The Affective Dominant: Affective Crisis and Contemporary Fiction

Contemporary developments in fiction have so far primarily been interpreted as an attempt to move beyond postmodernism toward a renewed sense of realism and communication. This article suggests an alternative conceptualization and puts forward the hypothesis that contemporary fiction marks a shift toward an affective dominant. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987) Brian McHale defines the dominant as a structure that brings order and hierarchy in a diversity of techniques and motifs in a literary text. Whereas in modernism the dominant is epistemological and in postmodernism it is ontological, in contemporary literature we contend this dominant is affective. The prevailing questions are “How can I feel reality (myself, the other, the past, the present, etc.)?”; “How can I feel to belong to reality?”; and “How can I feel reality to be real?” This affective dominant manifests itself in motifs such as desire, attachment, fantasy, and identification. Formal and narrative devices that in modernist or postmodernist fiction contributed to an epistemological or ontological dominant tend to foreground questions of affectivity in contemporary fiction. Through the analysis of novels by Ben Lerner, Alejandro Zambra, and Zadie Smith this article substantiates this hypothesis. This approach allows us to study contemporary fiction both diachronically, in relation to postmodernism, and synchronically, in relation to its social and ideological context.

Diversity of Genre in Post-Colonial Literature

The main aim of this article is to outline main tendencies in the development of post-colonial literature in the face of Jean Rhys and her novel Wide Sargasso Sea as a vivid example of starting attempt to break a white-domineering view of Asian countries and build up a new identity. Research attempts to refer to a wider scope of literary texts, including the ones that outline issues and problems related to the so-called invasion narratives. The term invasion narratives is seen as referring to a number of different texts, including English Patient by Michael Ondaatje or the Reader by Bernhard Schlink. One of numerous possibilities of analyzing post-colonial literature is the analysis of the novels by Zadie Smith White Teeth and on Beauty, the latter being a good example of a return to realism and actualizing what is called coined as the meanwhile. Special attention is given to meta-modernism and its function on the contemporary cultural and literary scene, above all with its attempt to start a neo-romantic direct kind of prose, or verse, simple in its form, yet aiming to construct new identities. This kind of prose incorporates the narratives exploring different traumas, including trans-generational traumas.

Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction

From climate catastrophe to pandemics and economic crises, the problems facing humanity today are impossibly complicated and planetary in scale. Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction makes the surprising but compelling claim that it is precisely by culitvating a modest temperament that contemporary fiction can play an central role in conbating the despair that many of us feel in the face of such enormous and intractable problems. This new temperament of critical modesty locates the fight for freedom and human dignity within the limited and compromised conditions in which we find ourselves. Through readings of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction shows us how contemporary works of literature model modesty as a critical temperament. Exploring modest forms of entangled human agency that represent an alternative to the novel of the large scale that have been most closely associated with the Anthropocene, Dancer builds a case that the novel has the potential to play a more important socio-cultural role than it has done. In doing so, the book offers an engaging response to the debate over post-critical and surface readings, bringing novels themselves into the conversation and arguing for a fictional mode that is both critical and modest, reminding us how much we are already engaged with the world, implicated and compromised, before we start developing theories, writing stories, or acting within it.

Modern Woolfian Fiction

Virginia Woolf radically transformed the novel of manners, a form defined by a domestic setting, limited emotional range, and the centrality of social codes. Woolf expanded this to include the whole range of human experience, partly through the use of shifting interior voices who meditate on art, marriage, grief, love, ambition, empire, gender, and the sea. With one long beautiful narrative sweep, Woolf turned the novel of manners into a novel of ideas. This expansion has had a profound effect on subsequent novelists such as Ian McEwan, Rachel Cusk, Michael Cunningham, Zadie Smith, Tessa Hadley, and the author of this chapter. These writers have used domestic settings and interior voices to write about the whole of life, laying claim to Woolf’s powerful and elastic new form, the novel-of-both-manners-and-ideas. This chapter examines works by these writers to show how Woolf’s luminous prose and deep empathy, her intellectual control and literary potency, continue to illuminate and vivify the contemporary novel.

Virginia Woolf in the Canon of Women’s Literature Narrative Futures of The Feminist Novel

Virginia Woolf’s novels have historically been regarded as exceptional for their nuanced characterization, particularly of women, and as foundationally influential to women writers after 1945. This chapter investigates the feminist underpinnings of Woolf’s portrayals of female characters in order to trace Woolf’s ongoing legacy in the feminist writing of today’s women authors. Focusing on three archetypes—the Angel, the Artist, and the Girl—the chapter evaluates Woolf’s techniques for female characterization alongside those deployed by women writers including Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Doris Lessing, Claire Messud, Fatima Mernissi, and Jenni Fagan. These comparative readings show the ways in which Woolf’s fiction inspires contemporary women writers to explore relationships between women and gives them a map for creating complex narratives of affiliation to encompass women’s physical, emotional, and intellectual lives.

Reconstruction of Female Identity Through Unattainable Beauty Standards in Zadie Smith's White Teeth

Reconstruction of female identity is one of the important issues in modern times. The majority of the females who descent from the countries of the third world confront lots of problems because of their race and gender. Black females or colored skin females because of the oppression of the white society upon them, try hard to cope with society in order to get some relief and feel that they are part of this cruel white society. One of the solutions for these black females is to reconstruct their identity by mimicry to the English beauty standards. Zadie Smith is a postcolonial author. She deals with third- world women and how they are treated in a minority and in a racist way. She strives to empower the subaltern black females who have African roots. In addition, to change the universal stereotypical dominated image about them. Smith focuses in her novel White Teeth on the marginalized female and how she is treated as shadow in her society. This article shows the impact of beauty standards on the reconstruction of female identity.

MASCULINITY AND IDENTITY IN ZADIE SMITH’S WHITE TEETH

In White Teeth, Zadie Smith portrays the lives of three immigrant families in Britain in the late half of twentieth century. Besides the generally celebrated theme of multiculturalism, this article argues that the novel is an exploration of the relationship between the identity of the second-generation immigrants and their fathers’ masculinity. The lack of masculinity in the fathers among the first-generation immigrants makes the second-generation immigrants cannot construct their British identity, they have to turn to other fatherly fingers for financial and social capital. Through the portrait of masculinity, the author expresses her concern of the racial discrimination against the immigrants and the importance of first-generation immigrants’ masculinity. But on the other hand, the novel’s portrait of men without masculinity intensified the stereotyped negative image of immigrants.

“Psychoanalysis and Laxatives,” or Democracy in America

Roth and misogyny, highlighted by attacks by Vivian Gornick, Claire Bloom, and Carmen Callil initiate this chapter and its persistent question: did Roth treat women only as one-dimensional sex objects or as fully rounded personalities with agency and power? Roth’s response, in a series of private documents, argues that women, at least in his life, were always respected and treated equally. He itemizes the key women in his professional career, from his early agent Candida Donadio through such late friendships such as Janet Malcolm, Judith Thurman, Zadie Smith, and Nicole Krauss. The issue of Roth and his father and the writing of Patrimony and the function of writing in the midst of trauma expand the chapter, plus his unparalleled productivity in the 1990s. The focus is on Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theater, and the American Trilogy—all this against the background of untangling himself from Claire Bloom, complicated by illness and depression. The impact and misrepresentations in Bloom’s Leaving a Doll’s House, however, complicated by Roth’s contradictory behavior with Bloom, created difficulties, personally and professionally. The increasing presence of death in his writing noted in Sabbath’s Theater and I Married a Communist shape the final pages as Roth’s evolving American identity comes into focus.