Performative Gender within NW
- 1 Sussex County Community College, Newton, NJ, USA
Abstract
Zadie Smith’s NW experimental and fragmented form interplays with the idea of meaning throughout the text. As a reader, it is hard not to draw upon comparisons to the self when reading NW . The act of reading NW , then, becomes a performance in which I, as a reader, engage in exploring meaning deeper and see how the text resonates with me. This essay explores gender as a performance of the active reading experience and one that resonates with the reader. Gender takes on the shape of a liquid identity throughout NW , and it is one that adds meaning to the form of NW , in that, gender comes to perform itself in adding meaning to liquid identities throughout the performance of reading NW. Gender comes to take on multiple meanings throughout NW , and it is one that the author explores further in this paper.
- Ahmed, S. (2024). The Feminist Killjoy Handbook . Penguin Books.
- De Lange, V. (1970, January 1). Neo-Liberalist Influence on Feminism in Zadie Smith’s NW and on Beauty . Utrecht University Student Theses Repository Home. https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/39513
- Gay, R. (2024). Bad Feminist: Essays . Harper Perennial.
- Hooks, B. (2014). Teaching to Transgress . Routledge.
- Oates, J. C. (2017). Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration , Obsession , and the Writing Life . ECCO, an Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers.
- Perez Zapata, B. (2020). “I Am the Sole Author”: Inauthenticity and Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s NW. Atlantis Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies , 42, 180-196.
- Smith, Z. (2012). NW . Prometheus.