Connectivity and Contemporaneity in Ali Smith’s Oeuvre: A Critical Study

Abstract

This thesis is a comprehensive study of the complete works (to date) of the contemporary Scottish writer Ali Smith. I explore the remarkable but diffuse critical attention to Smith's writing while positing an original single-author approach gleaned from sustained attention across her experimentation with literary forms and genres, including: novels, short stories, children’s literature, lectures, essays and nonfiction, prefaces and introductions, playscripts, poetry, and hybrid literary-critical works. By attending to both specific and diachronic concerns of aesthetics, culture, and politics across Smith’s oeuvre from the 1980s to the 2020s, this thesis argues that an interplay between connectivity and contemporaneity is key to Smith’s writing. My approach follows the contours of Smith’s oeuvre in dialogue with postcritical, feminist, queer, New Ethical, postcolonial and affect theory within the context of contemporary British literature and culture. This thesis also explores dialogue with other writers, artists, and cultural references which characterise Smith's highly allusive style by integrating these strands as part of a broader focus on connectivity and care across her oeuvre. By opening the archive of Smith’s oeuvre, I argue that the literary innovations of her writing hold particular significance in the wake of modernism and postmodernism and that her writing affords reparative and interstitial perspectives on contemporary experience and society. The thesis is structured across three chapters which branch out into particular focuses in subchapters, moving between resonant themes and particular texts and genres. The first chapter examines the culmination of Smith’s literary-critical discussions across essayistic, fictional, and hybrid forms as literary praxis: a synergistic alternative to interpretative practices in the arts and humanities. I argue that Smith’s praxis exhibits how contemporary literary texts can have agency in discourses of literature and visual art while demonstrating metacritical interventions premised on aesthetic encounter and intertextual dialogue. In the second chapter, I put New Ethical literary criticism in dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s postcolonial affect theory to theorise aesthetics of encounter. Focusing on metatheatrical playscripts, nonfictional works, and fiction, I explore how Smith’s writing self-consciously explores hospitality, politics of othering, narratives of asylum, and both the capacities and limitations of compassionate response in globalised neoliberal societies. The third chapter responds to relationality and the positioning of affective attachments and intersubjective relationships as potential sites for new socio-political and ethical possibilities. This chapter examines Smith’s metafictional adaptation of Antigone for children, grief and questions of grievability, and the critical potential of queer love and becoming. Finally, the Coda reflects on tentative possibilities of renewal offered through contemporaneous literary experimentation with the novel, focusing specifically on the Seasonal quartet (2016–20) in light of the frameworks developed through attention across Smith’s oeuvre.