Queering as a tool of narrative knowledge in Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and Other Stories.

Abstract

My paper analyses Ali Smith's innovative use of queering as a narrative strategy in Girl Meets Boy (2007) and The First Person and Other Stories (2008), focusing on her transformation of narrative structures, epistemic realities, and identity through intertextual engagement. Smith's fiction queers temporality and narrative agency by reimagining classical and literary texts, including Ovid's Metamorphoses, John Lyly's Gallathea, Shakespeare's plays, and Jane Eyre. I suggest that in Girl Meets Boy, Smith reinterprets Ovid's myth of Iphis and Ianthe to celebrate fluid and transformative identities, intertwining this with feminist activism and queer desire. By employing techniques such as prolepsis and analepsis, she destabilizes binary categories of gender and narrative form. My paper also examines The First Person and Other Stories, where Smith uses the short story form to experiment with self-reflexive and elliptical structures, disrupting traditional notions of linearity. I will examine how stories such as "third person," "second person," and "fidelio and bess" illustrate her capacity to reframe historical and cultural narratives, transforming them into spaces for queer textual exploration. Drawing on insights from Judith Butler, Marina Warner, and Linda Hutcheon, my analysis positions Smith's work within a lineage of literary metamorphosis that resists static notions of identity and storytelling. Ultimately, I argue that Smith queers the boundaries of knowledge, time, and narrative itself, creating fiction that is endlessly dynamic and self-referential.