摘 要

《赎罪》是伊恩·麦克尤恩的巅峰之作，小说由一位随时可能失忆的老人叙述，描述了一段心灵的赎罪之路。本文从简要介绍该小说及其作家入手，通过分析叙述聚焦、反讽以及预期叙述手法，进一步解读陌生化在小说中的应用，在感受麦克尤恩对人性和罪恶的思考的同时，赏析由其独特新奇的创作手法带来的关于写作艺术以及主题表达的别致审美。

关键词：伊恩·麦克尤恩；《赎罪》；陌生化；叙述聚焦；并置；反讽

Contents

1. Introduction 1
2. Demonstration 3
   1. Defamiliarization created by focalization 3
      1. Internal focus 4
      2. External focus 6
   2. Defamiliarization unfolded by Juxtaposition 7
      1. Juxtaposition of classics 7
      2. Intertextuality of narrative segments 8
   3. Defamiliarization represented by irony 9
      1. Situational irony 10
      2. Romantic irony 11
3. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 13

Bibliography 14

A study on defamiliarization in Atonement

Introduction

Ian Russell McEwan, born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England, is one of the most famous and outstanding novelists and screenwriters in contemporary British literature, only Martin Amis and Julian Barnes can compare with him. One critic of Washington Post even says that nowadays, no one in England can go beyond Ian Russell McEwan. Another critic calls him “the cool, clinical technician of contemporary English prose” (Cowley 42). The Chinese writer Yu Hua also admires him and likes his work very much. He is considered as “the most technically accomplished of all modern British writers” (Winder 49).

McEwan’s works are well-known as black comedy for their themes of violence, death, sex, goodness and evil, which are full of unease and horror. His representative works are Last Rights(1975), In Between the Sheets(1978), The Cement Garden(1978), The Comfort of Strangers (1981), The Child in Time (1987), Strangers (1989), and The Innocent(1990), Amsterdam(1999)... In 1981, McEwan was nominated for The Innocent, since which his name was again and again on the short-list for the Booker Prize for Black Dog (1992), Atonement (2001), Saturday(2005), and On Chesil Beach (2007) respectively. And in 1998, he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel Amsterdam.

McEwan’s childhood was spent in exile and drift. With his parents, he floundered from England to Germany, and to Libya. When he was 11 years old, he was sent back to England and went into a boarding school called Woolverstone Hall School. Being shy and sensitive, McEwan had a special time there. When it came to the life of Woolverstone Hall School, he once used a phrase — “sexual hell” to describe it. That turbulent period of time has affected his later writings greatly. In 1970, after graduating from the University of Sussex in 1967, he applied and entered into the “creative writing course” opened by Malcolm Bradbury. In 1975, he published his first short story collection First love, Last Rights and got the prize for Somerset Maugham Award in 1976.

Atonement was published in 2001 and generally regarded as one of McEwan’s best works and one of the most celebrated books in recent years. Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award (2003), the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). John Updike writes about the novel in New Yorker that “Ian McEwan, whose novels have tended to be short, smart, and saturnine, has produced a beautiful and majestic fictional panorama in Atonement (80)”.