Genres of literary theory in Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet and Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism: Writing on the Edge of Theory and Fiction

Abstract

Abstract

Literary scholars have, in recent years, questioned the reliance on ‘suspicious’ critique, ‘paranoid’ investigation and ‘analytical detachment’, seeking alternatives that favour attachment, creativity and optimism in connecting readers and texts. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick proposes ‘reparative reading’, Christopher Castiglia yearns for a literary ‘practice of hope’ and Rita Felski considers how the relationship between literature, theory and reader might be ‘recomposed’ in a ‘postcritique’ world. In response, this article brings together theorist Lauren Berlant and writer Ali Smith to identify their parallel preoccupations with and formal strategies for engaging the reader creatively and theoretically. I place Berlant's theorisation of the emerging present and inadequate genres of representation, in Cruel Optimism (2011), and their proposition of ‘amplified description’ as a form of critical engagement, in conversation with Smith's Seasonal Quartet (2016–2020). Smith creates an all-encompassing experience of plot, theory, ekphrasis and social and political commentary, embedding the reader experientially in temporal precarity, fragmentation, genre crossings and art. Through forms of conversation involving people, text, art and theory, both create textual atmospheres of affirmation in times of despair; I explore conversation as an experiential genre of literary critique, where the reader as dynamic interlocutor contests and challenges boundaries between fiction and theory.