The lost shape of words: reading the post-literate condition in Ali Smith’s Like (1997)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the representation of ‘post-literacy’ in Ali Smith’s debut novel Like (1997). The protagonist Amy Shone – once a fellow in English an unnamed Cambridge college who wielded books and knowledge as ‘power tools’ over others – mysteriously loses the ability to read and to write. I argue that Smith uses her protagonist’s experience of post-literacy to critique the scholarly regimentation of reading in academic literary criticism. As the narrative charts the protagonist’s loss and eventual recovery of literacy, Smith uses puns and wordplay to disrupt academic reading habits, in the process re-enchanting modes of aesthetic appreciation and interpretive enquiry through the inquisitive eyes of Amy’s seven-year-old daughter. This article uses Like, and its framing of post-literacy, to intervene in emergent discourses on the postcritical. It asks: how does academic criticism, including postcriticism, entrench ideas of written literacy as superior? How does Like challenge this? What are the epistemological possibilities of post-literacy (as a state of being, mode of reading, way of knowing), as they emerge in Like through Amy’s journey? How might they challenge, serve, or disrupt academic styles of reading – that is, the kinds of reading taught in the university classroom or valorised in contemporary literary studies?