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Zadie Smith's Aesthetics, Christina Cook

All Theses

In this thesis, I argue that Zadie Smith builds guidelines for reading within her novels On Beauty and White Teeth. These guidelines suggest that it is through reading aesthetically that we can fuse the neutral and the personal in order to come to a method of analysis that is critically fair. I suggest that Smith's desire for such methods is a result of her reductive critical reception in the wake of White Teeth's publication and that her texts provide interpretational cues that clarify her aesthetic approach; these cues are, more specifically, references to Elaine Scarry's "On Beauty and …