Introduction–Time for Reading Lynch, Deidre Shauna; Ender, Evelyne
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
10/2018, Letnik:
133, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Watching someone else get lost in a book and become riveted by its words or story is a baffling and estranging experience, one of "an almost primal exclusion". Barred from an unmediated knowledge of ...the content of that response, people are limited to in...ferring that reading is happening. Ali Smith is one of several contemporary fic...tion writers who take an interest in the condi...tions in which (their) readers read now.
By staging ekphrastic encounters with self-reflexive art Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet both models and advocates for a mode of engagement with the socio-political present that requires a critical look ...at dominant narratives. The ekphrastic encounters the novels stage serve as meta-fictional commentary that suggests that art can facilitate engagement with other perspectives and teach a benign mode of looking that could provide a way into more compassionate and open societal dialogue. However, the Quartet articulates scepticism as to whether its ekphrastic lessons will be heeded, particularly under the current attention economy and institutionalised dismissal of the arts. Specifically, by centring questions of composition Smith's ekphrastic encounters with collage address the politics of representation whereas the sculptural encounters bring out themes of endurance and passive resistance as political stategy. It is thus not only the state of the nation Smith sheds light on but also the state of the novel.
Influential critics including Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen have characterised the metamodern turn as politically reenergizing aesthetic practices with a mixture of ...hope and irony after a period of postmodern cynicism. While such studies have examined political movements or individual writers, few have examined how the metamodern shift affects the habitus of British artists and intellectuals who are the current instantiation of what Alan Sinfield calls the 'dissident middle class'. Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet wrestles with that very question as she populates her four novels with characters whose conversations about art and politics revise tropes of metropolitan cynicism common in postmodern British literature and scholarship. Smith's colliding representations of historical and fictional artists reflect a 'porous' aesthetic approach to the novel that combines fiction, ekphrasis, and contemporary politics and reimagines Britain's 'dissident middle' counterpublic. Smith's metamodern vision of a counterpublic sphere affirms the civic role of artists and intellectuals yet ironically tempers the novels' utopic moments with acknowledgments of other characters' barriers to participation in the counterpublic. The Seasonals present a distinct theoretical approach to the relationship between art and politics by blurring boundaries between a fictional counterpublic and the author and her readers' public sphere.
There are, at least, two modes of experience when we encounter the pictorial and verbal in the Penguin UK paperback edition of Ali Smith's How to be both (2014). One aspect of Smith's work that ...deserves closer attention is the relationship between the visual and verbal, particularly in relation to the use of a reprinted artwork as cover art and its reappearance as an ekphrastic object in the narrative. This essay focuses on the reprinted photograph as a paratextual element in order to examine the ways in which photography is deployed as an embedded commentary on ways of seeing and making in the novel. The ekphrastic descriptions of artworks problematize the boundaries between fictive worlds and external reality. Therefore, might ekphrasis be deployed as a self-conscious maneuver aimed at revealing the artifice of these fictive worlds in the novel? Smith's exploration of duality extends to the crossing of boundaries between art forms, paratext and text, and image and word. Although this essay does not discuss duality in the context of gender and sexuality, it illustrates the ways in which How to be both encourages ethical action, as key to seeing and being, without losing sight of art and aesthetics.
To write a book is to create a dwelling. Ali Smith's novels are equal parts narrative and blueprint in the sense that they usher the reader into spaces, homes, habitats, and residences. Thus, an ...author is surely an architect - someone who designs and plans stories on top of stories - someone concerned with form and function, esthetic and purpose. Smith's 2014 novel How to Be Both abounds with images of homes and roofs and doors. This essay is interested in architectural and literary thresholds, thresholds that welcome movement and exchange. Such spaces facilitate a type of narrative reciprocity between the novel's two sections. Smith thus expands the concept of the traditional frame narrative and creates what I call a reciprocal frame narrative focused on exchange instead of embeddedness. In this essay, I explore the architecture of and in How to Be Both to better understand the connections between the two protagonists, George and Francescho.
This essay discusses the depiction of the post-Brexit British landscape in the first three novels in Ali Smith's season-themed State of the Nation quartet, Autumn (2016), Winter (2017) and Spring ...(2018). It engages with contemporary ecocritical and feminist conceptualisations of climate change, and debates about the relationship between ecological crisis and the current political landscape to consider the ways in which these subjects are embedded in Smith's trilogy named for the seasons. It reflects on the potential for the novel form to attempt to bear witness to the present political moment and argues that Smith's fragmented and polyvocal texts represent an ethical and politically engaged approach to the contemporary crisis, where the novel can seek to enable or rehearse dialogues between groups whose positions are entrenched and at an impasse. It discusses the ways in which the novels dramatise the necessary ways out of seemingly irreconcilable differences through a celebration of empathy, ecological awareness and hospitality
Present-tense narration has become a prevalent narrative style in English literature over the past few decades. This narrative style tended to be considered unnatural and odd in narrative theory in ...the late twentieth century (Cohn, 1999; Fludernik, 1996), since using the present tense to describe events at the story level of narrative was regarded as incongruous with the traditional story-telling convention of ‘live now and tell later’, in which the present tense is generally associated with the narrator’s deictic centre at the level of discourse. In contemporary present-tense narratives, however, the present tense is often employed as a narrative tense that develops the narrative plot-line, making the unmistakable demarcation between story and discourse impossible by means of tense. As a case study, this paper examines the narrative effects of using present-tense narration in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014). It demonstrates how in this novel, the unique handling of the narrative present tense serves to achieve the particular effects of blurring levels between experience and narration as well as past and present. These effects can only be appreciated by reconsidering the relationship between story and discourse and by clarifying the connection between the functions of present-tense narration and the novel’s central theme, being both. Suggesting that the narrative present tense has varied functions in this novel, such as figural and retrospective, this paper illustrates that the diverse usage of the narrative present tense adds to the unclear distinction between narrative levels.
This article examines the representation of the European protagonist in Autumn by Ali Smith from a gender, intersectional and cultural studies perspective. The novel is a pioneering work in Brexlit, ...an emergent literary movement which aims to reflect the current political and social landscape of the United Kingdom after the 2016 European Union referendum. Firstly, this article offers an overview of the political, social and literary phenomenon of Brexlit, followed by an outline of Sara Ahmed's theorisation of the sociological concept of the stranger. Secondly, the article further contextualises Brexit fiction, presenting its crucial role in putting forward a fair portrayal of migrants, a collective largely misrepresented in the UK media. The article then considers the centrality of Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet to the reworking of the British social imaginary. The subsequent two sections explore the encounters in which Daniel's strange(r)ness manifests itself through his heterogeneous and relational yet singular identity, owing to his connection to the migratory experience. Retaining his differences and from a position of agency, the solidary bonds he establishes with Elisabeth convey strange(r)ness as a label that must be overcome in order to ensure a better coexistence within the British nation.
Art, Depth and Affect in Winter: Metamodernist Contexts of Ali Smith's Novel. The paper discusses Ali Smith’s Winter through the prism of the theory of metamodernism. The novel can be related to the ...works of authors who reject the cynical sophistication of postmodernist art and appropriate its strategies to focus on authenticity, sincerity, and affect. Drawing on Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen, who maintain that the metamodernist structure of feeling manifests through a mix of/or oscillation between pre-modernist, modernist and postmodernist tropes and devices, the author considers Ali Smith’s novel a mixture of postmodernist, modernist and romantic elements and explores how these elements function in the production of the metamodernist effect of her novel.
What comes after the language model of literary history? This essay considers that question by turning to works of contemporary fiction that operate at the edges of our most dominant language: ...English. These works use experiments with orthography, typeface, and design to dramatize the visual and aural culture of words, histories of language contact, and the apparatus of literary circulation. Words are there to be seen and heard as well as read, and what we see and hear alters how we read. Whereas multilingual works have typically added, elaborated, or combined languages, these works tend to block or restrict languages. They are therefore postlingual as well as post-anglophone. This is not a matter of narrowing and corralling what English can do. For writers in dominant languages, linguistic restriction is a necessary condition of literary cosmopolitanism.
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