What is realism?
Ideas and debates
This chapter outlines – selectively and strategically –
major frameworks in which problems of reflection, truthfulness, verisimilitude, and
realism have been discussed from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Some of
these frameworks (especially since the 1930s) have been purposefully developed as
theories of realism, others have been cultivated, predominantly by writers,
journalists, and critics, in a much richer and more porous discursive environment,
in which the impulses of theory cannot be disentangled from the maelstrom of
actual literary practices. Part One focuses on Georg Lukács, for it is in his work,
and the attendant debates and disagreements, that an entire constellation of
questions around realism is first compellingly formulated. In Part Two we continue
this discussion but shift the focus to earlier discourses on realism, from the
sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, and, crucially, such that would testify to
the ‘impurity’ of theory, to its birth and subsequent existence in the fold of
imbricated, at times even competing, live literary practices. Finally, Part Three
reflects on the relationship between realism and older and contemporaneous
alternatives.
Article outline
- 1.Form and truth: Reconsidering Lukács’s theory of realism in the context of other theories of
realism
- 2.The tasks of realism, or the confluence and divergence of artistic practice and
theory
- 2.1Verisimilitude and genre
- 2.2Who are we? Community and culture
- 2.3How to understand the world in which we live
- 2.4Does literature follow the path of history?
- 2.5How ugly, how immoral is the real?
- 2.6High art and popular literature
- 3.The versatility of realism
- 3.1Realism in touch with its neighbors
- 3.2Surface and depth
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
Works cited
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Cited by one other publication
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Under Pressure: Flaubert’s Human Barometers.
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