What Violently Elects Us: Filiation, Ethics, and War in the Contemporary British Novel

This dissertation examines the trope of filiation in novels by three contemporary British writers: John Banville, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. The trope of filiation and the related theme of inheritance has long been central to the concerns of the British novel, but it took on a new significance in the twentieth century, as the novel responded both thematically and formally to the aftermath of the two world wars. This study demonstrates the ways in which Banville, McEwan, and Ishiguro each situate their work in relation to this legacy, by means of an analogy between the inheritance structures figured within their novels and the inheritance performed by their engagement with the genre itself. This study relies on an instructive analogy to similar treatments of the larger problem of cultural filiation by the theorists Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Levinas exposes in his work the ethical and political problems of modernist temporality by critiquing modernity’s rejection of filiation, a rejection modeled also in the lost children, and barren and celibate men and women of modernist novels. Derrida meanwhile provides a way forward with his representation and performance of inheritance as a critical and transformative act, which is characterised on one hand by an ethical injunction, and on the other, by a filtering or a differentiation which changes the tradition even as it reaffirms it.Ph