Precarious times, Neoliberalist backlashes and discourses of post-truth in Ali Smith’s Summer

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is a response to the neoliberalist/right-wing populist backlashes in times of crisis and their reflection in the media, as well as the multidirectional crises that Europe is facing at the moment, most notably the war in Ukraine and the recent Covid-19 pandemic. I argue that these appeared as crises within crises, happening to an already socially precarious world, laying bare the shortcomings and deepening the multiple inequalities that already existed. I turn to the fictional representations of the discourses and practices which simultaneously explicate the problematic workings of today’s reality and provide tentative hope through literary imagination, employing the methods of feminist criticism and ecocriticism. Using Ali Smith’s novel Summer (2020) as an example, I draw attention to language and its agency to both construct a provisional reality, and to be deconstructed to reveal other agencies, i.e. the material workings of nature, bodies and seasons. I argue that Smith connects events, characters and temporalities in cyclical repetitions to interrogate the agenda of humanism, sociality, history and nature, presenting the pandemic as a global phenomenon which cannot be countered by individual choices, in a world that is connected on multiple scales that affect all lives, because of our material and transcorporeal connections.