Contemporary Women's Writing Advance Access published online on August 1, 2009
Contemporary Women's Writing, doi:10.1093/cww/vpp006
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
"A Democracy of Voice"? Narrating Community in Ali Smith's Hotel World
Emma E. Smith
University of Leeds, UK E.E.Smith@leeds.ac.uk
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Toward the end of the first section of Ali Smith's 2001 novel, Hotel World, its dead teenage narrator describes the people she passes on the streets of her unnamed, anywhere town as "a wall of faces shifting and falling like water" (27); later, the narrator of the final section returns to each face and, with the privilege of omniscient access, tells a little more of her or his story. Walking down a residential street, another character glimpses through the lit windows moments of other lives and is "repelled and energized by it, the knowledge that she could be brought together with someone else by the simple flick of a switch from light to dark" (163). To encounter these brief insights into other lives is to capture the experience of reading Hotel World. One night in the Global Hotel, several months after the accident in which teenage . . . [Full Text of this Article]
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Communal Narration and "Radical Democracy"
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Narrative Ethics
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The Pronoun of Presence: Sara's First-Person Narration
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Engagement and Distance in the Third Person: Else, Lise, and Penny
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The Intimacy of Grief: Clare's Interior Monologue
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Omniscience and the "Author-Version"
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Conclusion
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