Making Room for Affect: Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, and the Authenticating Human

Abstract

The project at hand takes as its object of study an affect-centered model of subjectivity that emphasizes the role authentication plays in determining the intensity of the subject’s feelings, and thus, I argue, the degree to which the subject becomes different. This model is derived from the fiction of Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace, who belong to a generation of authors whose work has been frequently periodized as responding to or “coming after” an academic construction of postmodern culture most popularized in the West during the last decades of the 20th century. By elaborating on the nature and implications of this model of subjectivity, this project seeks to understand the shift in literary sensibilities that occurs at the turn of the millennium as, in part, an impulse to “make room” for affect, not only in the character function of fiction, but also in Western conceptions of human becoming.