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Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives
Edited by Svend Erik Larsen, Steen Bille Jørgensen and Margaret R. Higonnet
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIII] 2022
► pp. 975–990

Narrate or describe

Documentation and the tasks of realism

| University of Connecticut
Contemporary African novelists have turned repeatedly to historical forms of narration. Arguably, history has been key to the postcolonial novel all along but this case study draws attention to a more recent intensification of the engagement with history that has the feel and urgency of documentation. The essay elaborates on the term ‘documentation’ in relation to Georg Lukács’s distinction between narration and description. Lukács aligned documentation with description and saw both as problematic terms associated with naturalism rather than realism. This case study recovers documentation as a dimension of historical narration by arguing for its importance in establishing the historicity of postcolonial subjects. Furthermore, supported by and analyzing texts by Edward Said, Teju Cole and Ghassan Kanafani, among others, the essay uncouples the association between descriptive discourse and visuality to establish a mode of description that challenges us to understand, or recognize, historical truth by denying the authority of a field of vision that has too often been determined by an outsider’s view of Africa.
Keywords: human rights, photography, novel, African Literature, Teju Cole, Edward W. Said, Ghassan Kanafani, realism
Article outline
  • 1.Documenting the ordinary: Palestine and South Africa
  • 2.Narrative complexity in African realism: Textuality and visuality
  • 3.Realism between dark and light places
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Works cited
Published online: 16 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxiii.27cou
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