Analysis Of Zadie Smith's Two Directions For The Novel

Zadie Smith identifies in her essay, "Two Directions for The Novel", "the Anglo-American liberal middle class" in a frightful crisis and anxiety (72). Smith goes on to state that the events of 9/11, a global financial recession and numerous natural disasters have certainly intensified and evoked a traumatic apprehension of contemporary life in the western world, which in turn have shaped the worries, concerns and styles of postmodernist fiction. In this catastrophe, the modernist aim for a new aesthetics responding to these wars and revolution, terror and global economic crisis is highly relevant in today's society (72). These various endeavours to renew modernist aesthetics with the contemporary concerns have emerged in the form of different types of revisionary modernism. These include remodernism, which is a rejection of postmodernism and the quest for a new spirituality in the art explored by Billie Childish and Charles Thompson; and metamodernism, which Robin Van Den Akker expains is "the oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment" to express a new structure of feeling (2). Postmodernism seems to exhaust its

Thus, the number 37 may represent a call for unanticipated unity and fortuitous connection, but its actual presence in the narrative calls attention to the disrupted communal fabric of the neighbourhood, particularly through economic disparity. The significance of the number 37 in N-W is also acknowledged by Christian Lorentzen is his review entitled "Why am I so fucked up?" (2012) for the London Review of Books. In it he presents the possibility of the number 37 being suggestive of Leah's "biological