REFLECTIONS OF CULTURAL CONCEPTION OF SELF IN ZADIE SMITH’S THE AUTOGRAPH MAN

Yıl 2015, Cilt: 4 Sayı: 2, 12 - 19, 01.12.2015

Ayla Oğuz

Öz

Antropologists
think that culture deeply affects people and shapes selves. It is a known fact
that cultural themes have a great influence on the conceptions of self,
emotion, child development, mental disorders and frames of individuals’
cognitive development. For J. Greg Miller, cultural content should be analyzed
as an essential influence on the patterning of psychological structures and
processes. So, there is a close relationship between the self and cultural
discourses. Michel Foucault points out that cultural forms shape subjectivity
in a socially constructed manner. Individuals having diverse inheritances due
to culture are in the center of identity problems when a person’s ethnicity is
categorized.

In The Autograph Man, Alex-Li Tandem,
buys and sells autographs for a living. Collecting the signatures of famous
people is his favourite occupation. As the son of a Chinese father and Jewish
mother he has a mixed blood and a complex inheritance. He lives alone because
his father is dead and his mother has moved to the country. He does not mind
his girlfriend of ten years, Esther, any more. He is always drunken and does
not refrain from smoking pot with his childhood friend Adam in his own life’s
complexity. In the novel difference between Jewish and goyish things is
emphasized, and naturally it creates a perceptual field for the concepts of
subjectivity and self. Thus, Zadie Smith tries to describe

Alex-Li’s place in pop culture
both as an autograph man clinging to a life full of irony and also a character
having complex inheritance and she gives an oppurtunity to the researchers to
study the

Autograph Man in terms of the importance of cultural content
in the formation of one’s social identity with references to cultural themes in
a Foucauldian approach. 

Anahtar Kelimeler

cultural content, subjectivity, self, identity, Alex-Li, Foucault, care of self

Kaynakça

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