Zadie Smith's London Fiction

“My books don’t seem to me to be about anything other than the people in them and the sentences used to construct them. […] And that’s what I try to concern myself with in fiction: the way of things in reality, as far as I am able to see and interpret them, which may not be especially far. […] If I have any gift at all it’s for dialogue – that trick of breathing what-looks-like-life into a collection of written sentences.” (Zadie Smith) [1]

In this seminar, we will delve into Zadie Smith’s art of writing contemporary London, of “breathing what-looks-like-life” into her work, whilst of course also exploring what it is about – ‘multicultural’ London, post-/neo-colonialism, gender, class, racism, science and genetics, history, religion, to name but a few recurrent themes that have concerned literary scholars and critics working on Smith. With her gift for dialogue, her wide range of modes from most serious to hilarious, Zadie Smith has taken her place among the literary chroniclers of contemporary London, alongside writers such as Martin Amis, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali and following “multiple roads” of the novel as pioneered by writers such as Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Sam Selvon. [2]

Over the course of the semester, we will read two of Smith’s novels – White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012) – as well as the short story or “novel in miniature” The Embassy of Cambodia (2013). [3] We will further study a selection of short essays published in the collections Changing My Mind. Occasional Essays (2009) and Feel Free. Essays (2018).

In order to participate in this seminar, you must have read White Teeth before to the start of the semester.

Please purchase the novels in the following editions (all other reading will be provided via Moodle):

Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. Penguin Books, 2001. ISBN-13: 978-0-140-29778-2.

Smith, Zadie. NW. Penguin Books, 2013. ISBN-13: 978-0-241-96526-9.

 

[1] Zadie Smith, “Notes on NW.” Feel Free. Essays. Hamish Hamilton, 2018, pp. 248-250.

[2] The notion of “multiple roads” of the novel is taken from Zadie Smith’s essay “Two Directions for the Novel”, published in Changing my Mind. Occasional Essays (Penguin Books, 2011, pp. 71-96).

[3] The notion of a “novel in miniature” is taken from Louise Doughty’s review of The Embassy of Cambodia, published in The Guardian (04 November 2013), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/04/embassy-of-cambodia-zadie-smith-review.