Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty deals with the politics of beauty. She states in an interview that her novels should be political and moral. If a novel tells you to be moral in a certain way then they it is a bad novel. She states that art is a reflection of morals and a reflection of authors’ morals. Art is a case of attempting to view both sides of the story. "The Culture wars": the political people on the left vs. the political people on the right who deal with the canon, literature, and genres. Left is multi-culturalist and they believe that there is no such thing as great art, while on the Right there are the conservatives who believe that there are only a few great artists. The novel, On Beauty, is about the culture wars on the Left is Howard and his family and on the Right is Jerome and Monty Kipps and his family. Jerome will be the one mediating between the Culture Wars of the two families.
Characters
The Kippes: From the Caribbean, live in England. A very religious family, pro-business.
The Belseys: The family in America: Howard and Kiki, Jerome, Zora and Levi. They live in an old Victorian house. Howard is a professor at Wellington College. They are stunned that Jerome has become a Christian. Kiki is Black and Howard is White.
Monty and Howard are both Renaissance Art professors, both are writing novels and yet Monty's will reach the top of the bestseller list and Howards will not. Howard attacks Monty's analysis of a Rembrandt poem in a scholarly journal- yet Howard had the wrong picture.
Why is Howards son working for Monty?
-He is working for Monty to attempt to get his fathers attention. Yet it is strange to see a character go from a more liberal lifestyle to a conservative lifestyle to gain attention from a parent. In high school the students who wanted attention from their parents attempted to do so by going against the "typical" student life, by becoming more liberal.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment