Ali Smith's queer autobiocritical aesthetics

Llewellyn, Mark ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9493-1580 2025. Ali Smith's queer autobiocritical aesthetics. Journal of Lesbian Studies

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	1089-4160
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 January 2025
Date of Acceptance:	29 January 2025
Last Modified:	14 Mar 2025 11:11
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175769

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