ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on the notion of the wounded character/place in Ian McEwan's Saturday, a novel that underlines the "fragmented, irreducibly ambiguous form in which the world presents itself to modern urban citizenry". In her views Saturday appeals to human contact and to imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself, that is, it pleads for ethics and human values in the face of utter despair, violence, and global insecurity. But at the same time, it mobilises past wounds, traces of violence that erupt onto the surface of the individuals, and that of the city of London that bears the traces of wounded pasts. The chapter addresses these issues from the combined perspective of the ethics of alterity, the ethics of care, trauma studies, and vulnerability studies. The author explains the material turn in vulnerability and trauma studies has opened up new ways of understanding the relationship with the other.
