Being Taught Something World-Sized: ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ and the Work of World Literature

Wiemann, Dirk

Book Section

Dirk Wiemann

Being Taught Something World-Sized

‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ and the Work of World Literature

In: The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 149–72

Open Access

This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.

Part of The Work of World Literature Containing:
The Work of World Literature / Francesco Giusti, Benjamin Lewis Robinson
Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature / Derek Attridge
World Literature and the Problem of Postcolonialism / Lorna Burns
Transcontextual Gestures / Francesco Giusti
The World after Fiction / Benjamin Lewis Robinson
Extracting Indigeneity / Rashmi Varma
Being Taught Something World-Sized
Working Conditions / Jarad Zimbler
Afterword / Emily Apter

Title	Being Taught Something World-Sized
Subtitle	‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ and the Work of World Literature
Author(s)	Dirk Wiemann
Identifier	https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_07
DOI Target	https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-19/wiemann_something-world-sized.html
HTML Page	https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-19/wiemann_something-world-sized.html
Description	This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.
Is Part Of	The Work of World Literature
Place	Berlin
Publisher	ICI Berlin Press
Date	2021
Subject	Ali Smith anagogy ethics Refugee Tales singularity world literature
Rights	© by the author(s) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Harvested	yes
Language	en-GB
short title	Something World-Sized
page start	149
page end	172
Source	The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 149–72
Bibliographic Citation	Dirk Wiemann, ‘Being Taught Something World-Sized: ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ and the Work of World Literature’, in The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 149–72 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_07>
Format	application/pdf application/pdf application/pdf