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

Authors : Ayla OĞUZ

Pages : 12-19

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Publication Date : 2015-12-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :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. 
Keywords : cultural content, subjectivity, self, identity, Alex Li, Foucault, care of self