How Duffy and McEwan Use Characteristic Postmodern Techniques in "Love Poems" and "Atonement"? Flora Leather 12th Grade

In both McEwan’s Atonement and many of Carol Ann Duffy’s love poems, the use of postmodernist devices such as self-reflexivity and intertextuality aid in the exploration of their ideas and the pertinence of questions their work raises. James Wood decrees, for example, that Atonement is certainly “a novel explicitly troubled by fiction’s fictionality- its artificiality- and eager to explore the question of the novel’s responsibility to truth”. This draws upon the novel’s focus on a search for the ‘truth’ and for ‘atonement’ whilst reminding the reader of the ultimate lack of any subjective truth in fiction, due to an absence of reality in the face of modernist realism. Similarly, Elizabeth O’Reilly declares Duffy “explores the way in which meaning and reality are constructed through language” which is apparent in many of her poems, for example, Anne Hathaway, which exploits metaphorical use of poetic devices: “my body now a softer rhyme/ to his… assonance; his touch/ a verb dancing in the centre of a noun” to convey the sensuality of their love.

Self-reflexive techniques often hold the underlying message that fiction is a mere illusion whilst creating worlds within worlds to construct a sense of reality that the writer gently...