Textuality Of History And Historicity Of Text

As a winner of almost all major English fiction awards, Ian Mc Ewan(1948—), one of the most remarkable and controversial contemporary writers, has established himself as the “British National Writer” over the past 30 years. His earlier short stories are characterized with tabooed subjects like sexual abuse, sadistic torment and pure insanity, for which he was nicknamed as “Ian Macabre”. His later novels, however, have turned the claustrophobic menace to address the wider world of history and society. As a watershed, his marvelous novel, Black Dogs, partakes of the ubiquity of historical legacies of Europe from the 1940 s to the 1980 s, and meanwhile combines the private with the public spheres.Applying the theory of New Historicism, this study studies Black Dogs to examine how history and texts are intertwined and pays close attention to historical reality. On the one hand, history is textualized. Centering on the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the specter of Majdanek Camp and the encounter of two black dogs, the thesis presents how the above historic events have been endowed with the personal sufferings through textualizaiton and interpreted as the ineradicable shadow of revanchism, lingering racism and the irreconcilable colliding between the rational and the mystic extremity. In so doing, the thesis argues that literary fictionalization of history can give voices to the forgotten and present a potential to even subvert it. On the other hand, text is historicized. In analyzing how Black Dogs is created under the influence of historical background and writer’s own life experience, the thesis focuses on WWII and the Cold War, noting that text is a product of history and in turn it can also shape history. Combining the text with society and history together, the discussion in this thesis also involves the meditation on the epistemological uncertainty, the relationship between capitalized History and histories, civilization and violence, to reassess and recount the past.The thesis concludes that Ian Ewan’s Black Dogs can be best understood within the perspective of New Historicism: textuality of history and historicity of text. By intertwining history with text, this thesis therefore attempts to emphasize the moral dimensions of remembering; i.e., the inescapability of the past, people’s responsibility to face it and their inevitable failure to ever completely come to terms with it. It may be that Black Dogs casts a pessimistic glance at humankind, and that it does so less out of a desire to shock than to drive a continuous engagement with the darker sides of human beings so that their collective future could be positively envisaged.