Lucy Neave – Technology, Pandemic and Art in Ali Smith’s Summer (2020) and Companion Piece (2022)

Abstract  Technological innovation has evoked anxiety in (some) contemporary writers. But writers are also well-placed to adapt to technological change by virtue of the multiple worlds they already inhabit. This paper examines two novels written contemporaneously with the pandemic by Ali Smith as a way of tracing the heightened embedding of people in the virtual world, made possible by improved digital infrastructures and technological development, which accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Smith’s Summer (2020) and Companion Piece (2022) evoke the outbreak of COVID-19 and characters’ responses to contagion-induced lockdowns in the UK, they also repeatedly underscore the importance of artworks, including painting, theatre, and writing, during a period which involved the segmentation of time and space. Smith’s fiction, and the material she wrote around the time her books were published, are engaged in making statements about the value of the material arts in a world where the virtual is overtaking the real.  Bio  Lucy Neave is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Infrastructures of Crisis in Global 21st-Century Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). Her most recent novel, Believe in Me (UQP, 2021) won the ACT Book of the Year. She teaches English and Creative Writing at the ANU.  This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to LucyNeave_Presentation.pptx