Literature and Professional Society: Modernism, Aesthetics, and Ian McEwan's Saturday

Abstract

Abstract:

Ian McEwan’s novels are well-known for their ongoing conversation with turn-of-the-twentieth-century modernism. This essay argues that McEwan’s novel Saturday engages with two modernist problematics—modernist interrogation of aesthetics and the emergence of the professional classes during the modernist era. Reading McEwan’s novel through and against its modernist antecedents, Mrs. Dalloway and Howards End, provides a means of understanding how, in modernist novels, a discourse of literary and aesthetic value exists as a function of the tension between leisure-class and professional-class ideologies. The triangulation of modernism, Saturday, and discourses of professionalism in the essay provides a theoretical framework for historicizing the perennial conflicts between theoretically informed literary criticism and “new aestheticism,” “new formalism,” and most recently, “postcritique” within the context of professional class hegemony.