Miscibility of Narrative Heterogeneity: Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth as a Hybrid Postmodernist Metafiction

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Khouzestan, ACECR, I.R.Iran

2 Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Khouzestan, ACECR, I.R.Iran.

10.34785/J014.2023.007

Abstract

Delving into the narration of Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth (2012), this enquiry unravels the threads of conventional realistic narrative and avant-garde postmodernist one in the tapestry of the novel, arguing that through the miscibility of these two heterogeneous modes of narration McEwan constructs a narrative meta-design that innovatively adds an enigmatic dimension to the spy novel genre. In his dual narrative that depends on verisimilitude as well as self-conscious reflexivity, he once again, a decade after his Atonement (2002), demonstrates his literary taste for bridging the "past" and "present." Marinating his narrative in Cold War events, and adding a dash of what Linda Hutcheon calls "historiographic metafiction," he makes a postmodern signature dish that sustains its paradoxical hybridity: a representational self-reflexivity or an anti-representational reflexivity. Aligned with Monica Cojocaru's detection of a "metafictional twist" in the novel as a part of her comparative investigation, this study discusses that Sweet Tooth's dual narrative makes it eligible to wear the postmodern badge.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

Adam, Naomi." 'Your duplicitous point of view': Delayed Revelations of Hypothetical Focalisation in Ian McEwan's Atonement and Sweet Tooth." Language and Literature, Vol.30, No.2, 2021, pp. 174-99.
Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge, 1995.
Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Bran, Nicol. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernist Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Calvino, Italo. If on a winter's night a traveller.1979. Translated by William Weaver, London: Vintage Books, 1998.
Cojocaru, Monica. "Metafictional Twist Endings in Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Sweet Tooth." East-West Cultural Passage, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015, pp. 7–19.
Daley, David. "Sweet Tooth Will Satisfy Ian McEwan’s Craving." USA Today, 15 November 2012.
Ellam, Julie. Ian McEwan's Atonement. London: Continuum, 2009.
Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approach to Literature.6th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Johnson, Samuel. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Vol. 7, edited by Arthur Sherbo, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.
Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. 2nd ed., Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Lewis, Barry. "Postmodernism and Fiction." The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. 3rd ed., edited by Stuart Sim, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 169-193.
Magritte, Rene. "The False Mirror." The Essential Magritte. Edited by Todd Alden, New York: The Wonderland Press, 1999. 
McEwan, Ian. Sweet Tooth. Toronto: Anchor Books, 2012.
Pastoor, Charles C. "Authorial Atonement in Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Sweet Tooth." Christianity & Literature, Vol. 68, No. 2, 2019, pp. 297–310.
Prendergast, Christopher. The Triangle of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2002.
Said, Edward. The World, the Text, the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. 1st ed., Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. New York: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Stoddard, Eve, and Grant. H. Cornwell. "Cosmopolitan or Mongrel? Créolité, Hybridity and ‘douglarization’ in Trinidad." European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol.2, No.3, 1999, pp. 331-353.
Sukenick, Ronald. In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction. London: Routledge, 1984.
Young, James. "Representation in Literature." Literature & Aesthetics, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1999, pp.127-143.
Critical Literary Studies
Volume 5, Issue 1 - Serial Number 9
January 2023
Pages 91-106

Files

History

  • Receive Date: 18 January 2022
  • Revise Date: 12 July 2022
  • Accept Date: 07 September 2022

Share

How to cite

Statistics