Citation:
Date Published:
6 Jan, 2020Abstract:
Typical of Ian McEwan’s early “shock literature,” “Solid Geometry” has attracted much scholarly comment on the issue of the conflict between female emotionalism and male rationality. By contrast, this paper focuses on the mystery of character M’s disappearance and examines the story’s three impossible events in the conceptual system of unnatural narratology. Yet it goes beyond the current model of naturalizing readings vs. unnaturalizing readings: it shows how the methods of ethical literary criticism can combine with unnatural narratology to yield new insights into the story, especially with the help of the concepts of ethical identity and ethical choice.
October 2020: Biwu Shang is Professor of English at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is the author of In Pursuit of Narrative Dynamics (Peter Lang, 2011), Contemporary Western Narratology: Postclassical Perspectives (People’s Literature Press, 2013) and Unnatural Narrative across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). His work has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Literary Semantics, Neohelicon, Semiotica and Arcadia, among other journals.