La enfermedad que pervive: reescritura del mito de la Tierra Baldía en «Machines Like Me» de Ian McEwan

En las letras inglesas, el mito de la Tierra Baldía, célebre sobre todo por su inscripción en las narrativas del ciclo artúrico, se convirtió en un claro ejemplo de mito con un gran peso moral. Y, como todo mito, la Tierra Baldía ha evolucionado y el Grial, que la restituiría en paraíso, ha abandona la función curativa y se convierte en un imposible. En Machines Like Me (2019), Charlie hace frente a la adopción de un androide, Adam, que desde el comienzo se definirá como «el Grial de la Ciencia» y que, poco a poco, adquirirá un comportamiento más humano que el de su padre adoptivo. Las frustraciones de Charlie y la consecuente devastación de su vida personal, con Adam como eje motor, le embarcarán en la búsqueda de su propio paraíso en una Tierra Baldía asolada por la guerra de las Malvinas, donde Reino Unido será derrotado.

Women Empowerment in Select Novels of Ian McEwan

This article is an attempt to trace women empowerment in select novels of Ian McEwan. It is through this article that I would present the empowered female characters in Ian McEwan's novels The Cement Garden (1978) and Nutshell (2016). These three novels are different from each other in their material, plot and characterization. But these novels bear a unique similarity. These novels show highly empowered female figures who have endowed with amazing capacity of head and heart. His novels show that Ian himself advocates power shift from male to female. It is because of this advocacy Ian appears to be a feminist. The Cement Garden belong to the early phase of Ian McEwan while Nutshell belongs to the later phase of Ian McEwan. Unique thing that captures our attention is the presence of empowered female characters in both the novels.

Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction

From climate catastrophe to pandemics and economic crises, the problems facing humanity today are impossibly complicated and planetary in scale. Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction makes the surprising but compelling claim that it is precisely by culitvating a modest temperament that contemporary fiction can play an central role in conbating the despair that many of us feel in the face of such enormous and intractable problems. This new temperament of critical modesty locates the fight for freedom and human dignity within the limited and compromised conditions in which we find ourselves. Through readings of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction shows us how contemporary works of literature model modesty as a critical temperament. Exploring modest forms of entangled human agency that represent an alternative to the novel of the large scale that have been most closely associated with the Anthropocene, Dancer builds a case that the novel has the potential to play a more important socio-cultural role than it has done. In doing so, the book offers an engaging response to the debate over post-critical and surface readings, bringing novels themselves into the conversation and arguing for a fictional mode that is both critical and modest, reminding us how much we are already engaged with the world, implicated and compromised, before we start developing theories, writing stories, or acting within it.

Literature and Fascination_Introduction

Exploring literary fascination as a key concept of aesthetic attraction, this book illuminates the ways in which literary texts are designed, presented, and received. Detailed case studies include texts by William Shakespeare, S.T. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan.

Modern Woolfian Fiction

Virginia Woolf radically transformed the novel of manners, a form defined by a domestic setting, limited emotional range, and the centrality of social codes. Woolf expanded this to include the whole range of human experience, partly through the use of shifting interior voices who meditate on art, marriage, grief, love, ambition, empire, gender, and the sea. With one long beautiful narrative sweep, Woolf turned the novel of manners into a novel of ideas. This expansion has had a profound effect on subsequent novelists such as Ian McEwan, Rachel Cusk, Michael Cunningham, Zadie Smith, Tessa Hadley, and the author of this chapter. These writers have used domestic settings and interior voices to write about the whole of life, laying claim to Woolf’s powerful and elastic new form, the novel-of-both-manners-and-ideas. This chapter examines works by these writers to show how Woolf’s luminous prose and deep empathy, her intellectual control and literary potency, continue to illuminate and vivify the contemporary novel.

A presença do pensamento científico na obra Solar, de Ian McEwan

O estudo de como personagens originários das ciências naturais são representados na literatura, pode se tornar um caminho para estabelecer conexões entre essas duas áreas do conhecimento, aparentemente tão distintas. Além disso, a literatura também pode passar a refletir não apenas o saber da ciência, mas o do próprio cientista, demonstrando que esses dois campos do saber habitam o mesmo espaço cultural influenciando-se mutuamente. Na obra Solar (2010), do escritor inglês Ian McEwan, esse movimento é perceptível, pois, o protagonista é um ganhador do Prêmio Nobel de Física, logo, um profissional atuante dentro de seu campo de trabalho. Portanto, neste artigo o objetivo é analisar a representação do físico em Solar estabelecendo relações entre a imagem criada pelo autor e concepções filosóficas sobre o pensamento científico.