earticle

영어

Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel On Beauty has been generally regarded as a satire of the academic world. Some critics argue that in On Beauty, most male intellectuals fail to achieve its cosmopolitan ideal since the presumed normative hierarchy within the intellectual mind excludes those outside of the main discourse. While partly accepting this argument, this study focuses on the women’s formation of cosmopolitan identities represented in the novel. In this paper, it is argued that Smith’s female characters successfully re-conceptualize the notion of beauty as a feminist, cosmopolitan value, thereby disrupting the unequal social relations present in a stratified cultural system. Here, much attention will be directed to the values that have been traditionally thought of as private and domestic, whose primary concern is to connect a particular cultural experience to that of another, developing a meaningful relationship across boundaries.