فرید پروانه

In the postmodern era, there seems to be a pervasive decline of concept of ethics and community, leading to the devaluation of human life and moral values. The recent ethical turn in literary climate, however, has acknowledged a new version of ethics whose very quiddity needs further research. The present study aims to not only elucidate the moral codes of post-postmodern ethics, but also depict the significant role of communicative ethics, considered by the authors to be the infrastructure of the contemporary moral issues. Ergo, this article explores the theories of Habermas in two contemporary American novels in 2006, Amy M. Homes’ This Book Will Save Your Life and Philip Roth’s Everyman , so as to shed light on the resemblance of post-postmodern moral frames and Habermasian communicative ethics. Although the characters are initially illustrated in a postmodern setting with social alienation, solipsism, and instrumental actions, they undergo an ethical turn that is a manifestation of social and individual interactions, thus developing a cure and self-creation in the lives of the fractured characters. Finally, protagonists turn to be a self-satisfied and integrous people by maintaining the criteria of communicative ethics comprising the priority of well-being of others, empathy, and situational morality.

The present research aims at investigating the social and local relevance of the process of self-authenticity in Zadie Smith’s NW. The novel imagines a complex network of relationships ranging from individual association with occupation to friendships and families, and to participation in local and public oriented interactions, all bring individuals to experience  multiplicity of identifications with others in yet more complex ways.With regard to density and complexity of overlapping social relations this essay  indicates how self-authenticity is a social process determined by confirmation with and from other’s as well as one’s own experiment as means and results of social interactions while, also, acting as a local process operating in practice and in relation to local relevance.The study interrogates to what extent locality acts as a firm framework of reference in construction and maintenance of self-authenticity and identity formation in the current context of increasing global dynamics. It follows the concept of critical cosmopolitanism that assumes individual’s capacity for self-reflexivity as integral to formation of self-authenticity  and necessitates the emergence of a cosmopolitan consciousness that views self-authenticity as dependent on situationally-relevant conditions of time and place rather than on pre-give social patterns viewed as  absolute entities of specific authority and autonomy.