ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore the importance of affect in relation to two contemporary twenty-first century writers, Ben Lerner and Ali Smith, both of whose work negotiates modernist techniques as a means to reconceiving novelistic sentiment, rejecting irony and cynicism in favour of candour and hope. They do this in distinct but comparable ways. In Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), a Benjaminian concern with the artistic reconfiguration of historical time and the projection of alternate futures currently unavailable enables a sense of hope or promise regarding art’s potential for social transformation, even in the context of large-scale socio-economic division and environmental catastrophe. Similarly, in Smith’s Autumn (2016), an Eliotian attention to the possibility alive within the present – to ‘timeless moments’ which release the individual from temporal constraints – balances a disaffection with the contemporary Brexit experience, suggesting an opportunity for artistically enabled resistance to provincialism and bureaucracy. These writers’ experiments with temporality and form thus consciously upset the established social and political order, instead making visible a hope-inspired outlook, which promises to galvanise critical consciousness and to combat present morbidity. In this way, they contribute to what has been called a ‘new sincerity’ within twenty-first century fiction (see, for example, Kelly 2016), though their understandings of this differ in notable ways.
