2007-08 AM Zadie Smith's Multicultural World
- Time: Fridays 12-2pm
At the age of 21 and still a college student, Zadie Smith had triggered a lively discussion about the surprising advance she was commissioned for the completion of her at the time unfinished first and a planned second novel. Indeed, White Teeth (2000) proved to be a huge success among critics and readers alike, won her both the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award for Best First Book, was translated into over 20 languages and adapted for a television broadcast in 2002. The second novel, The Autograph Man (2002) was less debated but widely considered to be a much more mature piece of literature, which won her the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction and lead to a nomination as Granta's one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Recently, Smith reappeared on the bestseller lists with a novel combining family saga and campus novel: On Beauty (2005) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won both the Orange Prize for Fiction and Somerset Maugham Award in 2006.
Beside her success as a fiction writer, Zadie Smith has contributed as an editor of erotic short stories ("Piece of Flesh", 2001), the author of a book bout writing (Fail Better: The Morality of the Novel, 2006), and numerous articles and essays (on Eminem, Katherine Hepburn and E.M. Forster, among others).
Contents
Topics
Those who are planning to join the seminar may contribute thoughts on what they'd like to do in the following list:
- The themes of family, friendship, love, beauty.
- The themes of culture, tradition, religion.
- London and the new millenium.
- The function of humour and (postmodern?) irony.
- Novel writing and the book market: reviews, reader's guides, critical writing, literary awards.
- Looking for genre: the coinage and function of such terms as "hysterical realism", "historiographic metafiction", "campus novel", "transatlantic comic saga" etc.
- The influence or intertextual allusions from Salman Rushdie (in White Teeth), Martin Amis (in The Autograph Man), E.M. Forster (in On Beauty).
Texts
- White Teeth [2000]. London: Penguin Books, 2001.
- ISBN-10: 0140297782 ISBN-13: 978-0140297782
- The Autograph Man [2002]. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
- ISBN-10: 0140276343 ISBN-13: 978-0140276343
- On Beatuy [2005]. London: Penguin Books, 2006.
- ISBN-10: 0141026669 ISBN-13: 978-0141026664
Requirements
- Please, read all three novels before the beginning of the semester and prepare a one-page-long summary for each text including a question or comment respectively.
You will be asked to
- participate in the seminar discussion,
- prepare a short presentation and
- write a research paper.
