Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2007. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

<p>The novel White teeth by Zadie Smith has been the object of my study in this essay. The aim of this study was to explore what the text communicated to the reader about hybridity and mimicry in the portrayal of some of the characters in the two families in White Teeth. The focus is on the male characters within the two families, as identity is created differently for men and women.</p>

The novel White teeth by Zadie Smith has been the object of my study in this essay. The aim of this study was to explore what the text communicated to the reader about hybridity and mimicry in the portrayal of some of the characters in the two families in White Teeth. The focus is on the male characters within the two families, as identity is created differently for men and women.

Present research addresses the topic of construction immigrant identities in two novels, White Teeth and Swing Time by contemporary British author Zadie Smith. The main focus of the work is to look closely at the examples of the characters in the aforementioned two novels who are first and second generation immigrants and see how they negotiate and create their identity formations. The most valuable theoretical framework for the present research proves to be the hybrid identity theory created by Homi Bhabha. Thus, the first theoretical part of the thesis attempts to explain the theoretical framework in order to apply the notion to the literary examples from the novels that are addressed in the following two chapters of the thesis. The following analysis of the literary characters revealed that the identity formations are primarily constructed through negotiation and hybridization as the immigrant identities tend to be hybrids of the cultures of their ancestors. Additionally, the penultimate chapter addresses the ideas of cross-national cosmopolitanism that are mentioned in the second novel which seem to be the possible and desired outcome of the processes of hybridization, while also exploring the limits of the theory.

This essay, on Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, deals with the characters’ identities and the influences of multiculturalism on their complex identities. It also discusses the role of the characters roots and history in constructing their identities and how they have made life problematic for the characters in multicultural London. The roots and history of the first generation of immigrants make problematic identities for the second generation in the novel. The main aim of this essay is to demonstrate the instability of identity as depicted in the novel. The characters in the novel cannot ‘’plan’’ their identities because it is a process which continues in all stages of life. Though the first generation of immigrants want to ‘’plan’’ an identity for their children (the second generation of immigrants), they are not successful. Because identity is a process and it is changeable based on place and time. The second generation of immigrants, who live in London, tries to mix the dominant culture (English culture) with their familial culture in order to have a different identity. They also want to escape from their family’s roots and history but it is difficult, because leaving roots is not an easy process.

British contemporary writer Zadie Smith is often representative of cosmopolitan writers of the twenty-first century: in both her fiction and nonfiction, she joins a multicultural background and broad, varied interests to an ethic based on the importance of interpersonal relationships and empathetic respect for the other. But while Smith is often considered the poster child for the contemporary British cosmopolitan, her ethics are in fact rooted in the one rather staid member of the canon: EM Forster, whose emphatic call to ‘only connect’ grounds all of Smith's fiction. Her latest novel, 2012's NW, further expands her relationship to Forster in highlighting both the promise and the limitations of empathy and cosmopolitan connection in the context of modern urban British life. This paper uses Kwame Anthony Appiah's definition of “rooted cosmopolitanism” to explore Forster's and Smith's shared ethics. I argue that their relationship grounds and influences Smith's literary rooted cosmopolitanism: that while she writes books for the age of globalization, her deliberate ties to the British canon suggest an investment in maintaining and reinvigorating the British novelistic tradition as a pathway to a collective British identity that is as expansive, modern, and empathetic as her novels.

Following the literary criticism of Zadie Smith’s NW by critics such as Lynn Wells and Wendy Knepper, this thesis seeks to engage with the social scripts and spatial dynamics of Smith’s fourth novel. I argue that NW is concerned with the neoliberalization of both real and virtual spaces, emphasizing the consequent effects of neoliberalism on agency and subjectivity and highlighting the neoliberal advancement of hyperindividualism and securitization over social responsibility and solidarity. Much detail is given to NW’s exploration of race, class and social mobility at the tail-end of the global financial crisis of 2007-08. NW’s fragmented four-part narrative channels a perspectival approach to space and place by delineating its structure through the four separate subjectivities of the main characters. I contextualize my thesis alongside Paul Gilroy’s cultural criticism of contemporary British multiculturalism, conviviality and melancholia, while also anchoring NW’s spatial concerns to Jeff Malpas’s spatial philosophy and Emily Cuming’s explication of British council estates in various forms of contemporary literature. As well, this thesis incorporates the philosophical frameworks of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a guide for recognizing some of NW’s interest in the subjective experience of people and spaces, and to reorient the act of ‘seeing’ as a radical form of agency and mediation in itself. Ultimately, this phenomenological and epistemological approach to interpreting Smith’s fiction creates the potential for meaning to be co-constructed between author and reader, forming a new social vision for the novel as artform. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Urban spaces have appeared in literature for a long time and they seem to fascinate a lot of contemporary writers. The constructions of cities become exceptionally complex in postcolonial British fiction that portrays urban landscape from the perspective of first and second generation immigrants from Britain's former colonies. All of the novels discussed in this work are set in London and the characters are immigrants of the South Asian and Caribbean diasporas in Britain: the thesis focuses namely on Brick Lane (Monica Ali), White Teeth (Zadie Smith) and Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (Meera Syal). However, the work also makes short digressions to a number of older works which deal with the immigrant experience in London: The Lonely Londoners (Sam Selvon), The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie) and The Buddha of Suburbia (Hanif Kureishi). The entire thesis consists of five parts and begins with an introduction to several theoretical terms that are necessary for analyses of immigrant identities and urban spaces. All of the theory that is discussed in the first chapter is then applied to the chosen novels by Ali, Smith and Syal. Overall, the thesis focuses on the ways in which the ex-colonial subjects in the books perceive London according to their gender and the particular generation of immigrants that...

This dissertation studies a group of contemporary Anglo-American novelists who contribute to the development of a new humanism after the postmodern critique of Euro-American culture. As such, these writers respond to positions in twentieth-century philosophy that converge in a call for silence which has an ontological as well as ethical valence: as a way of rigorously thinking the ‘outside’ to language, it avoids charges of metaphysical inauthenticity; as an ethical stance in the wake of the Shoah, it eschews a complicity with the reifications of modern culture. How to reconcile this post-metaphysical promise with the politico-aesthetic inadequacy of speechlessness is the central question for this nexus of novelists—David Markson, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith—at the center of which the study locates Wallace as a key figure of contemporary literature. By reconstructing the conversation among these authors, this dissertation argues that the nexus writers turn to indirect means of representation that do justice to the demand for silence in matters of metaphysics, but also gesture past it in the development of a neo-romantic aesthetics that invites the humanist category of the self back onto the scene after its dismissal by late postmodernism. The key to such indirection lies in an aporetic method that inspires explorations of metaphysical assumptions by seducing readers to an ambiguous site of aesthetic wonder; in conversation with a range of contemporary philosophers, the dissertation defines this affective site as a place of proximity, rather than absorption or detachment, which balances out the need for metaphysical distance with the productive desire for a fullness of experience. Such proximate aesthetic experiences continue the work of ‘doing metaphysics’ in post-metaphysical times by engaging our habitual responsiveness to the categories involved. Hence the novels discussed here stage limit cases of reason such as the unknowable world, the unreachable other, the absence of the self, and the unstable hierarchy between irony and sincerity: Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress imagines skepticism as literal abandonment and reminds us of our metaphysical indebtedness to a desired object/world; Ellis’s American Psycho shows the breakdown of communication due to a similarly skeptical vision of human interaction and presents a violence that tries to force a response from the desired subject/person; Wallace’s Infinite Jest creates a large canvas on which episodes of metaphysical and literal ‘stuckness’ afford possibilities for becoming human; Smith’s The Autograph Man, finally, pays attention to gestural language at the breaking point of materialism and theology, nature and culture, tragedy and comedy. / Graduate / 2020-08-01

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