The Anxiety of Authorship: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Fields, and Professional Jurisdiction

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article deploys critical work on professionals and intellectuals to argue that On Beauty is a way of writing through the tensions between field-specific knowledge carried by experts-including jurisdictional conflicts between these experts-and those who exist on the margins or outside the university; the stance of the narrative is reliant on the status of disciplines and authorship in academia. Smith’s unease with the contemporary university, I claim, plays out by wrestling with the field of authorship in the “program era,” with who can claim expertise and over what sets of knowledge they can claim it.