Text, Imagination and the Construction of Narrative Universes in Ali Smith's Short Stories

Date

2025-1-3

Author

Sönmez, Rabia Asiyye

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This thesis aims to explore and analyse the connection between Ali Smith’s experimental short story writing and her engagement with dialogue. The central argument is that Smith’s experimental literary technique allows her to generate narratives that are composed of a dialogue between characters and between the story and the reader, hence creating multilogic narrative universes. The thesis will consider a selection of stories across three of Smith’s short story collections: The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003), Other Stories and Other Stories (2004), and The First Person and Other Stories (2010). What this thesis observes is that Smith uses dialogue and multilogue in tandem with ambiguity to create a complex narrative space that encompasses not only the material space but also the cognitive space shared by the text and the reader. Two theoretical approaches are used in tandem to analyse the creation and behaviour of this space. Text-World Theory is used to analyse the communicative component, i.e. the dialogue. From within the field of narratology, narrative space is chosen to explore how systems of reality within stories are constructed through narrative technique. In doing so, this thesis aims to show how Ali Smith creates multilogic narrative universes which promote dialogue within and across the ontological boundaries of the text.

Subject Keywords

text-world, narrative universe, multilogue

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/112957

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis