Ali Smith's queer autobiocritical aesthetics

Abstract

Ali Smith's allusive relationship to the literary and cultural canon is a prominent feature of her writing life. Smith's works offer a rich and diverse perspective on the magpie-like appreciation of cultural mo(ve)ments as accretive and cumulative sites of creative re/construction. But they also provide a sense of the writer as reader, thinker and re-visioner of personalised literary and cultural canons including not only books but paintings, films and music. In this essay, I explore Smith's work through what I term the "autobiocritical" - that is literary texts which serve to play with notions of identity, authorial positioning and critical approaches via an allusive, metafictional and theoretically informed exploration of fiction, form and self-representation. The essay focuses on Smith's Artful (2012) in which I suggest she engages in a complex process of homage and adaptation that is invested in the queering of the acts of reading, re-reading and critical perspective. Smith's subversive approach to the nature of critical analysis when divested of personality, character and readerly interaction presents a degree of cynicism and scepticism about the role of the aesthetic when anaesthetised from the quirks and individualities of character and of reading - that are central to Smith's aesthetic.

Keywords: Ali Smith; Artful (2012); aesthetics; autobiocriticism; queer reading.