| Popis: |
The current way of reading Zadie Smith and Will Self is to assert that their work offers radical ways of rethinking identity and consciousness in a fluid postmodern global culture that has no need for old models of subjectivity and agency. This chapter argues that such a strategy fails to read these texts critically and instead, for all of their desires to reach beyond such mundane things as binaries and class, Smith and Self fully replicate the ideological marginalization of the working-class subject in their novels. Drawing on her lecture on E. M. Forster that she gave in London in 2003, I will examine Smith’s On Beauty in terms of its ideological relationship to Forster’s Howards End. My analysis of Will Self’s The Book of Dave will reveal how this satirical novel hollows out the working-class subject position in the present as well as in the imagined future.3 |
