Neoliberal Space, Place and Subjectivity in Zadie Smith's NW

Abstract

Following the literary criticism of Zadie Smith’s NW by critics such as Lynn Wells and Wendy Knepper, this thesis seeks to engage with the social scripts and spatial dynamics of Smith’s fourth novel. I argue that NW is concerned with the neoliberalization of both real and virtual spaces, emphasizing the consequent effects of neoliberalism on agency and subjectivity and highlighting the neoliberal advancement of hyperindividualism and securitization over social responsibility and solidarity. Much detail is given to NW’s exploration of race, class and social mobility at the tail-end of the global financial crisis of 2007-08. NW’s fragmented four-part narrative channels a perspectival approach to space and place by delineating its structure through the four separate subjectivities of the main characters. I contextualize my thesis alongside Paul Gilroy’s cultural criticism of contemporary British multiculturalism, conviviality and melancholia, while also anchoring NW’s spatial concerns to Jeff Malpas’s spatial philosophy and Emily Cuming’s explication of British council estates in various forms of contemporary literature. As well, this thesis incorporates the philosophical frameworks of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a guide for recognizing some of NW’s interest in the subjective experience of people and spaces, and to reorient the act of ‘seeing’ as a radical form of agency and mediation in itself. Ultimately, this phenomenological and epistemological approach to interpreting Smith’s fiction creates the potential for meaning to be co-constructed between author and reader, forming a new social vision for the novel as artform.