Identity in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette

Identity in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette PDF Author: Elisabeth Werdermann
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640922387
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 81

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Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Paderborn (Institut für Kulturwissenschaften), language: English, abstract: Who am I? What makes me me? These are questions of daily importance to every individual human being. The question of what defines us in our per-sonality cannot be answered in a single sentence, or easily. Multiple external factors from the field of culture such as ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexual orientation or history impinge on who we are, what we identify ourselves or are identified with. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, identity defines "Who or what a person or thing is; a distinct impression of a single person or thing presented to or perceived by others; a set of char-acteristics or a description that distinguishes a person from others." Depending on a person's social surroundings with all its cultural identifiers, his or her identity is shaped. In Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth and Hanif Kureishi's screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette identity is presented and problematised as "In-betweenness" . Both works focus on immigrants and their children, the se-cond generation, and the difficulties they face in their daily life caused by in-betweenness. In-betweenness as a term is quite self-explanatory and depicts ambiguity on several levels like belonging, ethnicity or sexual orientation/ habits, to name only a few. This ambiguity entails the social life of the characters as well as their emotional state. In the context of belonging, it is Cherry, from My Beautiful Laundrette, who first brings the term "in-betweenness" up: Oh God, I'm so sick of hearing about these in-betweens. People should make up their minds where they are. (Kureishi, p. 37) By this, she labels the subliminal topic of both literary works. With In-betweenness as a special form of identity, this research paper searches for reasons and circumstances, which make the chara

Identity in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette

Identity in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette PDF Author: Elisabeth Werdermann
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640922387
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 81

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Paderborn (Institut für Kulturwissenschaften), language: English, abstract: Who am I? What makes me me? These are questions of daily importance to every individual human being. The question of what defines us in our per-sonality cannot be answered in a single sentence, or easily. Multiple external factors from the field of culture such as ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexual orientation or history impinge on who we are, what we identify ourselves or are identified with. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, identity defines "Who or what a person or thing is; a distinct impression of a single person or thing presented to or perceived by others; a set of char-acteristics or a description that distinguishes a person from others." Depending on a person's social surroundings with all its cultural identifiers, his or her identity is shaped. In Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth and Hanif Kureishi's screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette identity is presented and problematised as "In-betweenness" . Both works focus on immigrants and their children, the se-cond generation, and the difficulties they face in their daily life caused by in-betweenness. In-betweenness as a term is quite self-explanatory and depicts ambiguity on several levels like belonging, ethnicity or sexual orientation/ habits, to name only a few. This ambiguity entails the social life of the characters as well as their emotional state. In the context of belonging, it is Cherry, from My Beautiful Laundrette, who first brings the term "in-betweenness" up: Oh God, I'm so sick of hearing about these in-betweens. People should make up their minds where they are. (Kureishi, p. 37) By this, she labels the subliminal topic of both literary works. With In-betweenness as a special form of identity, this research paper searches for reasons and circumstances, which make the chara

The Making of English National Identity

The Making of English National Identity PDF Author: Krishan Kumar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521777360
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Why is English national identity so enigmatic and so elusive? Why, unlike the Scots, Welsh, Irish and most of continental Europe, do the English find it so difficult to say who they are? The Making of English National Identity, first published in 2003, is a fascinating exploration of Englishness and what it means to be English. Drawing on historical, sociological and literary theory, Krishan Kumar examines the rise of English nationalism and issues of race and ethnicity from earliest times to the present day. He argues that the long history of the English as an imperial people has, as with other imperial people like the Russians and the Austrians, developed a sense of missionary nationalism which in the interests of unity and empire has necessitated the repression of ordinary expressions of nationalism. Professor Kumar's lively and provocative approach challenges readers to reconsider their pre-conceptions about national identity and who the English really are.

Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism

Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism PDF Author: Michael Perfect
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137307129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism analyses novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that explore ethnic and cultural diversity in London. It contributes to key, ongoing debates in literary and cultural studies and, in particular, to debates over the status and relevance of multiculturalism today.

The Swarming Streets

The Swarming Streets PDF Author: Lawrence Phillips
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042016637
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Preliminary Material --Introduction: The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London /Lawrence Phillips --A Risky Business: Going Out in the Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson /Nadine Attewell --"A Filmless London": Flânerie and Urban Culture in Dorothy Richardson's Articles for Close Up --Virgina Woolf's London and the Archaeology of Character /Vicki Tromanhauser --Treasure Seekers in the City: London in the Novels of E. Nesbit /Jenny Bavidge --"Thou art full of Stirs, a Tumultuous City": Storm Jameson and London in the 1920s /Chiara Briganti --"A Network of Inscrutable Canyons": Wartime London's Sensory Landscapes /Sara Wasson --Tales from the Crypt: Wartime London in Graham Swift's Shuttlecock /Ingrid Gunby --My Doingthings: London According to B. S. Johnson /Philip Tew --Cheerleading and Charting the Cosmopolis: London as Linear Narrative and Contested Space /Rob Burton --Shades of the Eighties: The Colour of Memory /Joe Brooker --Julian Barnes and the Marginalisation of Metropolitanism: The Suburban Centre in Metroland and Letters from London /Keith Wilson --"This Patron of the Spurned, this Perambulator of Margins, this Witness": Iain Sinclair as Rag-picker /Samantha Skinner --Images of London in African Literature: Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy and Dambudzo Marechera's The Black Insider /Kwadwo Jnr Osei-Nyame --Andrea Levy's London Novels /Susan Alice Fischer --Notes on Contributors /Lawrence Phillips --Index /Lawrence Phillips.

Mythmaking across Boundaries

Mythmaking across Boundaries PDF Author: Züleyha Çetiner-Öktem
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443892467
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
This volume explores the dynamics of myths throughout time and space, along with the mythmaking processes in various cultures, literatures and languages, in a wide range of fields, ranging from cultural studies to the history of art. The papers brought together here are motivated by two basic questions: How are myths made in diverse cultures and literatures? And, do all different cultures have different myths to be told in their artistic pursuits? To examine these questions, the book offers a wide array of articles by contributors from various cultures which focus on theory, history, space/ place, philosophy, literature, language, gender, and storytelling. Mythmaking across Boundaries not only brings together classical myths, but also contemporary constructions and reconstructions through different cultural perspectives by transcending boundaries. Using a wide spectrum of perspectives, this volume, instead of emphasising the different modes of the mythmaking process, connects numerous perceptions of mythmaking and investigates diversities among cultures, languages and literatures, viewing them as a unified whole. As the essays reflect on both academic and popular texts, the book will be useful to scholars and students, as well as the general reader.

The Privilege of Crisis

The Privilege of Crisis PDF Author: Elahe Haschemi Yekani
Publisher: Campus Verlag
ISBN: 3593393999
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Despite the understanding of scholars that masculinity, far from being a natural or stable concept, is in reality a social construction, the culture at large continues to privilege an idealized, coherent male point of view. The Privilege of Crisis draws on the work of authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad--as well as contemporary postcolonial writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith--to show how recurrent references to a "crisis" of masculinity or the decline of masculinity serve largely to demonstrate and support positions of male privilege.

Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film

Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film PDF Author: Peter Cherry
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755601734
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A climate of Islamophobia allows anxieties about Muslim men living in and migrating to Britain to endure. British Muslims men are often profiled in highly negative terms or regarded with suspicion owing to their perceived religious and cultural heritage. But novels and films by British migrant and diaspora writers and filmmakers powerfully contest these stereotypes, and explore the rich diversity of Muslim masculinities in Britain. This book is the first critical study to engage with British Muslim masculinities in this literary and cinematic output from the perspective of masculinity studies. Through close analysis of work by Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Guy Gunaratne, Sally El Hosaini, Hanif Kureishi, Suhayl Saadi, Kamila Shamsie, Zadie Smith, Zia Haider Rahman and Salman Rushdie, Peter Cherry examines how migrant and diaspora protagonists negotiate their masculinity in a climate of Islamophobic and anti-migrant rhetoric. Cherry proposes a transcultural reading of these novels and films that exposes how conceptions of 'Britishness', 'Muslimness' and those of masculinity are unstable and contingent constructs shaped by migration, interaction with other cultures, and global and local politics.

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018 PDF Author: Peter Boxall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108483410
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Gives a comprehensive critical picture of the development of British fiction from the election of Thatcher to the present.

The Post-War British Literature Handbook

The Post-War British Literature Handbook PDF Author: Katharine Cockin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441161988
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Literature and Culture Handbooks are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. Written in clear language by leading academics, they provide an indispensable introduction to key topics, including: • Introduction to authors, texts, historical and cultural contexts • Guides to key critics, concepts and topics • An overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research • Case studies in reading literary and critical texts • Annotated bibliography (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms. The Post-War British Literature Handbook is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to literature and culture in post-war Britain.

Bloomsbury Essential Guide for Reading Groups

Bloomsbury Essential Guide for Reading Groups PDF Author: Susan Osborne
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408103575
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
"A book club gives the opportunity to meet up with friends and wake the brain up a bit with lively and often quite aggressive discussion" Dawn French How do you keep your reading groups discussions lively and focussed? If you want to gain new insight into literature and share your passion with friends this book offers readers guides for 75 of the very best reads - guaranteed to provoke spirited debate! Each of the readers guides includes a summary of the book, a brief author biography, discussion points to spark debate, and a set of titles for further reading that deal with similar themes. A `background' section provides pointers to more material about the book online and as well as further thought-provoking material: Where did the author come from? What made them write the book? How did the context in which they wrote influence them? If you'd like further insight, debate, discussion and analysis to underpin your understanding and enjoyment of reading - then look no further than this guide. New titles in this edition include: The Long Firm, Leper's Companions, By the Sea, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, Buddha of Suburbia, The Icarus Girl, Black and Blue, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, The Cutting Room, Shadow of the Wind, Giving up the Ghost...and many more!