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This essay revisits Ian McEwan’s extremely successful novel Saturday, and interrogates its exemplary assessment of the British cultural climate after 9/11. The particular focus is on McEwan’s extensive recourse to the writings of Matthew Arnold, whose melancholy outlook on culture and anarchy McEwan basically translates into the 21st century without much ideological fraction. This relapse into Victorian liberal humanism as consolation for a Western world besieged by the contingencies of terrorism is extremely problematic. Not only does it wilfully ignore the transcultural realities of modern Britain, it also promotes an ahistorical and apolitical mode of critical inquiry which may be called reductive at best in view of the global challenges that the novel addresses.
This article addresses problems of authorship and creative authority in popular music, in particular in view of a pervasive split between modes of aesthetic production (involving modernist assemblage, multiple authorship, and the late capitalist logic of major label policies) and modes of aesthetic reception (which tend to take popular music as the organic output of individual performers). While rock musicians have attempted to come to terms with this phenomenon by either performing a ‘Romantic’ sense of authenticity (basically by importing folk values to the production process) or ‘Modernist authenticity’ (by highlighting experimen- tation and alienation), Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, creators of Gorillaz, found a third way which ingeniously allows them to do both. By creating a virtual rock band, and by hiding their own media personalities behind those of their virtual alter egos, they brought themselves into a position which allows them to produce ‘sincere’ popular music which ‘playfully’ stages the absurdities of major label music business while very successfully operating within its very confines.