Disrupted Intersubjectivity

Andrei Ionescu is a Staff Writer at Earth: Nature, Science, Life (www.earth.com). He holds a PhD from the University of Padua, Italy, and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Bucharest, Romania, Ghent University, Belgium, and Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Saudi Arabia. Ionescu’s areas of research include cognitive and medical humanities, posthumanism, animal studies, and ecocriticism.

• 1. Introduction: Ian McEwan’s Intuition Pumps1.1. Theoretical and Methodological Framework1.2. Forms of Intersubjectivity1.3. Blindness and Insight in Contemporary Cognitive Scientific and Philosophical Accounts of Intersubjectivity2. Sexual Breakdowns2.1. A Brief Look at Sexuality in Ian McEwan’s and D.H. Lawrence’s Works2.2. Blood-Knowledge as a Vestigial Form of Primary Intersubjectivity2.3. One of the Most Desolate Couplings Known to Copulating Humanity: Homemade Sexual Initiation2.4. Always Bound by History and Our Guilty Natures: Sexual Failure on Chesil Beach2.5. The Success of Failure, or the Heuristic Potential of McEwan’s Works in Understanding Sexuality3. Clashes of Worldviews3.1. Science vs. Religion vs. Art in McEwan’s Works3.2. In a Mess of Their Own Unmaking: Enduring Love’s Paralytics3.3. Their Fatal Lack of Cooperation: Corrupted Teamwork in Enduring Love3.4. The Dangers of Monomaniac Worldviews4. Coda4.1. The Hermeneutic and Heuristic Potential of the Concepts of Paralysis and Invasion4.2. Topics for Further ResearchBibliographyIndex

This cognitive thematic reading of Ian McEwan’s fiction is a sympathetic and enlightening approach to several of the author’s novels, importantly enriched by Ionescu’s scrupulous application of philosophical and cognitive theories. His exhaustive attention to a very broad range of sources in philosophical and scientific epistemological theory makes the book more than a reading of a single author, but also a reference source for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive literary theory and criticism. The combination of wide and responsible reading in ancillary fields of study with McEwan’s well-known and well-respected fiction makes this book a good place for readers new to this growing area of literary study to begin learning about it.