The Contemporary Novel’s Containment of Multitudes: Poetic Citation and Intertextual Framing in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days

Abstract: This essay explores the novelistic practice of poetic citation as a response to literary influence and the continuing relevance of poetic insight with respect to the contemporary novel’s concern with the value of literature in the political present. I argue for a new understanding of the exchange of textual energies between poetry and the novel as a dislodging and reframing of frames of reading, a critical perspective that best reflects the impact of the event of catastrophe on the novel’s registering of trauma and the marking of wounded bodies and psyches. Through an analysis of Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days , I present two opposed novelistic investments in poetry and literary tradition, differences that hinge upon the need to enlist poetic truth in favor of a consolidation of ethical vision. I examine the ways and extent through which poetry resists this outside appropriation by articulating its urgent truths at the boundaries of textual situations, unfolding an otherness within novelistic prose which shifts interpretation and adjusts our image of contemporary conditions as represented through the novels analyzed.