Alterity and Artfulness in the Fiction of Ali Smith

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There is an absence of substantial research on Ali Smith despite her prevalence in discussions of contemporary literature, including the kind of focused, critical analysis by which my proposed approach will examine key facets of her writing. I would like to analyse Smith's fiction through a lens pertaining to alterity and formal interstice, characteristic of her fiction and significant to the development of contemporary literature more generally. Throughout Smith's career, herwriting demonstrates textual playfulness and metafictional forms synonymous with postmodernism. However, her artful texts have a persistent attention to human relationships to each other and with works of art beyond antifoundational subversion. Smith's novels and stories are full of ghosts, strangers, and encounters with the Other, and her practice enacts an aesthetics of alterity on both thematic and formal levels. In Smith's fiction, an emphasis on alterity and artfulness has an inherently ethical and political value through textual encounters in-between reality and possibility,prompting a reader towards a critical recognition of lives other than our own and the vulnerabilities we share in an increasingly globalised and precarious world. By close analysis of Smith's rich body of fiction, I contend that her work is exemplary of contemporary literature's potential to activate a politics of compassion and ethics of care in response to socio-political and environmental crises.