A Study On The Traumatic Narrative Of Swing Time

Zadie Smith(1975-)is one of the representative figures of the new generation of British young women writers,and has attracted much attention in the field of British immigrant literature.Almost every work of Zadie Smith,especially the novel,has been recognized and valued by the literary world,and has been a frequent finalist for the Man Booker Prize,one of the World Literary Awards.In her new book Swing Time(2016),Zadie Smith,with her unique identity and perspective as a mixed-race woman writer of Jamaican immigrant descent,narrates three decades between 1982 and 2008,under the influence of time and society,two dance-loving mixed-race girls “Swing” to survive,so as to see the immigrants and their descendants as a result of family,race,color and identity of the trauma suffered.This thesis will combine the concept of medical trauma with narratology,and try to interpret the characters’ trauma by analyzing the narrative art of trauma in Swing Time.The introduction first gives a brief introduction to Zadie Smith and her work Swing Time,explains the features of trauma narrative,and reviews the research on Smith and her works at home and abroad.The first part analyzes the theme of multiple trauma,which is divided into family trauma under emotional alienation and racial trauma under immigration wave,through the analysis of the two trauma themes of the characters of the original symptoms and signs of mental trauma in order to explain the theme of trauma in the novel.In the second part,the author analyzes the traumatic master’s formula,the first narrative person,the dual narrative focus,the compound narrative of childhood trauma and the narrative voice of female trauma.The third part analyzes the works from the traumatic narrative space-time aspect.In terms of narrative time,the author breaks the normal time sequence and constructs a fragmental trauma narrative time structure which shuttles between the past and the present.According to Gabriel Zorun and Henri Lefebvre’s space theory,the paper further expounds the trauma of the characters from the geographical space,the social space and the text space.In the fourth part,the author discusses the individual’s escape,acceptance,reconstruction,the self-existence and the historical culture in the sense of human society,as well as the narrative significance of the multiple trauma.The epilogue makes a summative comment on the full text.Through the analysis of the narrative of trauma in Swing Time,this paper shows the diachronic and non-regional nature of trauma,so as to arouse the society’s vigilance and attention to the human spiritual trauma,and to further reflect and explore the trauma.