Beholding: Visuality and Postcritical Reading in Ali Smith's <em>How to be both</em>

Ali Smith's novel How to be both (2014) dwells on the formal possibilities and epistemological problems associated with sight. This insistent visuality allows Smith, like other novelists who participate in the ekphrastic or artistic turn of contemporary fiction, to develop new optics that respond to recent literary critical efforts to replace suspicious reading with other practices and affects. In How to be both, the kinds of looking—historical seeing, speculation, and beholding—that shape characters' encounters with painted artworks provide models for postcritical dispositions toward the text.