Where novels had once been loved for the perspectives brought to their subject matter by their authors, Barthes proposed that the ‘author was dead’, that the text itself was everything and that the reader must liberate themselves from reading something the way ‘an author intended it to be read.’ Writing, Bathes argued, could not be ‘deciphered’ but merely ‘disentangled’ by the reader and there could never be a final ‘meaning’. Smith studied at Cambridge at a time when French literary theorist and critic Roland Barthes’ dismantlement of the protocols for reading novels was taught. Zadie Smith cites EM Forster as among her favorite novelists and a 2003 essay about him says something about her earlier approach. She writes about all kinds of issues, but her essays on literature are where she is on home ground.
Since she has produced another acclaimed collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009) earlier, comparison between her approaches in the two periods could tell us much about tendencies in the past decade in the literary world. Smith has just come out with a collection of essays titled Feel Free. Smith is among the most important writers in the world today, and her position as a post-colonial novelist and an advocate for multiculturalism (or ethic pluralism) makes her writing exemplary – in the sense that it is acutely representative of intellectual and literary trends in the Western world.
Since then, she has published other acclaimed novels, contributed essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, among others, taught writing at Harvard and is now tenured professor of creative writing at New York University. Zadie Smith is a British novelist partly of Jamaican origin, whose acclaimed first novel White Teeth (2000) won several awards and was an immediate best-seller.
0 kommentar(er)
