralism (Literary Criticism), Narratology, Paul Ricoeur, Narrative Theory

The goal of this essay is to explore McEwan’s novel, and highlight within it the use of the different narrative techniques pertaining to Narrative time as proposed by Gerard Genette. More precisely, we will concern ourselves with the notion of the temporal order of the different elements that compose narrative time(s), and their presence in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. As it can be anticipated from the plural of 'time,' McEwan’s postmodern novel is frequently at odds with Gennette’s structuralism; an issue which will define and mold the contents of this essay.

- by Dushan Stojchev
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- British Literature, English Literature, Literature, Narrative

Published in a special issue on the topic of guilt, this analysis of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001) looks at the ethical problems that emerge from Briony’s narrative. It focuses especially on the problem of the relationship between the form and content of a secret, and the way that this transforms the act of testimony into a problematic discourse.

- by Peter D . Mathews
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- Contemporary British Literature, Ian McEwan

The aim of this essay is to explore how gender issues are represented and subverted in these pieces of literature, more specifically, within four novels: Atonement , The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Swing time and The Return. Some particular topics related to gender studies will be developed, for instance, traditional gender stereotypes, motherhood and the role of women, non-binary gender, parental roles, female voices and sexuality.
In order to do so, we will consult different authors such as Ritu Tyagi, Inakalia Assumis and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

- by Paola Bica
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- Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, English Literature, Literature

Climate change suffers from a relative lack of moral salience due to its enormous geographical and temporal scale, and the uneven distribution of likely effects. Evolutionary psychologists and sociologists have offered explanations for the lack of political and, for the most part, individual action in response to climatic threats. The essay links these explanations to ecocritical analyses of the problem of literary genre, and presents readings of Ian McEwan's 'Solar', Helen Simpson's 'In-Flight Entertainment' and Michael Crichton's 'State of Fear'.

- by Greg Garrard
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- Climate Change, Ecocriticism, Ian McEwan, Helen SImpson

The subject matter and imagery prevalent in Ian McEwan's early fiction are shockingly unpleasant and justifiably notorious for their portrayal of grotesqueries to the extent that their significance has been ignored or undermined compared to his later more successful works. In the present study, we discuss these grotesque representations and their implications in a number of his short stories from the two collections of In Between the Sheets (1975) and First Love, Last Rites (1978). Our discussion of the grotesque body in the aforementioned stories relies on a synthesis of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of grotesque realism and John R. Clark's view of the modern satiric grotesque, which involves grim laughter and degradation reinforced through scatological imagery. We thus argue that the loss of a communal and regenerative sense of human existence in the modern life style can explain the sadism, masochism, violence or fatality prevalent in contemporary fiction as exemplified in McEwan's short stories.

- by Nahid Shahbazi and +1
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- The Grotesque Body, Ian McEwan, Mikhail Bakhtin, First Love Last Rites

This paper will consider the notions of sight, vision and imagination in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) in order to try and offer a new definition of the author’s visual poetics. We will first focus on the frameworks moulding Briony’s vision, as a child and a fledgling writer. Watching events from the nursery, Briony’s gaze is explicitly defined as both childish and literary (melodramatic), reluctant and fascinated, a paradox which is materialized in the problematic blind spots of her obsessive vision. We will finally explain how the exploration of ‘vision’, as a theme and a poetics, connects McEwan to the literary tradition, as an heir to Conrad, but also creates an original and hybrid aesthetics of montage, which may ultimately have bearing on the ethical reading of Atonement.

- by Adèle Cassigneul and +1
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- British Literature, Ethics, Melodrama, Contemporary Literature

With its obvious symbolical connotations, the divorce between June and Bernard, two principal characters of McEwan's Black Dogs, enables the author to discuss the shortcomings of their two seemingly irreconcilable world-views. June sets out on an inward journey, but abandons social responsibility; whereas Bernard seeks to improve the world through 'sensible social engineering', while lacking an adequate understanding of humanity's innermost hopes and fears. In his study, The Left Hand of God, Michael Lerner discusses the same problem, but maintains that the incompatibility between the two positions is more apparent than real. According to Lerner, the political Left is in fact motivated by fundamentally spiritual values underlying its humanistic commitments, but has become tragically estranged from a discourse that would allow it to acknowledge and articulate those values. At the same time, Lerner argues that those who seek to explore their private psychological dynamics or the spiritual dimension of life should not view this route as an alternative, but as a supplement to political action. The paper also discusses McEwan's preoccupation with the question of evil and mankind's horrific capacity for cruelty, externalized in the archetypal image of the black dogs - and whether in this context, too, embracing the progressive spiritual vision that Lerner refers to as 'the Left Hand of God' may provide insight and transcendence.

- by Nataša Tučev
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- English Literature, Ian McEwan, Michael Lerner

Atonement is a story told to us by a seventy-seven year old Briony narrating herself as a thirteen-year old girl with passion for writing. On a hot summer’s day of 1935 she was to commit an innocent crime that would wreck the lives of two loving people. Why would she do that, you may wonder. It’s very simple, indeed, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. As postmodernists claim, there is no absolute truth or interpretation that can be achieved with the help of logical reasoning or by the consciousness of the mind. The conflict between the different perceptions of truth, facts and beliefs, truth and illusion will always be there. The novel employs both postmodern and classic narrative techniques and therefore, is treated as both realist and postmodern. On one hand there is a reality that’s misread by a young girl, on the other hand there’s a metanarrative reminding us that we’re reading a self-reflective novel. Being multi-layered, Atonement has a strong romantic element, historical background and psychological subtlety that continues the empirical tradition of British fiction, and, at the same time, questions the established values which makes it a fine postmodern novel. As a piece of modern fiction Atonement is significant for the way it tackles the complexities of human life depicted in narration and has a cathartic effect on the reader.

- by Khadija Jafarova
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- Postmodernism, Ian McEwan, Atonement Ian McEwan
- by Lars Eckstein
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- Postcolonial Studies, Ian McEwan

- by Dr. M. Mary Jayanthi
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- British Literature, English Literature, Literature, Ian McEwan

Abstract
This paper deals with the theory of the third culture as put forward
by Ian McEwan and diverse other thinkers who stress the importance
of the interdisciplinarity of science and the humanities as the only
panacea they envisage for man‘s salvation in the contemporary
―macabre‖ age. Having adamantly precluded the role of religion in
any cultural or civilizational enterprise, McEwan has been keen on
drawing on the integration of science and the humanities to achieve a
consummate third culture that can heal the fissures of our world and
provide a healthy, propitious environment for the fruitful coexistence
of disparate forces. It is the objective of this paper to explore
McEwan‘s problematization of this belief in the ability of the third
culture to effect harmony in people‘s lives, as manifested in his
Saturday. The paper starts with an account of the third culture as
explicated by C. P. Snow, John Brockman, and Ian McEwan and
then highlights the aversion of the proponents of this concept to
religion as a possible panacea to the ills of the contemporary world.
McEwan‘s Saturday will finally be investigated as a cogent
substantiation of the professed ability of the third culture to initiate
such a positive transformation into man‘s life.
Key Words:
The poetry of science writing; the third culture; Ian McEwan;
Saturday; interdisciplinarity; the integration of science and the
humanities; C. P. Snow; John Brockman.

- by abdulgawad elnady
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- Ecocriticism, Ian McEwan, Fiction Novels And Short Stories, Third Culture

This essay examines the significance and functions of the characters from the novel Atonement, with special attention to the “minor” characters, and their special roles in the hidden context of the novel. I analyze the characters through four different thematical approaches: social class, identity formation, the power of literature, and the question of responsibility, discussing all the four themes from two opposite perspectives.

- by Brigitta Béni
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- British Literature, English Literature, Ian McEwan, Atonement Ian McEwan
- by Tiago Sequeira
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- Ian McEwan, Atonement Ian McEwan, Briony Tallis

The term intertextuality is coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva, in her essay " Word, Dialogue and Novel " (1969). The underlying principle of intertextuality is relationality and lack of independence. In this paper, this technique (intertextuality) will be discussed in Ian McEwan's selected novels. The novels are Enduring Love (1997), Atonement (2001), and Sweet Tooth (2012).

- by Raad Abd-Aun
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- Intertextuality, Ian McEwan, Atonement Ian McEwan, Enduring love
- by Elsa Cavalié
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- Ian McEwan, Atonement Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan’s novel about climate change Solar (2010) was
eagerly anticipated by those who hoped for a dramatic shift in public
consciousness of the issue in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Most critics found it disappointing, yet the let-down is complex and
instructive, illuminating the cultural politics of climate in the noughties
and the intrinsic challenges of climate change as a topic for realist
novels. The novel is limited both by McEwan’s choice of satirical allegory
as a genre, and by the topical parables that continually dissipate
the momentum of the allegorical plot. Solar may also indicate the limit
of McEwan’s belief in the capacity of Enlightenment science and liberal
democracy to avert climate apocalypse.

- by Greg Garrard
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- Ecocriticism, Ian McEwan, Climate Fiction
- by Sławomir Kozioł
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- Social Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre, Ian McEwan

In its climatic scene, towards the end of a Sabbath packed with events, Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) offers a direct allusion to a Victorian masterpiece: Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” (1867). While scholars have explored the rich ideological, ethical and aesthetical dimensions of Saturday’s reference to Arnold, very little has been said about the novel’s more subtle allusions to another great Victorian work: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Adding an unexpected Gothic quality to the relationship between the novel’s protagonist and antagonist, Perowne and Baxter, these allusions invite readers to recognize a deep affinity between the two men, much deeper than Prowone seems willing to acknowledge. At the same time, these Gothic reverberations challenge Perowne’s unequivocal belief in progress and rationality and thus problematize the novel’s allegedly realist mode. As such, they add an intriguing dimension to Christina Root’s assertion that “Saturday becomes a much richer embodiment of the way we live now if we recognize the interplay of voices supplied by the novel’s intertextuality”.

- by Eitan Bar-Yosef
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- Gothic Literature, Intertextuality, Contemporary Literature, Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan's Saturday explores the tension between fundamental human polarities, polarities the novel shares with many improvisations (texts that claim unmediated, spontaneous, careless, or inspired creation): immediacy vs. mediation; freedom vs. necessity ; spontaneity vs. care and craft; Hermes vs. Saturn; right-vs. left-brain. McEwan's protagonist is both improviser and, as neurosurgeon, careful craftsman. His day provides him opportunities to confront and resolve these dualities. The novel exhibits improvi-sation's formal conventions and thematic features, demonstrating their synergy. Seen through the lens of improvisation, the novel dramatizes the right-brain's pushback in the life of a man almost wholly dedicated to the rationalistic, analytic left-brain.

- by Randy Fertel
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- Improvisation, James Joyce, Jungian psychology, Mandalas

The purpose of this Mémoire is to examine the way in which female authors who were young women in the 1950's have presented their own views of a gender restrictive era through semi-autobiographical novels. The choice to focus on semi-autobiographies is crucial, because those texts have an inherent power that historical accounts cannot convey: they carry the voice of a female individual who underwent the anxiety triggered by the restrictiveness of the era's expectations, and had to find a way around it. Moreover, by adding fictional elements to their stories, the authors can strengthen or reduce some facets of their stories so as to point to a particular moment of their lives, and the repercussions it had on their present self, offering the reader alternative versions for their life-stories
Both primary texts, The Millstone and The Bell Jar, have been chosen because they reflect on double standards and unfair treatments of women during the fifties. They unveil the difficulty to reconcile one's apparently contradictory desires, whether a husband, a family or a career. Both texts also enhance the idea that women have a superior role to play, but that they are deprived of their own possibilities: not by their husbands or men in general, but by the socially enforced cultural values, norms and morals that reduce them to their role as housewife or mother. This Mémoire will also reflect on contemporary media and political movements which contributed to the widely gender-centered organization of society: feminine magazines such as Mademoiselle or Seventeen and their ambiguous advice for young women, and political debates such as the Kitchen Debate of 1959. Then, with the help of Ian McEwan's novel On Chesil Beach, written in 2007 and looking back on the first years of the 1960's, it becomes obvious that constrictive gender roles were not specific to the Cold War era in America. They were indeed constitutive of Western cultural norms based on a patriarchal conception of society.

- by Sophie Toscan
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- Creative Writing, Gender Studies, Sex and Gender, Women's Studies

MA thesis, 2010
This thesis addresses the ethical effects of the defamiliarizing experience of literary reading in the context of a post-critical academic landscape. Starting with a critical assessment of contemporary expressions of a renewed desire for values as an ultimate consequence of poststructuralist thought, as embodied in ‘ethical criticism’ and the ‘return to beauty,’ a contemporary tendency towards universalization and symmetry in theories of literature and art is identified and critiqued as a regression into liberal humanism. Through a reading of Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), the idea of the novel as a ‘friend,’ as a locus of compassion through empathic investments with fictional characters, followed by a lucid understanding of the other, is presented as a project that turns otherness into self/sameness. A case is made for an attention to the integrated nature of ‘artfulness’ and ‘textfulness’ in literature, followed by the construction of a model of literary reading that revolves around (an expanded notion of) Viktor Shklovksy’s defamiliarization. This experience is linked to an asymmetrical ethics, which, in the context of the renewed desire for fixed values and certainties, is shown to amount to the contrary: a ‘knowing less,’ the impossibility of fully integrating the other into the same. Instead of proposing the novel as friend, this model for literary reading conceives of the text as a stranger that can never fully become familiar. This asymmetrical relation to the other is concretized by a reading of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005).

- by Rosemarie Buikema and +1
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- Aesthetics and Ethics, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Beauty

In this paper, I trace the trajectories of Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan from ecofeminist to Darwinist assumptions in their fictional worlds. The essay focuses on Atwood's Surfacing, The Handmaid's Tale and Life Before Man, and McEwan's... more

- by Greg Garrard
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- British Literature, English Literature, Canadian Literature, Margaret Atwood

When did creative writing courses really appear in the UK? The usual story is that the first creative writing programme was launched in 1970 at the University of East Anglia, under the leadership of Malcolm Bradbury. Ian McEwan is often presented as the first student in creative writing, a role he has always rejected – insisting that he studied for an MA in literature with the option to submit creative work for the final dissertation. As Kathryn Holeywell has shown, creative writing was already offered for assessment at UEA in the 1960s. This article tells a more complete history of creative writing in Britain, a history that takes into account the experimentations of the 1960s and the rise of literary prizes in the 1980s – without ignoring Bradbury’s important role.

- by Tijana Parezanovic and +1
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- American Literature, Religion, Mythology And Folklore, Cultural Studies