Empiricism, the Scientia Umbrarum and the Reconciliation of the Two Cultures in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor

Durbán Segarra, Marcos
Onega Jaén, Susana (dir.)

Universidad de Zaragoza, FFYL, 2017
Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Área de Filología Inglesa

Graduado en Estudios Ingleses

Resumen: Peter Ackroyd (London, 1949–) is considered to be one of the most productive and inventive writers of the 1980s and a leading figure in contemporary English fiction. He occupies a central position in the generation of English writers of historiographic metafiction, the trend Linda Hutcheon considers to be the best literary expression of postmodernism. In keeping with the contradictory nature of postmodernist art, historiographic metafiction expresses incredulity toward grand narratives by levelling history and literature to the same status of human discourse. Echoing this, in Hawksmoor, Ackroyd defends not only the historical coexistence of the two basic forms of human knowledge: reason and intuition, represented in the novel by empiricism and the Scientia Umbrarum, but also their complementarity, through the juxtaposition of two plot lines. Thus, he alternates the story of the mysterious murders committed near the churches built by the early eighteenth-century architect, Nicholas Dyer, with the attempts of detective Nicholas Hawksmoor to puzzle out a similar round of murders committed in the same places in the twentieth century. The aim of the Dissertation is to analyse the dual plot and structure and the symbolism of the novel with a view to demonstrating that Ackroyd defends not only the historical coexistence of reason and magic, logic and intuition, as basic forms of knowledge, but also their complementarity, thus undermining the dominant assumptions since the Age of Reason that there is a radical antagonism and incompatibility between them. Together with this, the Dissertation argues that the confrontation of reason and magic initiated in the Enlightenment may be extended to the twentieth century, when the visibility of this separation may be said to have culminated in C. P. Snow’s lecture on the two cultures.

Tipo de Trabajo Académico: Trabajo Fin de Grado