The End of Dialogue

Devouring Story and Situation many years ago as an eager young lecturer at the University of Warwick preparing to teach a narrative course, I was fascinated by Chambers's approach to the "point" of storytelling, through attending to transactional, literary, and ultimately philosophical contextualization and analysis. [...]Ross had been instrumental in my decision to accept a position at the University of Technology Sydney, enthusiastically describing both the academic and urban landscape I would call home for eight years, when I mentioned that I was considering the offer after a lecture he gave at the University of Bristol, a lecture I still remember well for his thoughtful exploration of La Haine as a meditation on lived cityscapes. More than this, the question he asks (and the fact that he does so in her memory) is the key to unlocking the narrative's hard-hitting points about the value of art in making connections, opening up perspectives, making our lives meaningful for ourselves and each other, even across generations and in ways that confront our mortality, particularly so in the pre-post-Brexit world characterized, for Smith, as "the end of dialogue.