DOCSLIB.ORG

WRAP-Novel-Future-Anterior-Book

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
WRAP-Novel-Future-Anterior-Book Original citation: Lupton, Christina. (2016) The novel as the future anterior of the book : Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Ali Smith’s the Accidental. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 49 (3). pp. 504-518. Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/79149 Copyright and reuse: The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work by researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Publisher’s statement: © 2016 Duke University Press. http://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-3651261 A note on versions: The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the ‘permanent WRAP URL’ above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications The Novel as the Future Anterior of the Book: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Ali Smith’s the Accidental At the end of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), a study that documents the breaking away of media from human physiology, Friedrich Kittler states: “under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say” (262). This doesn’t mean that he foresees a lack of things being written; rather, Kittler refers here to the increasingly likely scenario of machines being able to “speak” to themselves and each other, through networks and systems that bypass human cognition. The critic’s role in this setting would be to “read” these networks as the language underlying all others. Such an approach to literary history, Johanna Drucker stresses, aims “not to give a techno-determinist reading of literature, but to proffer a highly literary reading of the technologies of inscription as texts” (2013). Novels can still show up under this media historical lens. But their vital capacity to register the technologies of inscription and data transfer that produced them—Dracula and Gravity’s Rainbow are two novels on which Kittler has written in this vein—is recast as writing’s capacity to grasp and speak of its own production, evidence of matter informing matter rather than a dialectical relationship between transcendent and material realms (1997; 50, 101). This essay is about two fictions that seem to cede their reflexive capacity to media in this way. Kittler’s description of an inscription technology as something increasingly able to speak for and of itself, and to replace in this capacity traditionally human forms of self-reflection, is a scenario Remainder and the Accidental each take seriously. Both novels promote consciousness of bookishness; of the codex as a machine that is sequential and material; of the printed page; of moveable type. More importantly, both offer a view of the paper page that seems provided by 1 the technologies that move beyond it rather than by a human consciousness of matter. Partly in honor of these novels, and partly as an experiment in thinking through our current interest in surfaces and materials, my theoretical alliance in this paper remains with media archeology. But even in the terms of Kittler and Latour, I will suggest, the reflexivity of the kind at work in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Ali Smith’s The Accidental is difficult to parse entirely as a process of media’s self-begetting. This is partly because Smith and McCarthy account very differently for what the codex book will have been, implying that they represent it from the perspective of a media platform that has succeeded the book but also opening up the question of what that platform is. In this sense, their novels differ from reflexive classics like Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy, which animate the page much more directly as something articulate about its own trajectory. But Remainder and The Accidental are also unlike the digital novels, the techno-texts of N. Katherine Hayles’s description, which deploy the screen medium as a palpable referent shared by reader and writer, active in shaping the story told by the text (2011). Instead these novels pry themselves away from the book as their scene of composition even as it continues, a decade after their publication, to be the form in which they are most likely to circulate. Their description of their own mediation involves a relationship of exteriority to the book that is fictional because it states how the future is to be occupied, but does so before it has arrived. One way to describe this move is as invoking the future anterior, a perspective that Mark Currie defines as “not the actual future, but an envisaged, virtual future which is part of the present, experiencing the present moment as one that will have been, as something that will have happened (2013:61). In Paper Machines (2005), Derrida describes the future anterior of the paper as the view that opens up of an inscription technology once it is no longer directly in use as 2 a medium, but is still present as a point of reference. Pointing to paper as something that continues to occupy us imaginatively in electronic times, he argues by way of an analogy: one drives, he suggests, with both hands and feet, moving forwards along the road while all the time looking into the rear view mirror into the world receding into the distance (64). By this logic, the first sign of our bodies moving into the future is the rearview mirror image of the past. But for Derrida, as well as for Currie, the future anterior is as much grammatical proposition as mechanical production. Novels like Remainder and The Accidental perform in these terms in a space opened up by media history, but the capacity they deploy, to look from a non-native perspective at the technology of paper and print is at least partly their own production. 1. Locating Transcendence Of all recent novelists, McCarthy may be the most widely recognized as working at the juncture of media archeology and fiction, touted for his enthusiastic handing over authorial power to information currents and media formats. Critics, including Justus Neiman, Peter Vermeulen, and Matthew Hart, by whom he was recently interviewed at length, have given him much credit as spokesperson for the idea that currents of media change are shaping the novel today. Commitment to this position plays out in C (2010), which tracks the life of its protagonist, Serge, at points of contact with early twentieth-century technology. Machines used to encode and convey language as physical data—gramophone, telegraph, radio—feature in the novel, suggesting that the text itself is a channel for the material passage of information. McCarthy’s non-fiction writing on the topic of authorship returns often to the image of novelist as more DJ than artist, involved in transmitting a “set of signals that have been repeating, pulsing, 3 modulating in the airspace of the novel, poem, play—in their lines, between them and around them—since each of these forms began” (2012c: Sec 1). In keeping with this description of the writer, McCarthy has expressed fascination with the idea of an archive being, not the author’s voice, but a series of keystrokes and moments in digital history. He speaks in one interview in praise of the strand of “genetic criticism” that uses the forensic evidence of writing to track the movement of authors from one draft to the next, their intersection with other texts in their reading, and the cross-fertilization of language that shows up as the influence of one document on another. This does not apply only to the print or manuscript archive. McCarthy points out that digital documents harbor just as much material evidence of the writer’s life if they are read by “software that can reconstruct every keystroke you made since the beginning of time – MacBook, floppy discs, the lot” (2012b). In this spirit, McCarthy seems to be craning actively to see his work from the angle Kittler suggests, as a material transcript that makes intellection no more or less than another medium. Remainder can, and has, been read in these terms as an essay into the idea that cognitive and subjective experience should be approached materially; a fiction carried by the whole raft of arguments in favor of approaching texts as surfaces rather than depths. McCarthy’s unnamed narrator appears as a mind from which memories and emotions have been wiped by a mysterious accident, a patient whose thoughts and movements are broken down into constituent parts and pathways and consciously re-learnt. Using money received in compensation for the accident, he builds up memories by creating the physical environments he believed triggered them, chasing down authentic experiences by reproducing the movements and sequences from which they arise. As a plot, this physical furnishing of a cognitive world is both witty and strangely enthralling, involving sets inhabited by vast numbers of people paid to re-enact specific 4 sequences. Theoretically, it is also in keeping with what media theorists, including Hayles and Kittler, but Bernard Steigler, and Mark B.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • [PDF] Download Winter Full Ebook by Ali Smith
    [PDF] Download Winter Full eBook by Ali Smith Information: Author: Ali Smith Format: 336 pages Dimensions: 144 x 222mm Publication date: 02 Nov 2017 Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd Imprint: Hamish Hamilton Ltd Release location: London, United Kingdom Book Synopsis: The dazzling second novel in Ali Smith's essential Seasonal Quartet -- from the Baileys Prize-winning, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Autumn and How to be bothA Book of the Year according to: the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Evening Standard, The Times.'Dazzling' Daily TelegraphWinter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer's leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. And if there's ice, there'll be fire. In Ali Smith's Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith's shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter. It's the season that teaches us survival. Here comes Winter. Recommendations: Review quote Cleverly constructed and elegantly written. It's both an engaging human story and a place for wider topical observations. Bring on Spring * Evening Standard * If Ali Smith's four quartets in, and about, time do not endure to rank among the most original, consoling and inspiring of the artistic responses to 'this mad and bitter mess' of the present, then we will have plunged into an even bleaker mid-winter than people often fear * Financial Times * Smith is a specialist by now in using a quizzical, feather-light prose style to interrogate the heaviest of material...throughout Winter, grief and pain are transfigured, sometimes lastingly, by luminous moments of humour, insight and connection..
    [Show full text]
  • An Intertextual Analysis of the Novel Girl Meets Boy and the Use of Feminist And
    AN INTERTEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL GIRL MEETS BOY AND THE USE OF FEMINIST AND QUEER THEORY BY ALI SMITH IN HER RECEPTION OF THE TALE OF IPHIS FROM OVID’S METAMORPHOSES (9.666-797) by HOLLY ANNE RANGER INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY A thesis submitted to AND ANTIQUITY University of Birmingham COLLEGE OF ARTS AND LAW For the degree of UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM MPHIL (B) CLASSICS NOVEMBER 2012 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT In this thesis I discuss Ali Smith’s reworking of Ovid’s tale of the girl-boy Iphis from his Metamorphoses (9.666-797) in her 2006 novel Girl meets boy. I examine how Smith has brought Ovid to life for twenty-first century readers, first through an exploration of feminist and queer critical readings of Ovid and the influence of those theories on Smith’s method of classical reception, and secondly through an analysis of intertextual references. My matrix of interpretation draws upon the theories and experimental writing of Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler, alongside an examination of intertextual allusions to Ovid himself, Virginia Woolf, John Lyly and William Shakespeare.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Ali Smith Ali Smith's Fiction Demands of Its Reader Some Basic
    Ali Smith Ali Smith’s fiction demands of its reader some basic requirements. Firstly, one must be the bearer of a sense of humour, and, if possible, a sense of the ludicrous, for we are everywhere treated to a stream of in-jokes and puns that reflect their author’s fondness for both whimsy and surreality. Secondly, one must give up any reliance on the conventions of narrative realism for though her works are often explicitly set in recognisably contemporary worlds, they rarely limit themselves to the visible parameters of social reality, preferring audacious imaginative flight over intricate description or plot trajectory. Finally, one needs to tune emotionally to the pitch of writing that while fearsomely clever is also hauntingly affecting. Smith does not manipulatively wring from her reader an emotional reaction to the heart-breaking concerns with loss, vulnerability, grief, and loneliness about which she often writes, rather through echoes and associations one comes obliquely to appreciate and empathise with the difficult work of being human that Smith captures. Armed with these prerequisites the reader can feel prepared to tackle one of the most innovative, thoughtful, and witty writers of her generation. Alison Smith was born in Inverness, Scotland on 24th August 1962 to an English father, who was an electrician, and a mother from the very north of Ireland, who worked as a bus conductress. The last of five children, Smith recalls a happy childhood but one in which she, as the youngest by seven years, spent much time amusing herself. She learned to read at the age of three and had devoured her siblings’ book collections before her teenage years.
    [Show full text]
  • Ema Jelínková and Rachael Sanders, Eds. [The Literary Art of Ali Smith: “All We Are Is Eyes.” the Transatlantic Studies In
    [ostrava journal of english philology—vol.12, no. 2, 2020—book reviews] 114 [E. Jelínková and R. Sanders, eds.: The Literary Art of Ali Smith: “All we are is Eyes.” ...] [doi.org/10.15452/OJoEP.2020.12.0014] time line, and different target audiences). The book brings to the table highly in­ The book also introduces the topic of cre­ formative, current topics, especially in the ative writing courses and pragmatic as­ light of changing dynamics of publishing, pects of publishing. and it reflects on the need to go to meet the The only part of the book related to readers and address their changing read­ a different linguistic territory (French­ ing/literary needs and wants. ­speaking countries) describes French children’s literature and discusses autism Veronika Zavřelová with reference to carefully chosen, sup­ University of New York in Prague portive and stimulating literature. As mentioned, all the essays present­ Ema Jelínková and Rachael ed in the book are highly informative for a person who possesses an interest in lit­ Sanders, eds. [The Literary erature beyond reading for pleasure and Art of Ali Smith: “All we are might have an ambition to become an in­ is Eyes.” The Transatlantic sider in the book business. The presented topics and issues are Studies in British and North applicable to the global market; howev­ American Culture, vol. 31.] er, there are also specific features that are Frankfurt am Mein: Peter rooted in the English­‑speaking world. Thanks to the English language, this mar­ Lang, 2019. ket benefits from a strong ability to pen­ This volume comprises papers from an in­ etrate numerous countries and regions, ternational team of researchers exploring and it benefits from the fact that English is the multifaceted work of the contempo­ used as a lingua franca in the world of busi­ rary Scottish writer, playwright, academic ness; the benefit of the English language is and journalist Ali Smith – who has become literally the ability to speak to the masses.
    [Show full text]
  • Autumn Novel
    By the same author Free Love Like Other stories and other stories Hotel World The whole story and other stories The Accidental Girl Meets Boy The first person and other stories There but for the Artful Shire How to be both Public library and other stories This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2016 by Ali Smith All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd., a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2016. Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Pan Books: Excerpt from Talking to Women by Nell Dunn, copyright © 1966 by Nell Dunn. Reprinted by permission of Pan Books. Penguin Books Ltd.: Excerpt from Metamorphosis by Ovid, translated by Mary M. Innes. Copyright © 1995 by Mary M. Innes. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Wolverhampton Art Gallery & Museums: Excerpt from Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman by Sue Tate, copyright © 2013 by Sue Tate. Reprinted by permission of Wolverhampton Art Gallery & Museums. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Name: Smith, Ali, [date] author. Title: Autumn / Ali Smith. Description: New York : Pantheon Books, [2017] Identifiers: LCCN 2016036972 (print).
    [Show full text]
  • Dp - Ali Smith.Pdf
    Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Kateřina Štruncová Love, Alienation and Identity in Ali Smith’s Novels Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2013 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for introducing me to the breathtaking world of Ali Smith’s novels and for her kindness and helpful guidance. Table of Contents 1 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 2 Like …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4 3 Girl Meets Boy …………………………………………………………………………………………… 15 4 The Accidental …………………………………………………………………………………………… 25 5 Hotel World ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 38 6 There But For The ……………………………………………………………………………………… 48 7 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 57 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 59 Czech Resume ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 64 English Resume ………………………………………………………………………………………………65 1 Introduction This thesis analyzes the work of a Scottish writer Ali Smith, in particular all of her five novels that were published so far. Smith was born in Inverness in 1962, the fifth of five children. After school, Smith went to university at Aberdeen, then to Cambridge to study for a PhD, which she has never finished. After she gave up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde, she began writing short stories and novels. Smith, openly gay, currently lives in Cambridge and avoids publicity. She says that she has always believed that an author must remain as anonymous as possible or risk impeding the fiction for her readers. Too much biographical information “diminishes the thing that you do” she says. “You have to remain invisible” (qtd.
    [Show full text]
  • The Agency of Characters Who Read in the Fiction of Ali Smith
    ‘LEAV(ING) ROOM FOR THE READER’: THE AGENCY OF CHARACTERS WHO READ IN THE FICTION OF ALI SMITH Jessica Orr A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St Andrews 2019 Full metadata for this thesis is available in St Andrews Research Repository at: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Please use this identifier to cite or link to this thesis: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18826 This item is protected by original copyright This item is licensed under a Creative Commons License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 ‘Leav(ing) Room for the Reader’: The Agency of Characters who Read in the Fiction of Ali Smith Jessica Orr This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at the University of St Andrews June 2019 Candidate's declaration I, Jessica Orr, do hereby certify that this thesis, submitted for the degree of PhD, which is approximately 79,778 words in length, has been written by me, and that it is the record of work carried out by me, or principally by myself in collaboration with others as acknowledged, and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for any degree. I was admitted as a research student at the University of St Andrews in September 2015. I received funding from an organisation or institution and have acknowledged the funder(s) in the full text of my thesis. Date Signature of candidate Supervisor's declaration I hereby certify that the candidate has fulfilled the conditions of the Resolution and Regulations appropriate for the degree of PhD in the University of St Andrews and that the candidate is qualified to submit this thesis in application for that degree.
    [Show full text]
  • Interviewed by Caroline Smith
    INTERVIEWED Ali BY CAROLINE Smith SMITH Inverness-born Ali Smith’s first collection, Free Love and Other Stories (1995) was awarded Saltire Society Scottish First Book Of The Year Award. Her short stories and novels including the Man Booker Prize nominated Hotel World (2001) and 2005 winner of the Whitbread The Accidental (2004) are known for their visceral lan- guage play and dynamic shifts in view point and time scale delivered in a tightly constructed form. She often treats universal themes – love, death, guilt and illness – with a fleshy, fresh touch that surveys the commonplace and idiosyncratic along- side the monumental. She is currently working on a rewrite of a myth for Canongate’s myth series. 75 How have you developed as a writer since Free Love was published? I can’t think about it. It’s stupid. If I had on a critical hat, I would be able to say: these themes are the same, but I can’t even read my work after it’s published: all I would see are the mechanisms. I’ve only read Hotel World because I had to do some- thing with an audience and I had to read it over in case I got it wrong. That’s surprising because when I’ve heard you read, I’m struck by how your writing fits your spoken voice. You seem at ease. Really? I distrust strong voices. I don’t distrust proper strong voices in literature but I naturally distrust the link between the person who has the voice and the reading of it as being the only connection.
    [Show full text]
  • Secrets and Ethics in Ali Smith's the Accidental
    Secrets and ethics in Ali Smith’s novel The Accidental Noora Vesterinen Pro gradu -tutkielma Taiteiden ja kulttuurin tutkimuksen laitos Jyväskylän yliopisto Kevät 2014 JYVÄSKYLÄN YLIOPISTO Tiedekunta – Faculty Laitos – Department Humanistinen tiedekunta Taiteiden ja kulttuurin tutkimuksen laitos Tekijä – Author Noora Vesterinen Työn nimi – Title Secrets and ethics in Ali Smith’s novel The Accidental Oppiaine – Subject Työn laji – Level Kirjallisuus Pro gradu -tutkielma Aika - Month and year Sivumäärä – Number of pages Maaliskuu 2014 145 Tiivistelmä – Abstract Tutkielma käsittelee Ali Smithin (s. 1962) romaania The Accidental (2005, suomennettu 2006 nimellä Satunnainen ) salaisuuksien ja etiikan näkökulmasta. Luenta kiertyy teoksen viiden päähenkilön ympärille. Erityistä huomiota kohdistetaan Amberiin, salaperäiseen vieraaseen, joka poikkeaa täysin muista teoksen henkilöhahmoista. Luennan lähtökohtana on ajatus salaisuuksien ja etiikan yhteydestä paitsi romaanin päähenkilöiden maailmassa myös laajemmin. Tutkin, mitä romaani paljastaa salaisuuksien ja etiikan olemuksesta sekä niiden välisistä yhteyksistä. Luennan teoreettinen viitekehys jakautuu salaisuuksiin liittyvään teoriaan sekä eettiseen kerronnan teoriaan. Salaisuudet valottuvat paitsi käsitteen tarkan määrittelyn ja avaamisen kautta (Sissela Bok, Matei Calinescu) myös aukon käsitteen avulla (Gérard Genette, Leona Toker). Kerronnan etiikan teoriaa avataan yhtäältä retorisen etiikan näkökulmasta (James Phelan) ja toisaalta toiseuden etiikan kautta (Andrew Gibson, Simon Critchley).
    [Show full text]
  • MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO Postmodernist Features in Ali
    MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature Postmodernist Features in Ali Smith’s Novels Diploma Thesis Brno 2009 Supervisor: Written by: Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D. Pavla Navrátilová Declaration Hereby I state that I have worked on this bachelor thesis by myself and that all the sources of information I have used are listed in the References. I approve that this work is kept at Masaryk University in Brno in the library of the Faculty of Education and made available for study purposes. In Brno, 15 April 2009 Pavla Navrátilová 2 My grateful thanks go to Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D., who commented on my work. 3 Contents: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………..……5 POSTMODERNISM…………………………………………………...…..….9 HOTEL WORLD………………………………………………………..…….18 THE ACCIDENTAL ………………………………………………………….35 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………….…55 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………….……58 ELECTRONIC SOURCES ………………………………………………….58 RESUMÉ………………………………………………………………………62 4 Introduction Ali Smith has become one of the British remarkable contemporary authors whose works have successfully entered the literary world. Her novels Hotel World and The Accidental were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for fiction and the Orange Prize for fiction. However, apart from her book of short stories, only her novel Hotel World was translated in Czech language as Hotel svět . Smith claims that her novels contain the multi levelled narrative in order to guarantee the freedom of each character to tell a different story. This fragmentation of the structure of both novels, namely in Hotel World , has become the most obvious feature of her texts. I will focus in detail on this fragmentation, as a significant Postmodern attribute. I will also concentrate on women as the main characters.
    [Show full text]
  • Exploring Rhetoric of Motives in Ali Smith's Political Novel Autumn
    Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Translation Studies, ISSN: 2645-3592 Vol. 6, No.2, Spring 2021, pp.71-86 71 Exploring Rhetoric of Motives in Ali Smith’s Political Novel Autumn Hoda Shabrang* Department of English Language, Khatam University, Tehran, Iran [email protected] Mahsa Ebrahimi Department of English Language and Literature, Ershad Damavand Institute, Tehran, Iran. [email protected] Abstract In his political novel, Autumn, Ali Smith has implicitly integrated family life with political matrices of British-European relations. In this study, Autumn was investigated in light of Kenneth Burke's notions of identification, substance, symbolism, and imagination known as rhetoric of motives. Identification refers to identifying with characters having some components or substances in common. Rhetoric of motives refers to the application of terms with persuasive function that move people into action. The themes of Ali Smith's Autumn are in congruity with Kenneth Burke’s theoretical ideas represented as theme of love to explain illogical coupling of a young woman and an old man that recalls England and Europe/EU interconnection and mismatching relations. This study explored how the rhetoric and dialect of Smith that have symbolic meanings and functions is motivating through identification with characters. Burke believes that through rhetoric of motives and grammar of motives it is possible to create protagonists that people can easily identify with to persuade them into action based on their intended political views. Through rhetoric of motives by the seasonal novel via identification, symbolism, and imagination, Smith indirectly portrays the political event of Brexit (British Exit) and its consequences in British society.
    [Show full text]