ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), published in the midst of the political, economic, and socio-cultural ascendancy of British neoliberalism in the 1980s, is often hailed as his most socially critical work. Drawing on discussions by Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams and understanding ‘hegemony’ as a dynamic ‘process’ that is recreated, defended, challenged, and modified, this paper focuses on the novel’s distinctive form of counter-hegemonic struggle that inflects Thatcherite neoliberal hegemony. Anchored in the theme of the ‘absence of child’, The Child in Time employs categories of humanity, temporality, and (non-)hierarchy to frame the neoliberal hegemonic project as a ‘crisis’, imperiling human existence by shaping the structure of feeling marked by misery and the experience-system of child disappearance and death. The novel then introduces alternative discourses under the same categories, challenging the legitimacy of the hegemonic and asserting the necessity of the counter-hegemonic for social renewal and the continuity of human existence. For this analysis, this paper examines the ways in which McEwan uses epigraphs as concise summaries of the neoliberal hegemony particularly in relation to the field child care and education, and contrasts them with the counter-hegemonic narrative that is woven into the story. Last but not least, this paper emphasizes that the novel’s anti-hegemonic struggle becomes diluted at its conclusion with the birth of a new child, who is presented as a devalued ‘biological reality.’ This critical examination reveals the ideological limitations and essentialization of biological materiality within the novel, while acknowledging its commitment to counter-hegemonic resistance.

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