The Contemporary Novel, the Politics of Form, and the Law of Genres in Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know and Saturday: A Dialogue with Professor Peter Boxall

Asst/P Ian Tan (NIE NTU) will first deliver a paper on Ian McEwan’s latest novel What We Can Know and his earlier novel Saturday, focusing on McEwan’s treatment of the relationship between the novel, political crisis, and poetic form and meaning, the sense of the past as it is made available and complicated by textual interpretation and biographical writing, and the contextual interaction between literary genres in the contemporary novel as a mode of writing and thinking about the present moment. Asst/P Ian Tan will next engage Professor Peter Boxall (University of Oxford) in dialogue about matters arising from the paper and questions about the contemporary novel and literary interpretation. The session will be moderated by Associate Professor Angelia Poon (NIE NTU). 

Speakers:
Asst/P Ian Tan (NIE NTU)
Professor Peter Boxall (University of Oxford)
Associate Professor Angelia Poon