Thinking Backwards/Looking Forwards: Ali Smith’s Virginia Woolf, Metamodernism’s Paranoia

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This article argues that in order better to understand what David James and Urmila Seshagiri term ‘metamodernism’, we must first be attentive to the contemporaneity of another well-known strand of present-day literary discourse: postcritique. Focusing upon representations of paranoia and surveillance in the metamodernist works of Ali Smith, and Virginia Woolf’s quintessentially modernist To the Lighthouse (1927), it argues that postcritque and metamodernism are linked beyond the fact of their simultaneity. It demonstrates that a shift towards a postcritical theory of positive affects was already being formulated in high modernist writing. Finally, it concludes that if there are aesthetic imperatives to metamodernism, such as re-energising the idea of ‘Making it New’, then Smith does this through creating a postcritical synergy between fiction and criticism.