From Silence to Dialogic Discourse in Selected Short Stories by Ali Smith

• Main Author: Ema Jelínková
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Polish Association for the Study of English 2020-06-01
• Series: Polish Journal of English Studies
• Subjects: ali smith; scottish literature; bakhtin; dialogism; silence
• Online Access: http://pjes.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/PJES_6-1_1_Ema_Jelinkova.pdf
• ISSN: 2545-0131; 2543-5981

This paper focuses on the contemporary Scottish writer Ali Smith, specifically on the motifs of silence, voice, and Bakhtinian dialogism in her short stories “The Hanging Girl” and “The College”. A brief introduction to the relevant history, traditions, and concepts in Scottish writing in general and Scottish women’s writing in particular is provided to contextualise Smith’s fiction and illustrate how the author engages with her cultural heritage and how she updates it to address current issues. The selected stories are representative of Smith’s work in that they deal with the recurrent themes of loss, death, and longing for a genuine human connection. Smith explores manifestations of otherness in all senses of the word and pushes the possibilities of heteroglot interillumination of perspectives to give a voice to those who have been silenced, forgotten, or repressed by the dominant monoglot discourse. The stories in question, as well as Smith’s other fiction, include multiple voices and juxtapose different views while refraining from allowing any single of them to dominate the others. Ultimately, Smith’s forceful stories of human interest establish conditions of dialogic heteroglossia to draw attention to what we share as human beings rather than what makes us different from one another.