The Performative Function of Literature: the Discursive Game with the Reader in Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Abstract

This paper attempts to offer a new insight into Ian McEwan’s novel, Atonement, in relation to the phenomenon of a performative function of trauma narrative. The novel might be perceived as a discursive game between the reader, text and the implied author conducted within the novel’s complex structure, narrational design, the two-fold construction of the protagonist’s traumatised identity as well as the novel’s intertextual and metatextual mosaic. The use of the motif of fiction highlights the performative function of literature together with the trauma narrative present within the novel’s fictional realms and its generic composition. The article’s methodology relies on Trauma Theory and J. L. Austin’s Speech Act Theory.