Art, Nature and Politics in Spring

This article discusses the third instalment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, a work whose complex multi-voiced narrative addresses various important issues including the role of art in the contemporary world. The authors of the article employ two theoretical frameworks, Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and Vermeulen and van den Akker’s studies on metamodernism, to argue that Smith adopts a dialogical approach to the theme of art. With the help of close reading the authors map the dialogical clashes between the main voices and the semantic positions which are taken in order to demonstrate that the central dialogue presented within the novel is that between postmodern and metamodern sensibilities. Special attention is paid to the character Richard who represents the clear replacement of the postmodern sensibility with a metamodern approach through his semantic position, as is informed by his search for universality in art, his neo-romantic turn to the appreciation of the beauty of nature and his rejection of the postmodern trends that produce superficial and inauthentic forms of art.