Humanity Biologised: The Re-definition of Human Ethics in Ian McEwan's Enduring Love
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2018-2402-12Abstract
The present study investigates how Ian McEwan's Enduring Love (1997) re-defines human ethical qualities within a Darwinian framework. McEwan's Enduring Love from the very beginning to the end abounds in Darwinian images and passages, thereby, it forms a Darwinian lens through which the events of the novel are scanned and interpreted, from the helium balloon gone out of control to a shared happiness resulted from seeing a familiar face at the airport. Within the Darwinian worldview the novel sets, it tries to subvert the traditionally-considered human ethical actions, like heroism, cooperation, courage, and love and therefore re-define them. To prove its claim, this paper, first, explores the Darwinian framework Enduring Love develops, benefiting from the ideas of literary Darwinists and other biopoetical theorists; then, it tries to show how the novel applies the same Darwinian principles to those human ethical qualities mentioned above which results in their redefinition. Keywords: McEwan; Darwinism; re-definition of human ethical qualities; Enduring LoveReferences
Abrams, M. H. & Geoffrey Galt Harpham. (2012). A Glossary of Literary Terms. 10th ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth.
Bien, Peter. (1998). 'Enduring Love'. World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma. Vol. 72(4), 830-31.
Boyd, Brian. (2009). On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP.
Boyd, Brian, Joseph Carroll & Jonathan Gottschall. (2010). Introduction. Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. New York: Columbia UP. 1-17.
Carbonell, Curtis D. (2010). A Consilient Science and Humanities in McEwan's Enduring Love. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. Vol. 12(3), Jan.
Carroll, Joseph. (2011). Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice. State University of New York Press.
Coward. (2017). www.collinsdictionary.com, 11 Oct. 2017, www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/coward.
Darwin, Charles. (1859). On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray.
Darwin, Charles. (1981). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. New Jersey: Princeton UP.
Dawkins, Richard. (1998). Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Fisher, H. E, et al. (2006). Romantic Love: a Mammalian Brain System for Mate Choice. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Vol. 361(1476), 2173–2186., doi:10.1098/rstb.2006.1938.
Habibi, Seyed Javad. (2013). Democracy as Simulacrum: Incredulity towards the Metanarrative of Emancipation in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. 3L: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies. Vol. 19(3), 127-140.
Hawkes, David. (2011). Materialism. The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Ed. Michael Ryan, Gregory Castle, Robert Eaglestone. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 316-20.
Lannone, A. Pablo. (2001). Dictionary of World Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
"Love." (2003) Merriam Webster’s Dictionary.11th ed.
Mayr, Ernst. (2002). What Evolution Is. London: Phoenix.
McEwan, Ian. (2003). Enduring Love. New York: Rosetta Books.
Pinker, Steven. (2010). Art and Adaptation. In Boyd, B., Carroll, J., & Gottschall, J. (Eds.). Evolution, literature, and film: a reader. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Quillen, Ethan G. (2015). Everything Is Fiction: An Experimental Study in the Application of Ethnographic Criticism to Modern Atheist Identity (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). The University of Edinburgh.
Rogers, Kara. (2014). “Abiogenesis.” Encyclopædia Britannica, www.britannica.com/science/abiogenesis.
Ruse, Michael. (2008). The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates. 2nd ed. New York: Grey House.
Ruse, Michael. (2005). Evolutionary Naturalism: Selected Essays. London: Routledge.
Ruse, Michael. (1994). Evolutionary Theory And Christian Ethics: Are They In Harmony? Zygon. Vol. 29(1), 5-24.
Ruse, Michael, and Edward O. Wilson. (1986) Moral Philosophy as Applied Science. Philosophy. Vol. 61(236), 173-92.
Wilson, Edward O. (1999). Consilience the Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage.
Wilson, Edward O. (2000). Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. 2nd ed., Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
If the article is accepted for publication, copyright of this article will be vested to UKM Press, National University of Malaysia (UKM).
All articles published in this journal are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, unless otherwise stated.
