The Pathologies Of Modernity And The Communicative Appeal

Ian Russell McEwan is one of the most influential contemporary British authors.Saturday is one of the masterpieces of McEwan’s socially conscious literature written in his later period.Set on the highly modernized and mechanized metropolitan of London,Saturday is a 24-hour narrative that records the life of Henry Perowen,a neurosurgeon,from the early morning of Saturday to the dawn of Sunday.The experience of Perowne on this day reflects many problems of modern society.Some scholars at home and abroad have analyzed the problems of modern society from the perspectives of politics,culture,communication and psychology,but few study the modernity crisis from the perspective of social structure and few touch upon the communicative redemptive power embodied in the novel.Based on Jürgen Habermas’ s theory on modernity,this thesis analyzes the pathologies of modernity in Saturday from the perspective of social structures of the lifeworld and the public sphere,and explores the redemptive power of literary communication and ordinary rational communication embodied in the novel.In this way,the thesis tries to reveal McEwan’s in-depth thinking on modern society and his great social responsibility as a novelist.