Abstract
Zadie Smith’s novel NW investigates the ethical dimensions of urban habitation and interaction. This chapter argues that central to this investigation is the use of self-reflexive novelistic techniques that make possible a critical examination of the ethics of representation as well as ideologies that construct the self, the human, and the environment. By putting NW into conversation with Frankfurt School philosophers, object-oriented ontologists, and earlier anti-mimetic art movements, this chapter considers Smith’s ethical project of seeking out a critical and moral relationship between art and environment in urban spaces of the twenty-first-century.
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Hadlock, J. (2018). Between Urban Ecology and Social Construction: Environment and the Ethics of Representation in Zadie Smith’s NW. In: Michael, M. (eds) Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89728-8_8
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