Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Zadie Smith'

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa
One objective of this work is uncovering how the notions of subjectivity, otherness, and the urban landscape relate to one another in the novel NW, as they are displayed in the characters’ lives and in the narrative texture of the work. The relevance of this lies on the fact that uncovering how these notions relate to one another is uncovering how women’s subjectivities often find themselves in the crisis the novel portrays. The discussion of an issue that often identifies us as women is fundamental in the context of the XXI century when more times than not we lose our awareness of where we stand in the world, what we are and what we might be in the future. A second objective is to explore how the crises that the characters’ subjectivities are going through in their relation with the urban landscape are represented in terms of the novel’s aesthetic and narrative resources. To gain further insight as to the richness, in literary terms, of the novel is to deepen the literary discussion surrounding contemporary British literature.

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.

What kinds of elements determine people´s possibilities of being integrated into society? This is what the author tries to illuminate in this essay, by discussing the plots and characters in White Teeth.

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.

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.

Thesis (M.A.)--East Carolina University, 2009.
Presented to the faculty of the Department of English. Advisor: Thomas Douglass. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed May 4, 2010). Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis considers how contemporary British literature helps us negotiate better ways of being in an increasingly diverse world. Britain understood itself as a relatively homogenous white society and reacted badly when commonwealth citizens unexpectedly began to return following World War II. Colonial migrants increasingly large presence, particularly as many settled and had children, challenged the myth of a pure Anglo-Saxon Britain and forced a re-conceiving of what it is to be British. This thesis particularly examines how colonial immigrants found ways to (re)negotiate their identities as British in the face of hostility in their mother country. Chapter One looks at how Sam Selvons The Lonely Londoners depicts ways early West Indian immigrants found to endure in immediate post-war, nationalist, Britain. I argue that while working class migrants found ways to survive, they did so at the expense of personal growth. Nevertheless, their tenacity laid down the foundations of a new Britishness on which future generations could build. Chapter Two examines Hanif Kureishis The Buddha of Suburbia. I argue that Kureishis novel indicates how second-generation migrants, who are often more psychically flexible, form their identities differently to their immigrant parents. They negotiate ways of being British via their heritage and immediate family, but also with peers, and across various boundaries including those of class, gender, and culture. Chapter Three considers Zadie Smiths White Teeth. I argue that this novel suggests how immigrants negotiate their identities across even more boundaries and increasingly take advantage of the changing circumstances of life in Britain. This literature indicates reasons for some minority groups disaffection and subsequent behavior and so helps us to better understand and negotiate difference. In the Afterword, I reiterate that, starting from Britains nationalistic fear of hybridity in the 1950s, the novels in this study show the trajectory of how colonial immigrants found ways of being accepted as British. While it must remain vigilant to possible peril, Britains social imaginary has expanded to understand the benefits of multiculturalism and of valuing all citizens as equal.

The aim of this study is to study the construction of literary values. I have been looking at how literature awarded with sponsored literary prizes has been reviewed in four major English and American newspapers. I have been studying the reception of literature by Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín and Zadie Smith between 2000 and 2012. The prizes in focus are the Man Booker Prize, the Orange prize for fiction and the Costa Awards. There seems to be an increasing number of articles related to each author after they have been awarded a prize, however with little change in the content of the reviews. The non critical articles seems to move towards a more personal angle. I have also found that critics tend to position the authors’ works in comparision to canonised authorships rather than discussing the literature as awarded.

This thesis traces the shift from liberal to neoliberal education from the nineteenth century to the present day, in order to provide a rich and previously underdeveloped narrative of value in higher education in England. Rather than attempting to justify the value of the humanities within the presiding economic frameworks, or writing a defence against market rationalism, this thesis offers an original contribution through an immersion in historical, financial, and critical debates concerning educational policy. Drawing upon close reading and discursive analysis, this thesis constructs a nuanced map of the intersections of value in the humanities. The discussion encompasses an exploration of policymaking practices, scientific discourse, mediated representations, and public cultural life. The structure of the thesis is as follows. The introductory chapter outlines the overarching methodology by defining the contemporary period of this project (2008-14), establishing relevant scholarship, and drawing out the correspondences between the nineteenth century and the present day. Chapter one establishes a history of the Payment by Results approach in policymaking, first established in the Revised Code of Education (1862) and recently re-introduced in the reforms of the Browne Report (2010). Understanding the predominance of such short-term and quantitative policy is essential for detailing how value is articulated. Chapter two reconsiders the two cultures debate. In contrast to the misrepresentative, yet pervasive, perception that the sciences and the humanities are fundamentally in opposition, I propose a more nuanced history of these disciplines. Chapter three addresses fictional representations of the humanities within literature in order to establish a vantage point from which to assess alternative routes for valuation beyond economic narratives. The final chapter scrutinises the rise of the impact criterion within research assessment and places it within a wider context of market-led cultural policy (1980-90s). This thesis argues that reflecting on Victorian legacies of economism and public accountability enables us to reconsider contemporary valuation culture in higher education. This analytical framework is of benefit to future academic studies interested in the marketisation and valuation of culture, alongside literary studies that focus on the relationship between higher education, the individual, and the state.

This master thesis discusses the concepts of multiculturalism in Britain in the novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith. The theoretical part provides a theoretical background of British multiculturalism. Firstly, the colonial period is presented with the particular focus on the British Empire and the colonies of India and Jamaica. Secondly, the postcolonial period after the dissolution of the British Empire is analysed with the focus on the migration to the UK and the theoretical foundations of the postcolonial literature. Thirdly, the concept of multiculturalism in Britain is looked into, discussing the changes in society, construction of British identity and its negotiation. The practical part analyses the presented notions on the novel. Firstly, multicultural London as presented in the novel is described. Secondly, the development of multiculturalism is traced in the novel. Thirdly, multicultural identity of its characters is discussed. KEYWORDS: Multiculturalism, British Empire, colonialism, postcolonialism, history, identity, Zadie Smith, White Teeth

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.

Novels are mostly written in standard language, but they can also resort to non-standard linguistic varieties, for different purposes. This rhetorical strategy has been theorized, in particular by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), and has a long tradition of use in literature in English. It dates back to at least the fourteenth century, with Chaucer, and does not seem to disappear. Furthermore, in more recent times language variation has been imported into audio-visual fiction, where the resource to a multiplicity of English(es) beyond the standard is obvious. My dissertation focusses on White Teeth, Zadie Smith’s first novel, as it is a very good example of a recent novel which deals with a multiplicity of different varieties of English and which has also been adapted for television. It therefore provides a particularly interesting corpus for a contrastive analysis on the use of non-standard English in written and audio-visual fiction, a perspective from which it has not been considered in the literature so far. Ever since its publication, White Teeth has been the object of interest to both the general reading public and academics. Several essays in the domain of English Literary Studies have been produced, and some of them considered microlinguistic aspects as well. However, no study had so far tried a contrastive analysis between the literary text and the television adaptation, which is the object of this dissertation. The first goal of this dissertation is to identify the characteristics of non-standard English(es) used in the novel and in its television adaptation. Furthermore, attention will be directed to the means used to represent non-standard speech, including metalanguage, in both the novel and the television adaptation. The results of the study are summed up in the conclusion.
Os romances são, na sua maioria, escritos em língua padrão, embora também possam fazer uso de variedades linguísticas não padrão, para diferentes finalidades. Esta estratégia retórica, teorizada em particular por Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), tem uma longa tradição na literatura de língua inglesa. Ela remonta pelo menos ao século XIV, com Chaucer, e não parece desaparecer. Para além disso, em tempos mais recentes foi importada pela ficção audiovisual, onde é óbvio o recurso a uma multiplicidade de formas de inglês que divergem da norma. A minha dissertação foca-se no primeiro romance de Zadie Smith, White Teeth, já que se trata de um bom exemplo de um romance recente que recorre a uma multiplicidade de diferentes variedades de inglês e que foi adaptado para televisão. Constitui, por conseguinte, um caso particularmente interessante para análise contrastiva do uso de inglês não padrão em ficção escrita e audiovisual, perspetiva sob a qual não foi considerado na bibliografia até ao momento. Desde a sua publicação, White Teeth tem sido objecto de interesse do público leitor e de académicos. Várias dissertações foram escritas sobre este romance, sobretudo no domínio dos Estudos Literários, e algumas delas tiveram em consideração aspetos microlinguísticos. Contudo, até agora nenhum estudo havia tentado uma análise contrastiva do texto literário e da adaptação televisiva, que é o principal propósito da presente dissertação. Assim, o objetivo mais imediato deste trabalho é identificar a presença e as características das formas de inglês não padrão que são utilizadas no romance e na sua adaptação televisiva. A dissertação apresentada começa com uma introdução, onde se esclarece a questão a investigar e se apresenta o romance White Teeth e respectiva adaptação televisiva e se apresenta o plano de trabalho. O capítulo seguinte, "Heteroglossia na Ficção", explicita o enquadramento teórico adoptado. Começa-se por apresentar a noção de heteroglossia e referir as formas de integração de linguagem não padronizada nos textos literários. Em seguida, são discutidas as principais funções de linguagem não padrão no texto literário. O terceiro capítulo, "Inglês não padrão no romance White Teeth", será dedicado inteiramente à apresentação da heteroglossia do romance em análise. Completando duas análises anteriores do texto (Rotenberg 2015 e Kollamagi 2016), apresento uma análise do inglês não padrão constante da versão escrita de White Teeth. Para além de apresentar a metodologia utilizada, este capitulo identifica, descreve e exemplifica os ingleses não padrão utilizados por Smith no seu romance, considerando, as características fonológicas, morfossintácticas e lexicais destas diferentes variedades linguísticas; considera, ainda, a localização e as funções que essas variedades não padrão apresentam no texto. No capítulo quarto, "White Teeth: Heteroglossia na adaptação para a televisão", procede-se a uma análise da presença de variedades não padrão do inglês nos diferentes episódios que integram a série televisiva White Teeth e que se resumem a seguir. Parte I - "O Segundo Casamento Peculiar de Archie Jones", este episódio mostra, em primeiro lugar, as escolhas religiosas de Hortense Bowden, uma testemunha de Jeová, sua convicção do fim iminente do mundo e a conversão do namorado de Clara Bowden na época (Ryan Topps) a essa confissão religiosa depois de um acidente de scooter que ambos têm e no qual Clara quebra os dentes. Esses eventos são seguidos pelo distanciamento de Clara em relação a sua mãe e namorado, e seu casamento com Archie Jones, que tentou cometer suicídio. O casal dá à luz uma menina chamada Irie Jones. Em segundo lugar, o casamento arranjado entre duas famílias de Samad Iqbal e Alsana Begum, o casal deu à luz dois gémeos, ou seja, Magid e Millat Iqbal. Parte II - "A Tentação de Samad", este episódio apresenta as diferentes formas de tentação a que Samad é sujeito, pelo país de acolhimento (Grã-Bretanha) e respectiva população. Samad, Muçulmano e casado é seduzido por uma professora dos filhos, inglesa, Poppy Burt-Jones. Após uma dura batalha contra essa tentação, Samad termina com sua amante e também decide enviar o mais brilhante dos seus gémeos para o Bangladesh, sem o consentimento de sua esposa, para que ele possa aprender e praticar a fé e a cultura muçulmanas e ser poupado às tentações do mundo ocidental. Parte III - "O problema com Millat", este episódio foca o comportamento adoptado por Millat, o gémeo que permaneceu na Inglaterra, face aos seus pais; é ressentido por eles e atribuído à má influência da cultura europeia. Parte IV - "O retorno de Magid Iqbal", esta última parte da série apresenta o retorno de Magid do Bangladesh. As expectativas de seu pai não foram cumpridas. Magid não aderiu à religião e cultura muçulmanas e estudou ciências na universidade. Em segundo lugar, dentro deste episódio, também há a integração de Millat, o outro gémeo Iqbal no grupo de KEVIN para defender os valores do Alcorão e Joshua, filho de Marcus Chalfen em um grupo F.A.T.E. para proteger os interesses dos animais. Em cada um desses episódios, há uma forte presença de dialecto e linguagem não padrão. As características linguísticas não padronizadas caracterizam o discurso dos imigrantes e de seus descendentes, mas também dos falantes nativos de inglês. Este capítulo foca as particularidades linguísticas não padronizadas. Finalmente, a comparação entre o romance White Teeth e a respectiva adaptação televisiva é prosseguida através da análise comparativa do comportamento e caracterização linguísticos da personagem Samad em ambas as versões. Esta comparação permite concluir que a divergência face ao padrão é mais acentuada na versão televisiva do que no romance, sobretudo no plano fonológico, o que pode alterar a leitura final do texto. Este trabalho mais detalhado confirma ainda que o uso da metalinguagem é raro em adaptações audiovisuais. Os resultados do estudo estão resumidos na conclusão.

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

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...