Browsing by Subject "McEwan, Ian -- Criticism and interpretation"

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    A “Culpably Helpless” God: An examination of Henry Perowne in Ian McEwan’s Saturday
    (2013) Pryor, Katherine; Bennett, Ashly
    Henry Perowne, the protagonist of Ian McEwan's novel, struggles with various forms of guilt as he attempts to have a relaxing Saturday. Despite Henry's job as a neurosurgeon, none of the guilt‐inducing situations that McEwan presents are due to failed surgeries. They emerge, as his Saturday progresses, from his accidental viewing of a plane crash, then a car crash Henry is partially responsible for, and finally a visit to his senile mother. It is his inaction during the plane crash that causes him guilt, but after this first event the source of and solution to his guilt become increasingly complex. While his guilt after the plane crash fades over the course of the novel, the guilt he feels about his mother is cyclical and appears as if it will never be assuaged. At first it appears that his guilt about the car crash will also fade, but Baxter, the other driver, reappears at the end of the novel and Henry is forced to confront the guilt he felt he had already atoned for. Henry is originally presented as a character who has become callous to everyday events due what he calls “the growing complication of the modern condition, the growing circle of modern sympathy”. He has replaced his sympathy with guilt, an emotion that can conceivably be cured through atonement, unlike sympathy. Guilt too, however, proves to be an uncontrollable emotion and ultimately Henry faces his guilt and is forced overcome the emotional distance he has created to protect himself from sympathetic feelings. Henry's solution for his problem of sympathy is shown to be both unrealistic and destructive through McEwan's Saturday causing the reader to contemplate new solutions for this modern problem.
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    Theatres of Threat: Modern Feeling and Post-9/11 Consciousness in McEwan's Saturday
    (2017) Abujbara, Amira; Mohan, Rajeswari
    This paper explores Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday using affect theory and a postcognitivist lens. The novel follows a neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne carrying out weekend activities around London against the backdrop of the city’s protest against U.S. invasion into Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11. This paper locates the novel’s aesthetics – especially its depictions of consciousness – in the modernist tradition, but explores how the novel departs from modernist aesthetics by breaking down the Cartesian duality between inside mind and outside world to instead offer what David Herman calls “the mind as distributed” across bodies, environments, other minds, and political discourses. We can understand its depiction of a post-9/11 consciousness as consisting and consisted by quotidian environments and experiences as well as political discourses around interventionism and counterterrorism and feelings of political anxiety, threat, precarity, and interventionism. Drawing from Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds, the paper uses the novel to explore how affect is a fundamental part of consciousness as well as a silent but seething register for personal and political negotiation. In this sense, the novel is located in a postmodern moment by undermining the autonomous, liberal subject itself through its postcognitivist depiction of consciousness. This explorations helps understand how literary works lean into predominant epistemologies – in this case liberalism, secularism, and what Immanuel Wallerstein calls European universalism – in order to critique these epistemologies from within, especially when no imagination for an alternative worldview is available.