Sangam: A Confluence of Knowledge Streams

Will Self and Zadie Smith’s depictions of post-Thatcherite London: Imagining traumatic and traumatological Space

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dc.creator Tew, P
dc.date 2015-01-19T14:49:51Z
dc.date 2014
dc.date 2015-01-19T14:49:51Z
dc.date 2014
dc.date.accessioned 2022-05-25T14:53:53Z
dc.date.available 2022-05-25T14:53:53Z
dc.identifier Études britanniques contemporaines: Revue de la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaine, 47, 2014, Issue: The Imaginaries of Space.
dc.identifier http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/9804
dc.identifier.uri http://localhost:8080/xmlui/handle/CUHPOERS/172714
dc.description This essay considers theories of trauma and fiction, in particular by analysing two novels set in London, Will Self’s The Book of Dave and Zadie Smith’s NW, and argues that trauma’s apparent belatedness (rendering its origins as elusive and unattainable) is less important particularly post-9/11 than the ‘traumatological,’ or a sense of immediate, attributable potential threats permeating the social and cultural conditions. The essay explores how Self’s future dystopia with its dogmatic belief systems runs parallel with the present and how Dave ‘Tufty’ Rudman, insane after his divorce, creates a ranting text retrieved in the future by those founding a new monotheistic religion, Dävinanity. The Book of Dave’s pathological influence allows a satire of the blind faith which animates the extremism that permeates elements of extreme Islam and future fundamentalists in a largely flooded Ingerland (England). Smith’s novel largely concerns two friends living in London’s north-west suburbs, Leah Hanwell and Natalie (previously Keisha) Blake, bonded by a traumatic childhood event. This essay explores a literal and visceral cartography of these women’s different betrayals of their partners, their multiple acts of deceit, and their troubled inner lives grounded in nostalgia for a less privileged upbringing. Both Self’s and Smith’s London fictions incorporate insistently cartographies of suffering, charting the traumatic and traumatological realities of urban selfhood.
dc.language en
dc.relation Études britanniques contemporaines: Revue de la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaine.
dc.relation Études britanniques contemporaines: Revue de la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaine.
dc.relation Études britanniques contemporaines: Revue de la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaine.
dc.subject Trauma theory
dc.subject Theorists and fiction
dc.subject Will Self
dc.subject Zadie Smith
dc.subject Historical deferral
dc.subject The traumatological
dc.subject Post-9/11 narratives
dc.subject Transgression
dc.subject The sacrificial
dc.subject Urban cartographies
dc.subject Individual and collective pathologies
dc.subject Suffering
dc.subject Betrayal
dc.title Will Self and Zadie Smith’s depictions of post-Thatcherite London: Imagining traumatic and traumatological Space
dc.type Article


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