Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age
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Deidre Lynch
Deidre Lynch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature at Harvard University, where she co-convenes, with Yoon Sun Lee, the Novel Theory seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. She has published widely on the history and theory of the novel, as well as the history and theory of the book, in addition to serving as the long-time editor of the Romantic-period volume ofThe Norton Anthology of English Literature. Lynch is the author of the prize-winningThe Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998). Her more recent books includeLoving Literature: A Cultural History (2015) and (co-edited with Alexandra Gillespie)The Unfinished Book (2021). Current projects include a book with the working title “Paper Slips: A Literary, Media, and Material History of Scrap” and a series of essays on believing in novels.
Abstract
This essay, an experiment in combining the methods of narrative theory with those of book and media history, recovers from British novelist Ali Smith’s ‘Seasonal Quartet’ a running commentary on the tensions between continuation and completion that are hardwired into the novel as a genre. As she challenged normal publication schedules and published Autumn, Winter, Spring,and Summerin rapid succession, one book a year for four years from October 2016 to July 2020, Smith prompted her readers to recall the prior example of nineteenth-century serial fiction and its defining media alliance with the newspaper. The Quartet explicitly remembers and remediates the sprawl of Victorian fiction, its dilatoriness and devotion to narrative middles, and its equivocal relationship to narrative closure. Attending to the media habits ascribed to the characters of the Quartet, this essay also connects these books’ explorations of time and narrative mode to their investigations of their own media platforms. Smith’s experiments with narrative form are inseparable, I contend, from her documentation of the media ecology that the novel enters in the twenty-first century, whether as a bound and printed volume or as electronic text to be consumed on a phone.
Abstract
This essay, an experiment in combining the methods of narrative theory with those of book and media history, recovers from British novelist Ali Smith’s ‘Seasonal Quartet’ a running commentary on the tensions between continuation and completion that are hardwired into the novel as a genre. As she challenged normal publication schedules and published Autumn, Winter, Spring,and Summerin rapid succession, one book a year for four years from October 2016 to July 2020, Smith prompted her readers to recall the prior example of nineteenth-century serial fiction and its defining media alliance with the newspaper. The Quartet explicitly remembers and remediates the sprawl of Victorian fiction, its dilatoriness and devotion to narrative middles, and its equivocal relationship to narrative closure. Attending to the media habits ascribed to the characters of the Quartet, this essay also connects these books’ explorations of time and narrative mode to their investigations of their own media platforms. Smith’s experiments with narrative form are inseparable, I contend, from her documentation of the media ecology that the novel enters in the twenty-first century, whether as a bound and printed volume or as electronic text to be consumed on a phone.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
