DOCSLIB.ORG

Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity David Marcus ▪ Spring 2013

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity David Marcus ▪ Spring 2013 Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity David Marcus ▪ Spring 2013 Robin Hood Gardens Council Estate in East London (Amanda Vincent-Rous/Flickr) The nineties were strange years. For a decade after history had purportedly “ended” a lot happened. The Soviet Union dissolved, seemingly in days and without a gunshot. A bloody war broke out between rival ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia. The United States and much of the West were experiencing a burst of economic activity after decades of stagnation, and a revolutionary new mode of communication had emerged: the Internet. But running alongside the monumental was the downright absurd. Americans, it seemed, had not only grown prosperous in the years after the Cold War but also preposterous. In the midst of a government shutdown, the president of the United States ate pizza while he cavorted with an intern only slightly older than his daughter. The Internet turned out to be a blessing and a curse. Life felt diffuse, centrifugal, spread thin. We could trace a track-pad finger across the globe, and yet there was often nothing to touch, nothing to see, and nothing to feel. In an increasingly postindustrial age, our lives felt more and more disconnected, our labor more and more abstract. Billboard hits rang with paralyzed irony. “How bizarre”—as one particularly catchy refrain went—“how bizarre, how bizarre.” 1 Fiction followed suit. The literature of the 1990s and early 2000s was a catchall of voices and styles: experimental and staid, high and low, monumental and grotesque—often all at once. While an older generation of novelists—Peter Carey and Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee and Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison and Barry Unsworth—retreated to history, choosing to fictionalize the past rather than be consumed by the present, a new group of avant gardists—Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, and Zadie Smith—tried their hand at the now. Inspired by the speculative fiction of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, they sought to write the next BIG NOVEL: fiction capacious enough to contain the wide girth of post–Cold War capitalism. But if the literature of the turn of the twentieth century appeared to be a frenzy of new voices and styles, it was also oriented toward a common goal. For unlike their predecessors, this new generation sought to rebuild the world rather than deconstruct it. While Pynchon and DeLillo emphasized the unseen networks of government agents and advertising executives that limited our everyday lives, the new group tried to map out more local, more empowering connections: to mine the present for those rare, fragile moments of contact—those brief human intersections that remind us that while we are all each desperately unknowable and alone we are also in this together. As Wallace put it in an early interview, “We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible.” But “a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain. This is nourishing, redemptive.” This is why one writes and reads: to “become less alone inside.” There was, of course, a lasting irony in this ambition. For although Wallace and his contemporaries were spurred by the Forsterian imperative—“Only connect!”—they also ended up writing novels that felt far from any real human connection. Kinetic, fractal, encyclopedic in detail and entropic by design, they often spoke too loudly, too feverishly, too cleverly and chaotically. In their effort to seek out the human, they drew too much in. Instead of transcending those dull noises that drone out the simpler, more humane frequencies of everyday life, they often found themselves adding to the sonic distortion. Take, for example, an excerpt from one of Wallace’s many chapter-long digressions in Infinite Jest, a passage in which the description of how we experience a thing—in this case, the videophone—loses itself to a seemingly endless discursion of fact and footnote. WHY, WITHIN LIKE 16 MONTHS OR 5 SALES QUARTERS, [HAD] THE TUMESCENT DEMAND CURVE FOR ‘VIDEOPHONY’ SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT, SO THAT, BY THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FEWER THAN 10% OF ALL PRIVATE TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS UTILIZED ANY VIDEO-IMAGE-FIBER 2 DATA-TRANSFERS OR COINCIDENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES […AND…] THE AVERAGE U.S. PHONE-USER DECID[ED] S/HE ACTUALLY PREFERRED THE RETROGRADE OLD LOWTECH BELL-ERA VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONIC INTERFACE AFTER ALL, A PREFERENTIAL ABOUT-FACE THAT COST A GOOD MANY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-TELEPHONY-RELATED ENTREPRENEURS THEIR SHIRTS, PLUS DESTABILIZING TWO HIGHLY RESPECTED MUTUAL FUNDS THAT HAD GROUND-FLOORED HEAVILY IN VIDEO-PHONE TECHNOLOGY, AND VERY NEARLY WIPING OUT THE MARYLAND STATE EMPLOYEES’ RETIREMENT SYSTEM’S FREDDIE-MAC FUND, A FUND WHOSE ADMINISTRATOR’S MISTRESS’S BROTHER HAD BEEN AN ALMOST MANICALLY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-PHONE- TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEUR…AND BUT SO WHY THE ABRUPT CONSUMER RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONING? In describing a world in which we are frequently estranged—a world in which loneliness is, as Wallace once put it, “what we have in common”—his own act of communication stretched our everyday experiences so thin they had become translucent, almost invisible. James Wood perhaps best captured this line of criticism in his 2000 review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The problem with “hysterical realism,” as he called it, was not only that it imitated the world around it too closely but that it also confused motion for vitality, narrative acrobats for emotional complexity, catalogues of facts for the drama of knowing. “The conventions of realism are not being abolished,” Wood argued, “but, on the contrary, exhausted.” The hysterical novel failed not “at the level of verisimilitude, but…morality.” It reproduced the chaos it hoped to resist, replacing meaningful self-discovery with the solitudes of self-consciousness. It knows, Wood concluded, “a thousand different things— How to make the best Indonesian fish curry! The sonics of the trombone! The drug market of Detroit! The history of strip cartoons!—but [not] a single human being.” Zadie Smith was one of the first to be labeled a hysterical realist and, fittingly, she was also one of the first to rebel against its growing orthodoxies. After publishing White Teeth—a novel that mapped out the antic soul-seeking and comedic, if also often tragic, misunderstandings of melting-pot London—she went on to publish Autograph Man: an even more hysterical novel that tracked the life and times of one Alex-Li Tandem as he “lurched from one ill-fitting ‘identity’ to another” in a desperate search for a stable self. The new group tried to map out more local, more empowering connections: to mine the present for those rare, fragile moments of contact—those brief human intersections that remind us that while we are all each desperately unknowable and alone we are also in this together. But the world was changing. The moral excesses of dot-com prosperity were fast becoming the fretful anxieties of our brave new “age of horrorism”—as one British novelist put it. And if there were any question about the profligacy of the 3 Anglo-American novel at the end of the millennium, then the bombed-out days after September 11 seemed to confirm, once and for all, its negligent decadence. Writing a week after the attacks, Wood argued—not without some smug satisfaction—that what we now needed was not exuberant experiment but empathy: fiction that told “us not ‘how the world works’ but ‘how somebody felt about something’—indeed, how a lot of different people felt about a lot of different things (these are commonly called novels about human beings).” Smith, remarkably, agreed. “These are hysterical times,” she confessed. Any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped….Actually, I am sitting here in my pants, looking at a blank screen, finding nothing funny, scared out of my mind like every-body else….Most mornings I think: death of the novel? Yeah, sure, why not? And while she did not give up the novel altogether, she did exchange the maximalist experiments of her early work for a more disciplined and more sober realism. Written in a skillful but familiar third person, Smith’s 2005 On Beauty updated one of the least modernist of modernist novels—E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End—for contemporary Anglo-America. A weave of parlor-room drama and intrigue, it knitted together the transatlantic goings-on of two academic families as they negotiated the ups and downs of love and death, success and failure, over- education and prejudice. In many ways, it was everything Wood had called for: a novel that gave up giddy experiment for psychology, perpetual motion for ponderous ambiguity, a work of fiction that focused less on “how the world worked” than on “how it felt”—at least, how it felt for the Anglo-American bourgeoisie. In a 2003 essay on Forster’s novels, Smith clarified her turn from style to ethics and from exuberant self-expression to restrained empathy. When “you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics.” A novelist cannot merely manufacture “an exquisitely worked game”; he or she must also create a world complex enough to preserve the often-muddled ambiguities of human experience. As Howard Belsey—one of Smith’s often- muddled characters in On Beauty—was to put it to a classroom of soon-to-be bankers: “What we are trying to…interrogate here…is the mytheme of artist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human.” Of course, there was a glaring gap in the turn from hysterical to empathetic and ethical realism—one that was a bit naïve, especially for someone who grew up in the public housing of Northwest London: Smith had stopped interrogating the very question of whether one can exist as autonomous individual in an age full of soon-to-be bankers.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Gendered, Post-Diasporic Mobilities and the Politics of Blackness in Zadie Smith’S Swing Time (2016)
    Suzanne Scafe: Gendered, post-diasporic mobilities and the politics of blackness in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016) ! Gendered, Post-diasporic Mobilities and the Politics of Blackness in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016) Suzanne Scafe Visiting Professor School of Arts and Creative Industries London South Bank University, UK !93 https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/index.asp UWI IGDS CRGS Issue 13 ISSN 1995-1108 Abstract: Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time (2016) traverses the geographies and temporalities of the Black Atlantic, unsettling conventional definitions of a black African diaspora, and restlessly interrogating easy gestures of identification and belonging. In my analysis of Smith’s text, I argue that these interconnected spaces and the characters’ uneasy and shifting identities are representative of post-diasporic communities and subjectivities. The novel’s representations of female friendships, mother-daughter relationships, and professional relationships between women, however, demonstrate that experiences of diaspora/post- diaspora are complicated by issues of gender. Forms of black dance and African diasporic music represent the novel’s concerns with mobility and stillness; dance is used by its young female characters as a “diasporic resource” (Nassy Brown 2005, 42), a means of negotiating and contesting existing structures of gender, class and culture. Keywords: Zadie Smith, Swing Time, post-diaspora, dance, mobility, race, gender How to cite Scafe, Suzanne. 2019. “Gendered, Post-Diasporic Mobilities and the Politics of Blackness in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016).” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Issue 13: 93-120 !94 Suzanne Scafe: Gendered, post-diasporic mobilities and the politics of blackness in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016) The title of the novel Swing Time (2016) is taken from a 1936 Hollywood musical of the same name, featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
    [Show full text]
  • The Thought of Literature: Notes to Contemporary Fictions
    The Thought of Literature Notes to contemporary fictions Jason Childs A dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Technology Sydney, February 2018. Certificate of original authorship I certify that the work in this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree nor has it been submitted as part of requirements for a degree except as acknowledged within the text. I also certify that the thesis has been written by me. Any help that I have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. This research is supported by an Austalian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Signature of Candidate: Production Note: Signature removed prior to publication. February 20, 2018 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I am deeply grateful to Robyn Ferrell for taking over my supervision at a late stage in my candidature. Her feedback on my ideas and drafts, always generous and incisive, was invaluable in completing this work. Without Berndt Sellheim’s encouragement, I would not have begun this project; without his support, I would not have finished it. I am blessed to call him my friend. Martin Harrison was an important mentor for several years prior to starting this work and my supervisor during its defining early stages. Fellow students of Martin's will understand when I say that, despite his untimely death in 2014, there is not a sentence here that wasn’t written in conversation with him.
    [Show full text]
  • A Contemporary Representation of Reality: the Hysterical Realist Novel
    Dissertação de Mestrado Erasmus Mundus em ‘Crossways in Cultural Narratives’ A Contemporary Representation of Reality: the Hysterical Realist Novel Cristina Liseţchi Orientadores: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela: Dr César Domínguez Universidade Nova de Lisboa: Dr Maria Fernanda de Abreu Lisboa, Julho 2015 1 “I, Cristina Liseţchi, hereby certify that this dissertation, which is 21559 words in length, has been written by me, that it is a record of work carried out by me, and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. All sentences or passages quoted in this dissertation from other people's work (with or without trivial changes) have been placed within quotation marks, and specifically acknowledged by reference to author, work and page. I understand that plagiarism – the unacknowledged use of such passages – will be considered grounds for failure in this dissertation and, if serious, in the degree programme as a whole. I also affirm that, with the exception of the specific acknowledgements, these answers are entirely my own work." Signature of candidate 2 ABSTRACT Literary critics are faced with the difficult task of categorizing a wide corpus of contemporary narratives that have conquered the hearts of millions of readers worldwide, through their sardonic way of representing today’s reality and their particular interpretation of the novel’s traditional form. It is the case of hysterical realist novels, a new literary genre that constitutes the object of this present study, which explores the main aspects of this type of narratives by considering their perspective of the world and their means of achieving the effect of reality.
    [Show full text]
  • Gender Performativity and Societal Boundaries: an Analysis of NW And
    Gender Performativity and Societal Boundaries: an Analysis of NW and How to be Both Through the Lens of Judith Butler’s Theory Roos van den Broek 2 ENGELSE TAAL EN CULTUUR Teacher who will receive this document: Usha Wilbers Title of document: Gender Performativity and Societal Boundaries: an Analysis of NW and How to be Both through the lens of Judith Butler’s Theory Name of course: BA werkstuk Engelse Letterkunde Date of submission: 07-08-2019 The work submitted here is the sole responsibility of the undersigned, who has neither committed plagiarism nor colluded in its production. Signed Name of student: Roos van den Broek 3 Abstract This thesis provides an analysis of NW by Zadie Smith and How to be Both by Ali Smith through the lens of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Three aspects of this theory are examined: the biological sex versus gender distinction, gender performativity and sexuality. The thesis examines the way in which the characters in the novels present themselves, how they behave, and the choices they make. This includes how characters choose to dress themselves, whether they choose to have children, which gender they present themselves as and the kind of relationships they choose to get into. This thesis emphasizes the way that societal boundaries and expectations play a role in the way the characters perform their gender and sexuality. The conclusion of the thesis provides a comparison between the way that both novels reflect Judith Butler’s theory and how the characters differ in their interaction with gender, sexuality and the boundaries and norms of their societies.
    [Show full text]
  • Samir Sellami
    HYPERBOLIC REALISM IN THOMAS PYNCHON'S AND ROBERTO BOLAÑO'S LATE MAXIMALIST NOVELS AGAINST THE DAY & 2666 presented by / présenté par Samir Sellami to principal supervisor / au directeur de thèse Prof. Jonathan Pollock (Université de Perpignan Via Domitia) to co-tutelle supervisor / au co-directeur (co-tutelle) Prof. Fernando Resende (Universidade Federal Fluminense) and to external experts / et aux experts externes Prof. Pascale Amiot (Université de Perpignan Via Domitia) Prof. Ingrid Hotz-Davies (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen) Prof. Benjamim Picado (Universidade Federal Fluminense) in partial fulfillment of a Doctorate in the Humanities Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones January 31, 2018 Université de Perpignan Via Domitia / Universidade Federal Fluminense DECLARATION OF GOOD ACADEMIC CONDUCT I, SAMIR SELLAMI, hereby certify that this dissertation, which is 99841 words in length, has been written by me, that it is a record of work carried out by me, and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. All sentences or passages quoted in this dissertation from other people's work (with or without trivial changes) have been placed within quotation marks, and specifically acknowledged by reference to au- thor, work and page. I understand that plagiarism – the unacknowledged use of such passages – will be considered grounds for failure in this disser- tation and in the degree program as a whole. I also affirm that, with the ex- ception of the specific acknowledgements, the following dissertation is en- tirely my own work. Berlin / Perpignan / Rio de Janeiro: January 31, 2018 1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Like every piece of labor, this research project was made possible with the great help and support of many individuals and institutions.
    [Show full text]
  • Multicultural World in Zadie Smith's Recent Novels Multikulturní Svět V
    Jihočeská univerzita v Českých Budějovicích Pedagogická fakulta Katedra anglistiky Diplomová práce Multicultural World in Zadie Smith’s Recent Novels Multikulturní svět v románech Zadie Smith Vypracovala: Bc. Adéla Grenarová Vedoucí práce: PhDr. Alice Sukdolová, Ph.D. České Budějovice 2016 Prohlašuji, že jsem svoji diplomovou práci na téma Multikulturní svět v románech Zadie Smith vypracovala samostatně pouze s použitím pramenů a literatury uvedených v seznamu citované literatury. Prohlašuji, že v souladu s § 47b zákona č. 111/1998 Sb. v platném znění souhlasím se zveřejněním své diplomové práce, a to v nezkrácené podobě - v úpravě vzniklé vypuštěním vyznačených částí archivovaných pedagogickou fakultou elektronickou cestou ve veřejně přístupné části databáze STAG provozované Jihočeskou univerzitou v Českých Budějovicích na jejích internetových stránkách, a to se zachováním mého autorského práva k odevzdanému textu této kvalifikační práce. Souhlasím dále s tím, aby toutéž elektronickou cestou byly v souladu s uvedeným ustanovením zákona č. 111/1998 Sb. zveřejněny posudky školitele a oponentů práce i záznam o průběhu a výsledku obhajoby kvalifikační práce. Rovněž souhlasím s porovnáním textu mé kvalifikační práce s databází kvalifikačních prací Theses.cz provozovanou Národním registrem vysokoškolských kvalifikačních prací a systémem na odhalování plagiátů. V Českých Budějovicích dne Podpis studentky: ___________________________ Adéla Grenarová Poděkování Ráda bych poděkovala paní PhDr. Alici Sukdolové, Ph.D. za její připomínky, rady a podporu. Acknowledgement I would like to thank PhDr. Alice Sukdolová, Ph.D. for her comments, advice and support. Abstract Initially, the diploma thesis introduces the overall context of contemporary Anglo- American post-colonial literature and defines its fundamental postulates, such as ethnicity, cultural diversity, hybridity, globalization, and multiculturalism.
    [Show full text]
  • Rebirth of the Nouveau Roman: 9/11 As a Crisis of Confidence in American Literary Aesthetics
    Rebirth of the Nouveau Roman: 9/11 as a Crisis of Confidence in American Literary Aesthetics by Daniel Davis Wood On September 11, 2001, with the Twin Towers reduced to rubble, the novelist Jay McInerney fled to the home of his friend and fellow novelist Bret Easton Ellis. On September 15, with McInerney’s 1984 debut Bright Lights, Big City billed as “the definitive modern New York novel,” The Guardian asked him to consider the literary implications of ‘9/11.’ To that end, he recalled his conversation with Ellis: ‘I’m glad I don’t have a book coming out this month,’ I said - a selfish and trivial response to the disaster, but one I thought he would understand. Nobody was going to be talking about fiction this week. […] ‘I don't know how I’m going to be able to go back to this novel I’m writing,’ I said. The novel is set in New York, of course. The very New York which has just been altered forever. ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ he said. (2001) But what exactly did he mean? Underpinning McInerney’s lament are several assumptions in need of explication - assumptions about the nature of literary fiction; about its relationship to social, political, and cultural actuality; and about what readers of literary fiction expect of those who write it - which have informed not only his own fiction after 9/11 but also the fiction of many of his contemporaries. Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays 134 9/11/2011 – 11/2011 In this essay, I chart the differing responses to those assumptions amongst those who share them and those who do not - writers and readers alike.
    [Show full text]
  • City and Nature in the Work of Zadie Smith
    Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith Freya Graham Introduction In her riotous novel NW (2012), Zadie Smith takes us on a walk through North London. It’s a cacophony: “sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock. 98, 16, 32, standing room only—quicker to walk!”.1 The narrative continues over a page, taking in “TV screens in a TV shop”, “empty cabs” and a “casino!”.2 Plant and animal life are almost entirely absent, aside from a moment of “birdsong!” and a building surrounded by “security lights, security gates, security walls, security trees”.3 Elements that we may associate with the “natural world” have become part of the architecture of the city, indistinguishable from the man-made lights, gates and walls. NW is so centred on city life that the title itself takes inspiration from a London postcode. The novel follows the lives of four friends—Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan— who grow up on the same estate in north-west London. As the friends grow older, their lives overlap in unexpected ways. Leah works in a dead-end job and still lives near her childhood estate; Natalie seemingly triumphs in becoming a successful lawyer and mother; Felix, a former drug addict, is forging a new life; Nathan is involved in organised crime. The novel’s ambitious narrative threads culminate in a tragic chance encounter. NW expands on the themes of class, race, identity and place which Smith first explored in her debut novel, White Teeth (2000).
    [Show full text]
  • I Want to First Define What I Mean by a Novel's Plot
    Brown, Luke (2014) Tension between artistic and commercial impulses in literary writers’ engagement with plot. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5158/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Brown 1 Tension between artistic and commercial impulses in literary writers’ engagement with plot Luke Brown Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of PhD in English Literature School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow October 2013 Brown 2 Abstract Tension between artistic and commercial impulses in literary writers’ engagement with plot This thesis explores whether plot and story damage a literary writer’s attempt to describe ‘reality’. It is in two parts: a critical analysis followed by a complete novel. The first third of the thesis is an essay which, after distinguishing between story and plot, responds to writer critics who see plot as damaging to a writer’s attempt to describe ‘the real’. This section looks at fiction by Jane Austen, Henry James, Jeffrey Eugenides, Julian Barnes, Tom McCarthy and Zadie Smith, against a critical background of James Wood, Roland Barthes, David Shields and others including Viktor Shklovsky and Iris Murdoch.
    [Show full text]
  • An Insight Into the Postcolonial Work of Zadie Smith's NW and the Analysis
    Faculty of Tourism Final Project Report An insight into the postcolonial work of Zadie Smith’s NW and the analysis of some cultural referents in its translation into Spanish. Laura Martín Jordá Degree in Tourism Academic year 2016-17 Student ID number: 43201427K Tutor-guided work by Caterina Calafat Ripoll Spanish, Modern and Classical Philology Department The University is authorised to include this work in the Institutional Author Tutor Repository for consultation on open access and online broadcasting, Yes No Yes No with academic and research purposes only Work’s keywords: postcolonialism, translation, Zadie Smith, exoticism, hybridity, cultural referents, domestication, foreignization Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................. 2 Introduction......................................................................................................... 2 Methodology used .............................................................................................. 2 Chapter 1.Zadie Smith’s NW & Postcolonialism ................................................. 3 1.1. NW ........................................................................................................ 3 1.2. The author, Zadie Smith ........................................................................ 4 1.3. On Postcolonialism................................................................................ 5 1.4. On Postcolonial Literature ....................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Social Class As Seen Through the Representation of Language in Zadie Smith's NW
    Social Class as Seen through the Representation of Language in Zadie Smith’s NW Vanessa Bengtsson English Studies Bachelor’s Thesis 14 Credits Spring Semester 2021 Supervisor: Petra Ragnerstam Bengtsson 1 Abstract This paper investigates the representation of the working class in Zadie Smith’s novel NW. With the aid of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on different forms of capital, as well as sociolinguistic theory, the project aims to study the language of the characters as an indicator of their social class belonging. The analysis is divided into three different sections where the characters’ speeches are studied in the context of their age, gender, and ethnicity. This analysis takes a dual approach by first examining what the characters’ language can tell us about their class belonging, and then exploring what effect the use of the representation of working-class speech has on the characters, as well as on the novel at large. The analysis reveals the dissimilarities between the different groups (male and female, old and young, white or non-white), and establishes that through the use of working-class speech, Smith has managed to create a complex and dynamic image of the working class. Key Words: Zadie Smith, NW, Pierre Bourdieu, Forms of Capital, Sociolinguistics, Working- Class Speech. Bengtsson 2 Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 3 1. Theory and Background ........................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Inauthenticity and Intertextuality in Zadie Smith's NW
    ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 42.2 (December 2020): 180-196 e-issn 1989-6840 DOI: http://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2020-42.2.09 © The Author(s) Content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence “I am the sole author”: Inauthenticity and Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s NW Beatriz Pérez Zapata Tecnocampus (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Valencian International University [email protected] This article examines the role of intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) and the novel’s questioning of authorship, authenticity and identity. Relying on intertextual and postcolonial theories, the article lays bare how Smith’s novel questions the fixity and stability of selves and how she situates herself as an inherently intertextual author disrupted by others and potentially disruptive of (post)colonial ways of being and one that plays with notions of (in)authenticity and originality. For this purpose, the article pays attention to the novel’s intertextual links with the historical case of the Tichborne claimant and Jorge Luis Borges’s fictionalisation of it in the short story “Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor,” included in the collection A Universal History of Infamy (1933). Moreover, the article focuses on the theorisation of infamy, understood as the disruption of hegemonic narratives brought about by marginal characters and discourses. Keywords: intertextuality; authenticity; authorship; postcolonialism; Zadie Smith . “Soy la única autora”: inautenticidad e intertextualidad en NW de Zadie Smith Este artículo explora el papel de la intertextualidad en la novela NW (2012) de Zadie Smith y cómo esta cuestiona los conceptos de autoría, autenticidad e identidad.
    [Show full text]