DOCSLIB.ORG

Social Class As Seen Through the Representation of Language in Zadie Smith's NW

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read 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 ......................................................................................................... 7 1.1 Bourdieu – Habitus, Field and the Forms of Capital ........................................................ 7 1.2 Language and Class ........................................................................................................ 10 1.3 Narratology and Representations of Speech ................................................................... 14 2. Class and Gender .................................................................................................................. 17 2.1 Grace and Nathan ........................................................................................................... 17 3. Class and Age ....................................................................................................................... 20 3.1 Leah and Pauline Hanwell .............................................................................................. 20 3.2 Felix and Lloyd Cooper .................................................................................................. 21 3.3 Natalie and Marcia Blake ............................................................................................... 23 4. Class and Ethnicity ............................................................................................................... 26 4.1 Shar and Nathan.............................................................................................................. 26 4.2 Natalie and Michel .......................................................................................................... 28 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 30 Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 32 Bengtsson 3 Introduction London-based author Zadie Smith’s novel NW received both popular and critical acclaim when it was published in the year 2012. The novel is concerned with themes that appear in many of Smith’s works: culture, identity, racism, multiculturalism, and friendship - but NW is also a portrait of the working-class in contemporary London. NW is a tragicomedy set in Northwest London and it mainly portrays four young locals – Natalie, Leah, Nathan, and Felix. Natalie and Leah have been best friends since childhood, but they have come to lead very different lives. Leah’s degree in philosophy has not lead to the fulfilling and successful career that she wished for, and she and her husband are still caught living in the council estates where Leah grew up. Natalie, on the other hand, has worked hard to leave her Jamaican roots and her childhood in the council estates behind her. Changing her name from Keisha to the more English-sounding Natalie, receiving a law degree, and marrying a man with both economic and cultural capital has led to that Natalie has made an incredible class journey, but also to that she has lost contact with her identity and background. The class differences between the two women have started to tear at their relationship - while Natalie feels bogus in the company of her friend, Leah has started building up resentment towards Natalie’s middle-class lifestyle. Felix, on the other hand, has just become clean of his drug addiction and is on a steady path towards a new life when he gets murdered in a robbery gone wrong. In the culmination of the novel Leah and Natalie bond again over accusing Nathan, their old classmate who is now at the bottom of society, of being guilty of the crime. Many researchers have studied NW previously. The themes of the research of this novel are rather diverse, and vary between the postcolonial and Brexit, cosmopolitan empathy, race and reconnection, and female friendship, for example. In “Neoliberalism and False Consciousness Before and After Brexit In Zadie Smith's NW” James Arnett discusses Bengtsson 4 class in contemporary London, and its connection to Smith’s novel. This theme John McLeod builds on in “Warning Signs: Postcolonial Writing and the Apprehension of Brexit,” where he argues that the class divides that led to the referendum in Great Britain could be identified beforehand in postcolonial writings such as NW. It was decided that this research project would build on this Marxist perspective on NW, and that it would concentrate on class aspects of the novel. Another study caught my attention: in “‘Anyone over the Age of Thirty Catching a Bus Can Consider Himself a Failure’: Class Mobility and Public Transport in Zadie Smith’s NW”, Lauren Elkin sees the representation of class through public transport. Here, public transport works as a signifier of class, and it allows Elkin to study Smith’s portrait of contemporary, stratified, London and its inhabitants. This specific signifier makes the class perspective in NW extremely tangible, and it made me consider other aspects of class. What about other signifiers of social class in the novel? How is social class made visible in this novel, other than through public transport? By using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on different forms of capital we can establish that there are many different signifiers of class in NW. We can, for example, consider the professions of the characters, in what sort of house they reside, how they talk about money – but also their language, their taste, and their social contacts. One clear signifier of class in the novel is language, and that is what this project will lay its focus on. With the aid of Bourdieu’s concept of forms of capital this project will seek to identify how the novel represents social class through language. This includes, but is not limited to, looking at the characters’ speech, analyzing the representation of their language. This project will analyze how the characters speak, to aim to identify how the novel presents the characters’ class belonging through language. The analysis will build on Bourdieu’s essay “The Forms of Capital,” but also on sociolinguistic theory which will aid in providing indicators of how social class and language interact. The fact that the representation of class- Bengtsson 5 marked language is not consistent throughout the novels makes this issue more complex. An analysis of the representation of social dialect and accent of characters, contrasted to characters with no indicators of how they speak, will concretize this complexity, and I aim to start a discussion of what it might mean that some characters have a speech marked by indicators of working-class dialects, while some do not. To conduct this study the characters will be divided into groups that sociolinguists often consider when studying language in society: gender, age, and ethnicity. Each section will first contain a small statistical analysis to see what groups (male or female, young or old, white or non-white) are marked most as speaking with working-class dialects. By doing this we can establish how the indicators of working-class dialect have been distributed among the characters, and this will aid in determining which characters to study in a deeper analysis. In each section, different characters will be studied deeper. In the gender section, one male and one female character will work as an example when studying the relationship between gender and language closer. In the age section, generational pairs of characters will be studied to better understand how Smith has depicted working-class language as being transferred through generations, and what this means for the characters. Lastly, in the ethnicity section, we will look at two pairs of characters with different representations of language to better understand the nuances of the distribution of working-class dialect within the non-white characters. 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
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]
  • 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]
  • 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]
  • 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]
  • 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]
  • Swing Time: a Novel by Zadie Smith Ebook
    Swing Time: A Novel by Zadie Smith ebook Ebook Swing Time: A Novel currently available for review only, if you need complete ebook Swing Time: A Novel please fill out registration form to access in our databases Download book here >> Paperback: 464 pages Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (September 5, 2017) Language: English ISBN-10: 0143111647 ISBN-13: 978-0143111641 Product Dimensions:5.4 x 1 x 8.4 inches ISBN10 0143111647 ISBN13 978-0143111641 Download here >> Description: A New York Times bestseller * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction * Longlisted for the Man Booker PrizeAn ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty.Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. Its a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the women dance just like Tracey—the same twists, the same shakes—and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time.
    [Show full text]
  • Swing Time Zadie Smith
    Swing Time Zadie Smith Discussion Questions 1. At what point in SWING TIME did you realize the narrator’s name hadn’t been revealed? She is nameless throughout. Why do you think the author did this? 2. Similarly, what does this story gain from being told in first person, despite the narrator’s name never being re- vealed? What’s lost? 3. This book focuses heavily on female friendship. Why do you think Tracey and the narrator had such lasting effects on each other, even after they grew apart? 4. What is the significance of the title, SWING TIME? 5. The narrator’s mother and father are very different from Tracey’s parents. What do you think Smith is trying to explore with these many different models of motherhood and fatherhood? 6. Aimee is a favorite popstar of Tracey and the narrator’s as they are growing up. When we meet her years later, she is still performing, but also working to open a school in Africa. Why do think Aimee plays such an important role in both the narrator’s childhood and adulthood, and what is Smith trying to get at through her character’s words and actions? 7. The book has a very powerful line: “You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can’t cross.” What is the significance behind each characters’ very different relationship to money? 8. Describe the epilogue. Based on what you’ve learned about each of the charac- ters, what do you believe happens after the narrator sees Tracey dancing with her children? Swing Time Zadie Smith About the Author Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975.
    [Show full text]
  • Modernism in the Twenty-First Century a Comparison of Virginia Woolf’S Mrs Dalloway and Zadie Smith’S NW
    Modernism in the Twenty-First Century A Comparison of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Zadie Smith’s NW Aantal woorden: 23.964 SASKIA DE CEUSTER Studentennummer: 01508283 Promotor: Prof. dr. Birgit Van Puymbroeck Masterproef voorgelegd voor het behalen van de graad master in de Vergelijkende moderne letterkunde. Academiejaar: 2018 – 2019 De Ceuster 1 De Ceuster 2 Voorwoord Met deze masterproef sluit ik mijn opleiding vergelijkende moderne letterkunde af. Het schrijven van deze thesis was een boeiend proces, dat soms al eens wat vlotter of wat minder vlot verliep, en ik wil dan ook in het bijzonder mijn promotor Prof. dr. Van Puymbroeck bedanken voor de constante beschikbaarheid en de uitgebreide feedback doorheen het denk- en schrijfproces. De Ceuster 3 De Ceuster 4 Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................5 0. Introduction .....................................................................................................................8 1. Historical Frameworks .................................................................................................. 12 1.1 Characterizing the Modern, the Postmodern, and their Continuation into the Twenty- First Century ..................................................................................................................... 12 1.2 Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith ............................................................................. 20 2. Thematic Comparison
    [Show full text]
  • A Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith
    Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) Indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, ERIHPLUS Special Conference Issue (Vol. 12, No. 5, 2020. 1-13) from 1st Rupkatha International Open Conference on Recent Advances in Interdisciplinary Humanities (rioc.rupkatha.com) Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V12/n5/rioc1s24n7.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s24n7 A Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith Abdul Wadood Khan Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Translation, College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ORCID : 0000-0003-1077-8361. Email: [email protected] Abstract The multicultural novels of Zadie Smith, though fiction, invite linguists’ attention because of the efforts she makes to achieve dialectal and social accuracy. While Smith’s On Beauty (2005) is celebrated for its use of American Black English Vernacular; White Teeth: A Novel (2001) is acclaimed for its use of Cockney, Jamaican Creole, and youth language in London. In this linguistic review of White Teeth, specific features of the characters’ dialects are compared with standard versions of English. The impact of these speech patterns on the larger narrative is discussed. This study focuses especially on verbal inflections in the variety of dialects appropriated in the novel. It reviews the relevant research in the field of linguistic inflections and partial derivations with a view to comparing and contrasting their significance. This paper also debates the efficacy of existing sociolinguistic tools vis-à-vis a linguistically challenging work like White Teeth. The study aims at facilitating a better understanding of the linguistic features in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and their literary use.
    [Show full text]
  • Exploring Death and Grief: Zen in Zadie Smith's the Autograph
    Exploring Death and Grief: Brno Studies in English Volume 46, No. 2, 2020 Zen in Zadie Smith’s ISSN 0524-6881 | e-ISSN 1805-0867 The Autograph Man https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2020-2-16 Beatriz Pérez Zapata Abstract This article analyses how Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (2002) portrays the individual trau- ma of loss of Alex-Li Tandem, a Chinese-Jewish Englishman, who experiences prolonged grief after the death of his father. More specifically, this article provides an in-depth analysis of grief and argues that it is through Zen Buddhism that Alex eventually accepts death in general and is finally able to participate in Kaddish, a Jewish ritual to remember the deceased. Moving away from previous analysis of the novel’s postsecularism and trauma in general, this article focuses on the portrayal of mourning, the interrogation of contemporary approaches to death and be- reavement, and the role different spiritual traditions play in Alex’s process of working through. Key words Zadie Smith; mourning; grief; prolonged grief; Zen 1. Introduction Grief has been, and still is, a recurrent topic in literature that portrays a complex personal experience that is difficult to overcome and share. In a society which, as Julia Bandini (2015: 349) argues, is “death-denying” and where traditional tools for coping have been lost in favour of medicalization, literature may come to the fore as a helpful shared experience of loss. In his study of the representation of death and grief in literature, John Skelton (2003: 213) concluded that “one of the central tasks of literature is to impose a structure on life and death, giving mean- ing to both”.
    [Show full text]