Search results for "On Beauty"
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Zadie Smith's autonomous writing commitments to E.M. Forster
2010
Though Zadie Smith has published only three novels so far, her fiction seems to follow some astonishing path from standard social commitment to the world to a more aesthetic and ideological commitment to Forster's Edwardian Howards End. In White Teeth Smith writes the story of today's multicultural London in a committed way, though soon enough her particular view of the past and its aftermath signals some tension between literature and history. The logic of chance and randomness provides a first hint of the autonomy of fiction for Smith: fiction allows the past and history “to have happened”. On Beauty may forget the world in the same ambiguous way as Howards End did, eventually more poetic…
‘Just keep on walking in a straight line': allowing for chance in Zadie Smith's overdetermined London (White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty)
2008
International audience; Zadie Smith's three novels signal a sullen yet coherent evolution in the representation of both real and fictional London. Each of the three texts reveals a threefold failure in the way the city can become the ideal place for the characters to know and fulfil themselves. London is first a mere topographical and cultural gridlock: its neighbourhoods are overdetermined in a way that leads to the negation of the individual, leaving no space for action and banning any type of self-improvement. Yet Smith's London in White Teeth is not as coded as often claimed, and may provide some tools to pervert this conditioning of places and people. The novels indeed examine the dyna…