With Ian McEwan and Saturday, we are straying across the Atlantic to provide a point of comparison to the American fiction we're reading this quarter. McEwan has been fairly prolific. Born in 1948, he has produced not only Saturday (2005) and the award-winning Atonement (2001), but also a long list of earlier works that earned him the title of "Ian Macabre." In The Cement Garden (1978), Enduring Love (1997), and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), McEwan explores themes such as incest and the "enduring" love of a stalker for his prey. Also manifest in these early works is McEwan's growing preoccupation with the battle between reason and unreason, science and religion, and chaos and ethics--themes that will find their culmination in the work we'll be reading for class.
In many ways, McEwan's career, and particularly his work in Saturday, illustrate a return to ethics and a new humanism in twenty-first century letters. Hailed as one of the first great works composed subsequent to 9-11, Saturday has also consistently come under fire for its adherence to the tenets of formal realism and its reliance on traditional humanistic discourse as an antidote to the "barbarism" of the terrorists' threat. How might we read McEwan's rendering of the life of Perowne? What does the style of the novel and its interest in science and reason say about McEwan's discursive preoccupations? What does it say about the rupture that terror can create in the everyday? Is it, as some critics have argued, a somewhat conservative novel? Can a novel be conservative?
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