Heroism in Contemporary Literature:Meta-Heroisms, Minor Heroisms, and the Civic Function of Storytelling

Who counts as a hero or a heroine today? This essay locates a renewed preoccupation with this time-old question in twenty-first century literature. Focusing primarily on the work of Ali Smith, and situating this in a wider milieu of "meta-heroic" narratives – by Anna Burns, Jennifer Egan, Hari Kunzru and Ben Marcus – I identify an appetite for a change in the way in which heroism is approached. The twenty-first century field of heroism studies (the formation of which constitutes further testimony to the renewed preoccupation with the question of heroism in the new millennium) continues to conceptualize the hero as primarily a representation of worthwhile values. The twenty-first century meta-heroic narratives examined here, however, point toward a different direction. They dramatize the intellectual impasses to which such an approach leads, and, collectively, they call for a non-value-based theorization of the hero. Responding to this call for an alternative approach, I turn to the work of Jacques Rancière, which offers the possibility of approaching heroism primarily as a matter of time rather than as an embodiment of values; one's establishment as a hero can be understood as the result of the ways in which the passage of time is narrated. Approaching heroism as a matter of time renders comprehensible heroizations that remain problematically unfathomable in the narratives explored here. It also serves to make perceptible Ali Smith's alternative heroism – what I term a "minor heroism" – and, with this, the civic function of storytelling.