Postmodernisme i Ali Smiths forfatterskab

The Whole Story? Reading Postmodernisms in the Work of Ali Smith

Ali Smith is a prolific contemporary writer, whose work crosses form and genre, to include short stories, novels, plays and critical works. Many labels have been attached to her fiction, amongst them ‘experimental’, ‘Scottish’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘postmodernist.’ Despite her comprehensive body of work, she is as yet academically under-researched; possibly because her work is so rich and varied, and therefore resistant to stock approaches of formulaic analysis.

Italo Calvino is one of Smith’s acknowledged literary touchstones. In The Reader (2006), an anthology of her literary influences, Smith includes an extract from his Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988). Six Memos is a posthumously published series of lectures which Calvino was to have delivered at Harvard University. In it he identifies five specific qualities of literature: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity, which he situates within the perspective of the new millennium.

Appropriating Calvino’s framework, I will present five chapters, each illustrating a different trope of postmodernism, each supported with additional material from key theorists of the postmodern, including: Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Jean Francois Lyotard and Teresa de Lauretis. As postmodernism is widely regarded as a reaction to modernism; I will also draw on figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin and Henri Bergson.