报告题目：Ian McEwan's Technology of the Authorial Self

时间：6月6日（周三）上午10:00-11:30

地点：221室

讲座摘要：In this lecture, I propose to read the British novelist Ian McEwan as an ethically disconcerted post-imperial writer. His early works “gave voice to an anxiety about social, cultural and moral decline after the end of Britain’s imperial power had become vividly apparent” (Groes). Both the writer’s and his characters’ fatherless post-war childhoods testify to the systematic disconnection of the public and private in the late imperial and post-imperial country, which induced the growing feeling of unprotectedness among its inhabitants. I will argue that McEwan consistently searches for an ethically responsible literary form to cope with the traumatic defenselessness that, much beyond post-imperial Britain, at least in his understanding became the experience of both the recent world and literature. In this search, he develops a peculiar technology of his authorial self. By tending to provide a shelter to the defenseless characters, it reproduces the protective attitude of these characters toward the other characters. However, as I will try to argue through the close reading of Atonement, the author simultaneously exposes their remorseful attachment to the victims as selfish. As he thus never stops ethically exempting himself from his Doppelgängers, he continuously wrong-foots the reader. In sum, Atonement draws its characters, narrator, author, and readers into the frenetic pursuit of the final ethical truth but repeatedly entraps them in this truth’s provisional political surrogates.

主讲人简介：Vladimir Biti is Professor of World Literature and Comparative Literature at the Faculty for Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna. He is the author of nine books, including the most recent Tracing Global Democracy Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma (2016), in addition to more than a hundred journal articles. From 1996 to 2004, he was a member of the Executive Board of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, from 2001 to 2005 Chair of the Committee on Literary Theory of the International Comparative Literature Association, and from 2004 to 2010 a member of the Executive Bureau of the same Association. An editor of the renowned journal arcadia: International Journal of Literary Culture, he is also a member of the editorial board of several other international journals, including Journal of Literary Theory and Journal for Literature and Trauma Studies. He received the 1998 Great Award of the Croatian Academy of Sciences, the 2000 Award for Science of the Matrix Croatica, and the 2001 Award of the Faculty of Philosophy for an extraordinary contribution to the research and teaching activities of the Faculty. In 2007 he became a member of Academia Europaea.