CHLEL Project Report Template
Please, supply a clear statement describing the exact state of your project to facilitate the evaluation by the CHLEL members
Project title: “Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Year of first approval: 2014 Literary Realism in Comparative Perspectives” Report date: 29.7.2020
Project main editor/s: Dirk Göttsche (PI of Leverhulme International Research Network “Landscapes of Realism”), Margaret Higonnet, Svend Erik Larsen, Robert Weninger
Project subeditor/s: Simon James, Steen Bille Jørgensen, †Patrizia Lombardo, Rosa Mucignat, Thomas Pavel, Galin Tihanov
Researcher who will represent the project during the business meeting: Dirk Göttsche Project type: CHLEL series
Annual report
A general outline of all volumes (underlining changes concerning the previous report): Project aims: Moving beyond persistent disciplinary boundaries in literary and media studies, this project questions established, often national conceptions of Realism by radically rethinking the history, poetics and politics of realist modes of representation in literature, art, film and the digital media from the nineteenth century to the present day. It combines an interdisciplinary focus on literatures written in European languages with comparative consideration of other media and cross-cultural exchange, including with non-European language areas, from the nineteenth century to the present day. This ambition requires an innovative methodology and format that breaks emphatically with the traditional set-up of edited volumes and the routines of the ‘lone scholar’. No single researcher, even if versed in a range of languages and literatures, has the level of disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise required. The core of the project therefore is a series of 15 intensive workshops, based around the joined-up discussion of tailor-made submissions circulated in advance, which systematically develop all aspects of the theme and provide a platform for rigorous interdisciplinarity and consistent comparativity, feeding into chapters that will be genuinely collaborative and co-authored throughout. The outcome are two substantial volumes on Realism in the CHLEL series.
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Progress report May 2019 to July 2020 During this year the network has managed to complete Volume I of the publication while also advancing Volume II significantly. Volume I (435,000 words) went through detailed editing and copy-editing by two of the three editors (Göttsche and Weninger; Mucignat was on maternity leave), as well as the postgraduate assistants paid from the Leverhulme budget, during summer and autumn 2019. After a final discussion of the introduction at workshop 14, Volume I was submitted to CHLEL peer review on 3.1.2020. The three CHLEL peer review reports by Martin Swales, Lars Ole Sauerberg and Massimo Fusillo, received in April/May 2020, endorsed the volume as “a major achievement”, “a magnificent and profoundly important work”, “a landmark in critical studies generally and realism specifically”, and “extremely rich, dense and stimulating”, while also making a number of specific recommendations. Our editors’ response of 28 May 2020 welcomed most, but not all of these suggestions for mostly small final revisions. All revisions have now been completed. The joint title of both volumes has been amended to “Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism in Comparative Perspectives”, as suggested in our response to the peer review reports. The volume was approved by the CHLEL committee on 17 July 2020 and has now been submitted to John Benjamins for book production. Volume II is on track for submission to peer review by the end of 2020. It includes two contributions authored or co-authored by founding project member Patrizia Lombardo, who very sadly passed away in June 2019 after two years of battling cancer. The project decided to dedicate both volumes to her memory, and PI Göttsche liaised with the CHLEL committee about hosting the annual CHLEL symposium at Nottingham on 15 May 2020 in her memory as a former member of CHLEL. Along with the annual CHLEL meeting, the symposium has had to be postponed due to the corona crisis. The Leverhulme International Research Network, which funded most of the work of our project and acted as the framework and catalyst for effective delivery, ended on 31.12.2019. Editors and chapter leads have committed to fully complete the remainder of the work before the end of 2020. There are no structural changes in Volume I against the 2019 report; work focused on fine-tuning and preparing the chapters for publication (including the draft index and keywords for digital tagging). In Volume II conceptual work on the core essays continued: The “Emotion and Memory” core essay was finalized for workshop 14; a near-final draft of the core essay on “The Battle of Forms” (now retitled “Dynamics of Realist Forms”) and a first draft towards the core essay on “People and Objects” (now: “Objects and People”) have been discussed at online workshop 15 (via Zoom on 2.7.2020), which also discussed eight new and revised case studies for Volume II. A near-final draft of the core essay on “Worlding Realism” along with all other case studies that have not yet been processed will be discussed at online workshop 16 (via Zoom on 11.9.2020) so as to ensure completion at the same level of collaboration and quality control as before. A small number of additional case studies has been recruited during the review period (see table of content and list of abstracts below). Work on the “Introduction” and discussion of whether 3
to have a “Conclusion”, and in which format, is ongoing. Detailed editing and copy-editing has started and is due to be completed by end December 2020. One of the postgraduates who did copy-editorial work on Volume I, now a postdoc and Honorary Research Fellow at Nottingham, has been recruited to assist with the linguistic and editorial work required. Svend Erik Larsen and Steen Bille Jørgensen have secured University of Aarhus funding (DKK65,000) to pay him. Using the fact that the Universities of Nottingham (Göttsche) and Connecticut (Higonnet) are both members of the Universitas 21 network, we also applied to the U21 Researcher Resilience Fund for postdocs to secure a further US$5,000 for this work, but this application was unsuccessful. The format of the workshops has again proved highly effective as a means of producing the volumes of this intensely collaborative international and comparative project, and therefore remains unchanged: conceptual chapter outlines, then draft chapters and case studies, finally completed sets of materials for each sub-theme are circulated in advance of the workshops so as to enable focused discussion aimed at maximizing the potential of each contribution; each submission is assigned respondents from inside and outside the network who bring in additional expertise and act as informal peer-reviewers; most case study authors have attended at least once so as to better understand the methodology and ambition of the project, which in turn benefits the coherence of the emerging publication. Panel chairs produce summaries of the discussion for circulation to all workshop participants and network members; chapter leads provide feedback to case study authors who cannot attend and act as editors for their sub-themes. One practical change resulting from the editorial work on Volume I is that a joint bibliography for each of the volumes has been abandoned in favour of individual chapter/case study bibliographies.
Overview of workshops held: Workshop 13 at SOAS, 24.-25.5.2019 (organisers Göttsche and Ouyang): core essays “What is Realism?” and “Rereading 19th century Realism” plus 22 case studies; 16 participants. Workshop 14 at King’s College London, 22.-23.11.2019 (organisers Göttsche and Mucignat): Volume I “Introduction”; core essays “Rereading 19th century Realism”, “Emotion and Memory” and “Objects and People” plus 8 case studies; 12 participants. Workshop 15 (originally scheduled to be hosted at SOAS, 1.-2.5.2020) moved online (Zoom) and deferred to 2.7.2020 due to the corona crisis (organisers Göttsche and Larsen): core essays “Dynamics of Realist Forms”, “Objects and People”, discussion of Volume II “Introduction” plus 8 case studies and brainstorming of Volume II conclusion; editors and volume II chapter leads only (7 participants). Workshop 16 (originally to be hosted by King’s College London) online (Zoom) on 11.9.2020 (organisers Göttsche and Larsen): core essays “Objects and People” and “Worlding Realism”, “Introduction” to Vol. II, any remaining case studies, discussion of possible “Conclusion” (c. 12 participants expected). Full workshop programmes and materials are available on request. All workshops included review sessions on progress and business meetings to coordinate next steps; minutes are available on request. The project Dropbox ensures that all project members have access to up-to-date versions of chapter outlines, up-to- date chapters and case studies, and abstracts so as to facilitate cross-referencing and avoid duplication. A separate Dropbox has been created for the submission of all material to CHLEL peer review and the 4
publisher John Benjamins. The Leverhulme Trust has acknowledged the PI’s final project report, submitted in January 2020.
An outline of the volume/section to be assessed during the current meeting (underlining changes concerning the previous report): N/A – see progress report above
Specific actions taken concerning the previous year evaluation as contained in the committee minutes: The amended minutes of the CHLEL meeting in August 2019 did not require particular action. – The exact shape of the Volume II conclusion has yet to be agreed (workshops 15 and 16). – At this point there are no plans for a subject index on top of the index of names. The detailed table of content should enable targeted navigation of the volumes. – The point in last CHLEL minutes about the ISBN number was a misunderstanding.
List of contributions (name of contributors, title and abstract): TABLES OF CONTENT AND ABSTRACTS
Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism in Comparative Perspectives General editor: Dirk Göttsche
Volume I: Mapping Realism Edited by Dirk Göttsche, Rosa Mucignat and Robert Weninger
Content List of Illustrations
Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgments
Note on Translations and Documentation
Introduction Dirk Göttsche, Rosa Mucignat and Robert Weninger
1 What is Realism? Coordinators: Thomas Pavel and Galin Tihanov
Core Essay: What is Realism? Ideas and debates Thomas Pavel and Galin Tihanov 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 2.1 Verisimilitude and genre 2.2 Who are we? Community and culture 2.3 How to understand the world in which we live 2.4 Does literature follow the path of history? 2.5 How ugly, how immoral is the real? 2.6 High art and popular literature 3 The versatility of realism 3.1 Realism in touch with its neighbors 3.2 Surface and depth
Case studies Robert Weninger: The Contest of Realism: German Marxist ‘realism debates’ from the 1930s to the 1950s Régine Borderie: How Real is Realism? Gérard de Nerval’s “bizarre arrangements of life” Sascha Ebeling: The Emergence of the Novel in India and Competing Modes of Realism
2 Routes into Realism Coordinator: Dirk Göttsche 5
Core Essay: Routes into Realism: Multiple beginnings, shared catalysts, transformative dynamics Ann Caesar, Anne Duprat, Dirk Göttsche, Rae Greiner, Anne Lounsbery and Stephen Roberts 1 Introduction 2 From the late eighteenth century to realism: Sentimentalism and its legacies in realist poetics 2.1 From ‘sentimental’ to ‘sympathetic’ realism in British literature 2.2 Sincerity as a route into psychological realism in French literature 2.3 The family novel and Enlightenment legacies in German realism 2.4 Manzoni and the legacy of the romance in Italian literature 3 Genre innovation as a route into Realism 3.1 Through romanticism to realism: The rise of the historical novel as a catalyst of realist narrative 3.1.1 Walter Scott’s reinvention of the historical novel 3.1.2 Significant timeframes: The Early Modern period and the rise of realism in the French historical novel (1826–1848) 3.1.3 From romance to Italian historical realism: Manzoni’s I promessi sposi 3.1.4 Galdós and the Spanish novela de costumbres 3.2 The nineteenth-century Zeitroman as the historical novel of the present 3.3 Short forms as catalysts of realist representation 3.3.1 The English, French and German prose sketch 3.3.2 Cuadros de costumbres and the Spanish realist novella and novel 3.3.3 The emergence of realism in Russian literature 3.3.4 English parafiction and loco-descriptive poetry 3.3.5 The Italian novella 4 Proto-Realisms: Early realist poetics and literary practice 4.1 English proto-realism and the disruption of consensual poetics 4.2 The dialectics of idealism and realism in early German realism 4.3 Contemporaneity and mimetic illusion in early French realism 5 The language of realism: The emergence of realist styles and techniques 5.1 Free indirect discourse in English and French realism 5.2 Stylistic profiles of early realism in Italian, German, Russian and Spanish 6 Conclusions, perspectives, challenges
Case studies Brendan Prendeville: Routes into Realism: Painting, from the eighteenth century into the early nineteenth Graham Thompson: Routes into American Realism Tatjana Jukić: Realism and Translation: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for an Austro-Hungarian minority and beyond
3 Time and Space Coordinators: Svend Erik Larsen and Rosa Mucignat
Core Essay: Fleeting Moments and Unstable Spaces: Explorations of time and space in realism Svend Erik Larsen and Rosa Mucignat 1 The dialectic of time and space 2 Spatio-temporalities of realism 2.1 Embodied and disembodied spatio-temporality 2.2 Public and private, work and leisure: Two complementary spatio-temporal oppositions 3 Gendered spaces 3.1 Inside/outside 3.2 Home and the world 3.3 Private and public 4 Global and local refractions 5 History and historicity 5.1 Human agency 5.2 Progress 5.3 Chance and speed 5.4 Stability on the edge 6 Details and spatial representation 7 The realist poetics of time and space 6
7.1 Prose and the everyday world: Metonymy 7.2 Everyday life: Chronotopes 7.2.1 Dismantling the idyll 7.2.2. Revolutionizing the salon 8 Beyond European realism 8.1 Other places 8.2 Other subjectivities
Case studies Anders Engberg-Pedersen: Cartographic Realism in Nineteenth-Century Literature Svend Erik Larsen: Mobile Spaces: The impact of traveling in realism Itala Vivan: Reclaiming Space, Mastering Time in African Postcolonial Fiction Niall Sreenan: Utopian Island Realism in J. M. Synge’s Travel Narrative of The Aran Islands and Tomás O’Crohan’s Autobiography The Islander Midori Tanaka Atkins: In-Between Spaces in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore: Time and space in Japanese realism Asbjørn Grønstad: Haptic Realism: Erik Poppe’s film U-July 22 and the aesthetics of duration
4 Rereading Nineteenth-Century Realism Coordinator: Dirk Göttsche
Core Essay: Literary Playing Fields in Motion: Remapping and rereading nineteenth-century realism Dirk Göttsche
1 Introduction: Rethinking nineteenth-century realism 2 Realism, the nation and modernization 3 Realism, gender and the family 4 Transcultural dialogue and realist style 5 The postcolonial rereading of nineteenth-century realism 5.1 Realist fiction and the colonial “transformation of the world” 5.2 Realism and anti-colonialism 6 Reading realism beyond the canon and across genres, media and discourses 6.1 Across media and genres 6.2 Realism, discourse history and the sciences 7 Conclusion and outlook: Realism, naturalism and modernism
Case studies Julien Zanetta: The French Debate about Gustave Courbet’s Pictorial Realism and the Dialogue between Literature and Art in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Anne Lounsbery: Russian Families, Accidental and Other Rae Greiner: The Benefit of Reading Marginal Forms: Dramatic monologue and ekphrastic poetry Olivia Santovetti: Madame Bovary in Italy: Forms of realism in the late nineteenth-century Italian novel Simão Valente: Eça and Machado: Money and adultery in lusophone realism Sotirios Paraschas: Zola, Realism and Naturalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Greece Benedikts Kalnačs: The Polyphony of Late Nineteenth-Century Baltic Realism
5 Post-1900 Transformations of Realism Coordinator: Robert Weninger
Core Essay: Straw Man or Profligate Son? Transformations of literary realism since 1900 Robert Weninger 1 The Lernaean hydra realism 2 Post-1900 transformations of the realist Bildungsroman 2.1 The realism of modernism in Joyce’s Ulysses 2.2 Three twentieth-century reappropriations of the Bildungsroman 3 Reopening the book of history: The historical novel post-1900 4 From social realism to socialist realism 5 Pathologies of realism—adultery and beyond 6 Modernism’s introspective turn 6.1 Stream of consciousness and interior monologue 6.2 The realism of surrealism 7
7 Realism’s postmodern diversions 7.1 Realism within postmodernism: Two examples 7.2 Mapping a diverse field 8 The returns of realism
Case studies Francesco Di Chiara and Paolo Noto: Realism Across Borders: The role of state institutions in making Italian neo-realist film transnational Paul Martin: Realism in Play: The uses of realism in computer gaming discourse Birgit Neumann: Realism and Postcolonial Subjectivity in the Black British Bildungsroman Robert Weninger: The Rise and Fall of Socialist Realism: The case of Christa Wolf Simão Valente: Realism in Anglo-American Crime Fiction Lucia Boldrini: Biographical Fiction’s Challenge to Realism: Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl and Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Una habitación ajena
Notes on contributors Index
Volume II: Pathways through Realism Edited by Margaret Higonnet, Steen Bille Jørgensen and Svend Erik Larsen
Content List of Illustrations
Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgments
Note on Translations and Documentation
Introduction Margaret Higonnet, Steen Bille Jørgensen and Svend Erik Larsen
1 Psychological Pathways: Emotion and Memory Coordinators: Svend Erik Larsen and Patrizia Lombardo†
Core Essay: “Memories inwrought with affection”: Emotion and Memory in Realism Svend Erik Larsen and Patrizia Lombardo†
1 In the wake of revolution 2 The long eighteenth century 2.1 Prejudice and passions 2.2 “The vulgar practice of the hour” 2.3 The thrill of the new 3 First transformation: Social vision descends into social frustration 3.1 Between legal contract and national identity 3.2 National illusions and realities of war 3.3 Revolution as emotion 4 Second transformation: Self-fulfillment turns into self-disillusionment 4.1 Self-education in a blind alley 4.2 The superfluous man 4.3 Passions for or against life? 5 Third transformation: From frail friendship to haunted homes 5.1 The unreadable other 5.2 The delicate balance of friendship 5.3 Love or honor? 6 Fourth transformation: Alienating settings yield sublime awe 6.1 Landscape and cityscape 6.1.1 Arousing the senses 6.1.2 Remembering the signs 6.2 The natural and the technological sublime 8
6.2.1 The beautiful 6.2.2 The natural sublime 6.2.3 The technological sublime 7 Coda: Turning the century 7.1 New theories 7.2 “At the heart of a vast enigma” 7.3 Into the twentieth century
Case studies Patrizia Lombardo†: The Interplay of Emotion and Memory. Stendhal, Zola, Musil Tone Selboe: Situations of Sympathy: Eroding Emotions and Everyday Life in the Realist Novel Stefan Hajduk: Attunement. Mood and Memory in Goethe, Flaubert and Dickens Hans Lauge Hansen: Spanish and Latin American Memory Novels Riikka Rossi: The Poetics of Disgust in Realist Fiction. Émile Zola and Sofi Oksanen Maya Boutaghou: History and Untold Memories. New Realism in Assia Djebar’s Films
2 Referential Pathways: People and Objects Coordinator: Simon James
Core Essay: Material Matters: The Surfaces of Realism Simon James
1 Surfaces: The outsides of realism 2 Objects: The material in the fictional 3 Clothing: Presenting the self 4 The body as object: Physiognomy and caricature 5 Environments: Producing the self 6 Money: Abstracting the object
Case studies Anthony Walker-Cook: Curating Realism in a World of Objects: Collecting in Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle Svend Erik Larsen: “Distance avails not.” Representing the Modern Masses Jeremy Tambling: Realism and Allegory: Balzac, Dickens and James Tomáš Jirsa: Performing the Reverse Side of the Face. Toward Affective Realism Mads Rosendahl Thomsen: Posthumanism and Realism
3 Formal Pathways: Genre and Form Coordinators: Margaret Higonnet and Steen Bille Jørgensen
Core Essay: Dynamics of Realist Forms Steen Bille Jørgensen
1 Introduction: New forms, new realities 2 Questioning literary form and the experience of reality 2.1 Closed and open forms 2.2 Poetic vision and everyday lif 2.3 Capturing the moment – Pictorial reflexivity 3 Popular culture and formal innovation 3.1 New audiences and democratization of culture 3.2 Popular forms, serialization and new aesthetic ideals 3.3 Literary models and systemic worldviews 4 Composition and discursive-aesthetic strategies 4.1 Prefaces and the battle of realism 4.2 Theatricality and irony 4.3 Narrative masks: Women’s writing and female readership 5 Scaling and rescaling 5.1 Scale, perception and reading 5.2 Short forms 6 Concluding perspective: Beyond realism?
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Case studies Margaret Higonnet: Forms of Realism in Children’s Literature Joan Templeton: Early Theatrical Realism on Page and Stage: Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg Alena Rettová: The Making of the Historical Narrative in the Swahili utenzi: The Realism of a Poetic Form Jeremy Tambling: Pessoa (title tbc) Katharine Capshaw: Photography and Dissent in John Lewis’s Graphic Novel March Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta: The Visions of John Ball. Iain Bell’s opera In Parenthesis
4 Geographical Pathways: Worlding Realism Coordinators: Margaret Higonnet and Steen Bille Jørgensen
Core Essay: Worlding Realism: Dialogic Encounters Margaret Higonnet
1 Introduction: theories, terminologies, challenges 1.1 Do terms such as ‘adaptation’, ‘intertextuality’, ‘appropriation’, ‘double-consciousness’, ‘mimicry’ generate different comparative findings? 1.2 Instability of political boundaries between cultures 1.3 Shifting historical contexts: political and economic moments of encounter 2 Factors that encourage literary traffic, transformation, and spread of realism 2.1 Physical modes of transportation, communication 2.2 Universal literacy, multilingualism 2.3 Transnational movements of writers, theatrical groups, migration, exile 2.4 Translation and mistranslation 3 What institutions become vehicles for transmission? 3.1 Educational systems – dialogue between nationalism and internationalism 3.2 Journals, publishing houses with international links 4 Transmission factors that differentiate cultural forms of realism 4.1 Different modes of imperialism, different avenues of post-colonialism 4.2 Types of literary network – diffusion vs linear transmission 4.3 Specialized centers of innovation linked to politics, technological development, cultural collaboration among the arts 5 Alternative cultural traditions of Realism 5.1 Grounding in varied philosophic and epistemological traditions 5.2 Hybridization with indigenous oral and written forms (e.g. magical realism) 6 Concluding questions
Case studies Joan Templeton: Varieties of Theatrical Realism after Ibsen Nicolas Zufferey: Is There a Notion of ‘Realism’ in Traditional China? Wen-chin Ouyang: Worlding of Realism: The Case of Naguib Mahfouz Karen-Margrethe Simonsen: The Real Magic in Miguel Angel Asturias’ Magical Realism. Legends of Guatemala and The President Eleni Coundouriotis: Narrate or Describe: Documentation and the Tasks of Realism Ulka Anjaria: Realism in the Colony
Conclusion (tbc)
Notes on contributors Index
Estimate of total word count Volume I: 435,000 words Volume II: 300,000 words Total: 735,000 words plus 22 illustrations to date
Abstracts Volume I: “Mapping Realism”
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1. Introduction (Dirk Göttsche, Rosa Mucignat and Robert Weninger) The Introduction serves a fourfold function: to outline the premises and principles governing the project as a whole, to survey recent developments that characterize scholarship in the field, to delineate the innovative collaborative methodology governing the undertaking, and to provide a summary of the volume’s contents and its goals. The editors relate how, traditionally, realism is viewed both as a specific period of literary history between the 1830s and the 1890s, and as a conceptual attitude that manifests itself across history from antiquity to the present. Here, by contrast, literary realism is understood as a self-reflexive response to modernity and remapped as a relational and performative mode of questioning and (re)conceiving reality through representation; beginning in the eighteenth century and reaching into the present, this ongoing experiment in mimetic reflection on experience results in a multi-phased and multi-stranded cross-cultural dynamic within European-language literatures and beyond. Landscapes of Realism consequently seeks to extend the conventional focus on nineteenth-century realism to include not just a reassessment of its prehistory and an examination of the interaction between realist and counter-realist poetics within the nineteenth century, but also consideration of the afterlife, perpetuation and revival of realist modes of representation from 1900 to the present.
2. “What is Realism? Ideas and Debates” (Stefano Ercolino, Yonsei University, South Korea; Thomas Pavel, University of Chicago; Galin Tihanov, Queen Mary University London) Core essay: 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 could not 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 as well as on the more general views of human life it projects. Keywords: Marxist theories of Realism; Georg Lukács; artistic method; genre; society; history; high literature; popular literature; realist effects; moral psychology
Case studies: Régine Borderie (University of Reims): “How real is realism? Gérard de Nerval’s ‘bizarre arrangements of life’” The article examines the early history of the term ‘realism’ in nineteenth-century France and its unusual deployment in Gérard de Nerval’s narrative prose, where it signals the strange, dream-like character of certain experiences, in particular the oddity of common situations and feelings described by authors like Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert who were admired by many for their sincere, precise and comprehensive descriptions of social life. The multicolored depiction of common experiences, improvisation, and randomness that we find in Nerval’s works are also part of Flaubert’s realist practice; both give life to their narratives by emphasizing dreams, transitory impressions and fleeting sensations. Keywords: Gérard de Nerval, realism and strangeness, bizarre representation, sensations, randomness.
Sascha Ebeling (University of Chicago): “The emergence of the novel in India and competing modes of Realism” During the second half of the nineteenth century, people across India began to write books they called “novels,” sometimes using traditional terms for ‘story’ or ‘prose narrative’ in their respective language, sometimes simply using the English term “novel.” Only recently critics have acknowledged that this ‘emergence of the novel’ in India was not simply the importation of a Western form or a borrowed genre, but rather a set of complex sociocultural processes that varied significantly from one linguistic region and 11
literary tradition to another. This chapter examines the question of realism in the early novels written in Indian languages, i.e., the question of how precisely the earliest Indian novels related to the societies from which they originated. Keywords: Indian cultural specificity, documentary realism, aesthetic realism, didactic realism
Robert Weninger (King’s College London): “The Contest of Realism: German Marxist ‘Realism Debates’ from the 1930s to the 1950s” The community of German-language Marxist intellectuals living in exile in the 1930s was riven by the so- called “Expressionism Debate,” often also referred to as “Realism Debate.” In essays published in the Moscow-based exile journal Das Wort in 1937 and 1938, the initial contributors to the debate castigated expressionism, a quintessentially German variant of avantgarde experimentalism, for facilitating Nazism’s rise to power due to its bourgeois aestheticist atavism; later contributors, some of whom had themselves begun their literary careers as expressionists, defended expressionism, arguing that avantgarde experimentation is not inherently reactionary, nor must it be considered antithetical to a Marxist aesthetics. This exploratory essay tracks the debate from its inception in Das Wort through its late-1930s extensions, specifically the Seghers-Lukács-correspondence and Bertolt Brecht’s numerous essay fragments directed against Georg Lukács (fragments published only after Brecht’s death in 1956), to the 1950/1960s Lukács-Adorno debate (inasmuch as it can be called a debate), recapitulating the “Expressionism Debate’s” relevance for the discussion of realism, Marxism and literary experimentalism. Keywords: Realism, Expressionism Debate, Marxist Literary Theory, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno
3. “Routes into Realism: Multiple Beginnings, Shared Catalysts, Transformative Dynamics” (Dirk Göttsche, University of Nottingham; Ann Caesar, Warwick University; Anne Duprat, University of Amiens; Rae Greiner, University of Indiana; Anne Lounsbery, New York University; Stephen Roberts, University of Nottingham) Core essay: This chapter reassesses and remaps the emergence of realist poetics and style in English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish literature in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, i.e. mostly before the French and German theories and critical debates about realism of the 1850s. Focusing largely on the novel and the novella, but also considering short prose and poetry, the chapter analyses the often neglected role of Enlightenment legacies in the rise of realism (sentimentalism, the family novel, the romance), questions conventional periodization by exploring the development of realist themes and techniques in the context of romanticism and the historical novel (including the historical novel of the present), and pioneers the analysis of different forms of short prose as catalysts of realist representation and style. Two further sections are devoted to the profile of early realism (proto- realism) in criticism and literary practice, whose disruptions and experiments are often at odds with later realist theory, and to the language and style of realist narrative. The chapter’s comparative approach highlights the common ground between the multiple beginnings of realism in the different languages and the role of cross-cultural literary resonances, translations, analogies and dialogues but also the asynchronicity and specificity of national variations. Keywords: proto-realism, sentimentalism, romanticism, historical novel, family novel, short prose, poetics, style
Case studies: Brendan Prendeville (Goldsmith College, University of London): “Routes into Realism: Painting, from the eighteenth century into the early nineteenth” During the eighteenth century, realist traits emerged in both French and British art, principally through the ‘elevation’ of genre. In France, Greuze interpreted mundane and domestic subjects in such ways as to lend them a moral weight; in Britain, Hogarth addressed social concerns by means of comedy; in both cases an aim was to raise the status of genre, and in both contexts there were parallels with developments in drama and the novel. The institutional and social setting for the practices in question was enlightened and bourgeois, and the manifested realism was bounded by convention, admitting of artifice. The realism 12
that was to emerge in nineteenth-century art tended by contrast to contest institutional norms. It came to be based expressly in subjective experience (conveying the feeling of being immersed in an event, or in nature) and yet could tend to be wider in scope than the work of eighteenth-century precursors, in the sense of being more universal in content and more public in its mode of address. Such tendencies may be discerned, divergently, in Goya, Friedrich and Constable. Where science comes into play, we find a shift from Newtonian order (Joseph Wright) to matter in process (Constable), with the dawn of romanticism and the industrial age. Keywords: Genre, nature, ideal, science, subjectivity, immersion, materiality
Graham Thompson (University of Nottingham): “Routes into American Realism” Realism is usually associated with American literature written after the Civil War. This essay argues that realism was also a significant force during the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The argument proceeds in three parts. First, the close entanglement of British and American literary culture meant that many of the forces driving the emergence of realism in Britain were imported to the United States. This is evident in the popularity of British sentimental, gothic, and historical novelists and in the appetite for Charles Dickens and William M. Thackeray. The culture of reprinting, which dominated American publishing before 1850, ensured that Americans were more likely to read British rather than American writing. Second, realism established a foothold in American culture in non-novelistic forms, particularly the sketch and short story, which found outlets in a vibrant periodical culture. Third, the essay shows that even writers who self-consciously wrote romances rather than novels—Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville—relied on realist poetic techniques that critics have often underplayed in an effort to emphasize their romanticism. Realism in the United States had a long and diverse history and emerged prior to the major social and cultural changes that marked the period after the 1850s. Keywords: Romance; transatlantic circulation; reprinting; the gothic; slave narratives; magazines
Tatjana Jukic (Zagreb University): “Realism and translation: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for an Austro- Hungarian minority and beyond” Drawing on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), I first show how the Victorian novel processes translation out of the narrative in order to espouse the metonymic imperative of realism. While this may be how the relation of realism and translation is decided in the Victorian novel, I argue that the subsequent history of translation of Brontë’s novel remains inflected in this relation. Taking Croatian translations of Jane Eyre as a case study, I analyze the ways in which they remain predicated on the metonymic imperative of realism, first in Austria-Hungary, when metonymy on these terms was adopted by Austro-Hungarian minorities as a vehicle of modern self-definition, and then in a process that survives the historical Austria- Hungary well into the twentieth century, in Yugoslav modernity for instance. What these translations ultimately sustain, and reveal, is radical realism: not a poetics so much as an apparatus instrumental to negotiating the modern condition in the past two centuries. Keywords: Realism; translation; metonymy; the Victorian novel; Austria-Hungary; Croatian literature
4. “Fleeting Moments and Unstable Spaces: Explorations of Time and Space in Realism” (Rosa Mucignat, King’s College London; Svend Erik Larsen, Aarhus University) Core essay: From the end of the eighteenth and through the nineteenth century science, philosophy and socio-political changes spawned fundamental reconfigurations of the Western experience and understanding of spatio-temporality. Challenging writers to radically reconceptualize their understanding of time and space and to explore more fully how to do justice to the complex new sense of spatio- temporality, this shift gives rise to a realism that develops as a creative response to modernity. The traditional embodied involvement with an organization of time and space that is based on natural categories is faced with new demands from a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing world that is fast growing global not least through intensified European globalization. At loggerheads with the traditional embodied forms of organizing and conceptualizing time and space, the new categories and technologies usher in today’s disembodied mechanical regime of social organization, worklife, transport, travel, leisure time, and class and gender mobility, both on the private micro-level of the individual and the public macro- level of whole communities and societies. Supported by a series of specialized case studies focussing on 13
literatures across and beyond Europe, this chapter explores how writers develop and deploy realist themes and techniques in order to respond to and cope with the accelerated spatio-temporal dynamics that underpin modern life. Key words: Spatio-temporal regimes, space and time, public and private, work and leisure, gender, historicity, chronotope, human agency
Case studies: Anders Engberg-Pedersen (University of Southern Denmark): “Cartographic Realism in nineteenth- century literature” This case study seeks to use maps as a ground of comparison of nineteenth-century realist fiction by posing the question: how did nineteenth-century realist literature itself make use of and think about maps? In order to do so, it considers maps not only as tools, but also as complex objects. At once material, representational and discursive, maps unite a number of features that make them an ideal site for a comparative analysis of questions of representation, truth-value and realism that are central to the literature of the period. The case study identifies three main roles that maps played in nineteenth-century realist fiction: the first and most basic role concerns readerly orientation; second, maps served as generators of fiction; and third, maps provided a source for debates about representation itself. Rather than simply inscribing the fiction in geospace, the accompanying maps raised the very question of the relation between the text, the map, and their referents and called attention to potential disjunctions between the imaginary fiction and real geospace. I use the map as a prism to compare a range of nineteenth-century texts and the varying functions and conceptions of realism their engagement with cartography entails. The literary texts themselves thus appear to find their place along a spectrum from the mappable to the unmappable, thereby positioning themselves in the midst of the contemporary discussion about the referentiality of maps and the mappability of literature. Keywords: Cartography, Maps, Literature, Realism, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Svend Erik Larsen (University of Aarhus): “Mobile Spaces: The Impact of Traveling in Realism” During the nineteenth century more of the world came to Europe than before, and a growing number of Europeans ventured to places other than their own, also beyond European borders. The general mobility of places and people quickened and did so because of new technologies that expanded transport, communication and trade. Realism explored how mobility became a fundamental condition for human identity in contemporary culture. Explorers mapped the interior of the colonies and brought new knowledge, strange objects and foreign people back to Europe while at the same time making the globe more accessible. In the world’s fairs the wonders of the world were on display together with innovations that helped the urbanized and industrialized societies to obtain resources from far away, thereby promoting global trade. The fairs also became the first manifestations of mass tourism for millions of people. On a smaller-scale excursions to one’s urban surroundings became popular and made mobility an everyday experience for ever more people. Realism views such mobility in a double perspective. On the one hand, it increased individual freedom to acquire new knowledge and settle in new places. On the other hand, it also created new social fusions and cultural antagonisms between the urban or imperial centers with high mobility and power and marginalized ways of life outside the centers, both domestic and overseas. Using examples from travel accounts and fiction from nineteenth-century realism, the essay discusses this double perspective and its challenge to language and imagination. Keywords: mobility, explorers, tourism, migration, journalism, science, photography
Itala Vivan (University of Milan): “Reclaiming space, mastering time in African postcolonial fiction” The theme of the chapter is contextualized by an introduction which analyzes what is meant by postcolonial African literature, focusing on the map of time and space where it appeared and flourished as a revolutionary re-positioning of the mind against the universalism of European canons. Postcolonialism is not just a mode of writing but an epistemological approach and a vision of the world that ceases to rotate around the imperial metropolis and becomes unprecedently multicentric. The relevance of time and space in African postcolonial discourse derives from the fact that since its inception, postcolonial theory 14
and practice have been political and rooted in political analysis and history—so that the whole of postcolonial literature talks politics. The chapter then moves into an analysis of the works of five important African writers—Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883), Sol Plaatjeʼs Mhudi (1930), Chinua Achebeʼs Things Fall Apart (1958), Ken Saro-Wiwaʼs Sozaboy (1985), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichieʼs Americanah (2013). If realism might be considered as an ongoing experiment in the art of representation, for the African writer it is more philosophical and political than ethical and aesthetic, and the goal is never mimetic but rather representational of a new and different landscape. Keywords: Italian fiction, postcolonial discourse, African literature
Niall Sreenan (King’s College London): “Utopian island Realism in J.M. Synge’s travel narrative of The Aran Islands and Tomás O’Crohan’s autobiography The Islander” What is the relationship between the “no-where” of Utopian imagination and the realist impulse to represent faithfully the world in the here and now. This case study explores this question through an examination of the literary-spatial topos of the island in two key texts of twentieth-century Irish works of realist literature: Tomás Ó’Chriomhthain’s Irish-language autobiographical work, The Islander (1937), and J. M. Synge’s diaristic travel narrative, The Aran Islands (1907). Reading these works comparatively, I link Synge’s and Ó’Chriomhtain’s apparently sui generis representations of life on the Western islands of Ireland to the broad literary and critical tradition of European realism and locate their influence therein of positivist, anthropological currents of thought as well as the cultural politics of post-imperial nation building. Working in dialogue with postcolonial, spatial, and Marxist criticism, this study articulates how a realist fixation on the spatial figure of the island in these works enables a form of culturally nationalist Utopianism as well as an ambivalent form of spatially Utopian discourse that resists geographic, cultural, and epistemological totalization. Keywords: Islands, Utopia, Realism, Irish literature, postcolonialism, J.M Synge, Tomas O’Crohan
Midori Atkins (San Francisco): “In-Between Spaces in Murakami Haruki’s Kafka on the Shore: Time and Space in Japanese Realism” In his 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) creates a ma (間, “in-between”) chronotope through which he reconfigures European realist and Japanese fantastic modes of representation to tell a uniquely Japanese story of the struggle to deal with the memories and trauma of World War II, the 1945 atomic bombings and the civic conflict of 1970. Through its alternating storylines and the juxtaposition of three generations of protagonists, Kafka on the Shore brings the European literary traditions of realism and the Kafkaesque into dialogue with the fantastical of the medieval Japanese narrative tradition in which the real world and the spirit world coexisted long before the advent of Latin American magical realism. The examples analyzed in this essay show the ways in which the use of the ma chronotope allows Murakami to create both a multiplicity and mutual contamination of storylines and layers of representation that work to destabilize the ostensible linearity, solidity and sovereignty of realist temporality and spatiality. Keywords: Haruki Murakami, Japanese realism, The Tale of Genji, World War II in literature, magical realism
Asbjørn Grønstad (University of Bergen): “Erik Poppe’s film U-July 22 and the aesthetics of duration” This case study argues that the kind of temporality that arises from slow cinema generates a new form of film realism. Pivotal to this new realism is what I refer to as an aesthetics of duration, the specifically cinematic visualization of coherent and protracted time. An aesthetics of duration also produces a presence effect, which, this essay suggests, can be linked to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Martin Seel. Charting the key strands of an intellectual history of realism in the field of film theory, the article also appraises contemporary work on realism such as that of Ivone Margulies and Lúcia Nagib. The second part of the essay focuses on single-take films and uses as its case in point Erik Poppe’s U-July 22, a feature film reenacting the massacre that took place on the Norwegian island Utøya on 22 July 2011. The argument here is that the single-take approach enhances the authenticity of the narrative, replicating the sense of panicked claustrophobia that the victims must have felt during the shooting. The film’s 15
handheld ambulatory camera enables a seamless temporality that forcefully instills in the audience a sense of fervent, haptic realism. Keywords: Duration, realism, ethics, Utøya atrocity, documentary cinema, film theory
5. “Literary Playing Fields in Motion: Remapping and rereading nineteenth-century realism” (Dirk Göttsche, University of Nottingham) Core essay: This chapter suggests avenues for a critical remapping and rereading of the supposedly well- known core phase of literary realism in the mid- to late nineteenth century, from the 1840s to the early 1900s, with timelines depending on language area. Building on “Routes into Realism,” this core essay and the associated case studies move beyond traditional linear conceptions of literary history, reconceptualizing realism as a multi-stranded and multi-phased dynamic embracing Europe’s language areas in a complex and polyphonous landscape of joint concerns and shared modes of representation, but also diverse voices and productive tensions that create a multidimensional set of playing fields (Spielräume) in motion. Considering a full range of literatures, the chapter explores the diversity of realism within and across languages; interactions between realism and romanticism, naturalism and modernism that question traditional periodization; and the dialogue between different national and transnational strands of realism. Specific themes include the intrinsic links between realism, modernization and nation- building; gender and the family; transcultural dialogue and the development of realist style; the postcolonial rereading of realist literature; and reading beyond the established canon and across genres, media and discourses, including science. Keywords: realism, romanticism, naturalism, modernism, nation-building, gender, science, Postcolonial Studies
Case studies: Julien Zanetta (University of Geneva): “The French debate about Gustave Courbet’s pictorial realism and the dialogue between literature and art in the mid-nineteenth century” In 1855, Gustave Courbet’s “Pavillon du réalisme” excited indignation. A close scrutiny of the reactions of four prominent critics of the time––Théophile Silvestre, Charles Baudelaire, and the Goncourt brothers––sheds new light on the nature of the debate and the underlying aesthetic theories behind these divided responses. All of them participated in defining the painter of Ornans as the spearhead of a new current in painting that negated the imagination, as they claimed. Analyzing their arguments leads me to retrace the lexical misunderstanding at the heart of the debate about French realism, marked by unsteady definitions and violent partisanship. According to Baudelaire and Silvestre, realism is flawed in its very definition. For the Goncourt brothers, realism, if based on Courbet’s pictorial model, is a burden for the new literary style they wished to promote. The French debate of the 1850/60s about Courbet’s pictorial realism illustrates the dialogue between literature and art in the mid-nineteenth century and the problems involved in operating with partisan concepts of the time, such as ‘romanticism’ and ‘realism.’ Keywords: Gustave Courbet, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Silvestre, Goncourt brothers, Écriture artiste, Intermediality, Realism, Photography
Anne Lounsbery (New York University): “Russian Families, Accidental and Other” Realist novels were vehicles for exploring ideological battles that Russians called ‘the Woman Question.’ Questions about women’s social role (emancipated or not, maternal or not, educated or not, etc.) were tied to other questions—economic, religious, legal, and political—facing a country where institutions were ‘modernizing’ (or westernizing) with disorienting speed. Hence Dostoevsky’s characterization of the contemporary Russian household as “an accidental family.” Many realist texts raise doubts about the traditional family’s ability to sustain itself in modernity; in Turgenev’s mid-century novellas, for instance, promising young female characters are repeatedly disappointed by their weak male counterparts (“superfluous men”). Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–1877) implies that a woman cannot sever the bonds of marriage and stay alive, but in Khvoshchinskaya’s novella The Boarding School Girl (1861), the heroine emancipates herself from all family bonds and constructs an independent life. Tolstoy’s late novella 16
Kreutzer Sonata (1891) goes so far as to suggest that only radical chastity, even if it leads to humanity’s extinction, can free people from the degradation and commodification that are inevitable consequences of sexual relations. As Tolstoy’s own evolution suggests, many contradictory answers were offered to the Woman Question, but as the century drew on, the tendency was toward increasing radicalism. Keywords: Fyodor Dostoevsky; Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya; Russian Realism; Leo Tolstoy; ‘Woman Question’; gender roles; family novel
Rae Greiner (Indiana University): “The benefit of reading marginal forms: dramatic monologue and ekphrastic poetry” The dramatic monologue and ekphrastic poetry are minor forms with which many nineteenth-century authors, including realist novelists such as Thomas Hardy and Henry James, experimented. Both types of poems blend genres and modes in ways that these and other authors found appealing. James’s 1868 “The Story of a Masterpiece,” for instance, reworks Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” by featuring a painter-narrator more concerned with his “own private impression” than the “actually existing.” This emphasis on subjectivity can make the poem seem antirealist. Unlike the panoramic views and detailed settings of the realist novel, the dramatic monologue and ekphrastic poetry seem to sacrifice the realist demand for heterogeneity and social amplitude for a dramatic omission of things (artworks) and persons, offering only partial portraits and dramatizing absence. Yet, there are important resonances with realism: an emphasis on the historical, wherein realism involves a mind working in relation to other minds, and mental renderings of time and space; the domestication of setting and subject, and an egalitarianism toward and mixing of genres (as exemplified in Tennyson’s “English idylls”); the importance of rhetorical purpose and the communalization of meaning; an ironic awareness of non-universality and the multiplicity of perspectives; and an emphasis on sensory perception and embodiment as a privileged source of meaning. Keywords: Realism, visual art, poetry, irony, emotion, embodiment
Olivia Santovetti (Leeds University): “Madame Bovary in Italy: Forms of Realism in the late nineteenth- century Italian novel” The final thirty years of the nineteenth century—which coincide with the first decades of the unified Italy— are the golden age of the Italian novel: for the first time ‘Italian’ and ‘novel’ combined to produce an “authentically Italian novel” (Asor Rosa). This extremely rich period is characterized by lively debates and great experimentation as well as by two main elements: the adoption, almost universally, of the realist mode, and the reference to French literature as a model. This chapter looks, first, at Franco-Italian cultural transfer; then it analyzes the influence that Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had in Italian literary practice and in the rise of Italian realism. I pay special attention to four realist novels which reworked the bovarystic theme and explored the ‘dangers’ of novel-reading. I argue that in the age of realism the woman reader character becomes a self-reflexive device which enables the novel to reflect critically on its status, fictional and illusory, on its function and its readership, real and implied. My case studies offer a sample of the forms of realism in the late nineteenth-century Italian novel and address the following questions: the issue of morality in the novel (Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra, 1881), the ambivalent power of fiction (Matilde Serao’s Fantasia, 1884), the difficult legacy of romanticism (Federico De Roberto’s L’illusione, 1891), and the adoption of realist poetics (Marco Praga, La biondina, 1893). Keywords: Bovarysme, self-reflection, woman readers, morality and literature, Franco-Italian cultural transfer, romanticism, Verismo, naturalism
Simão Valente (University of Lisbon): “Eça and Machado: Money and Adultery in Lusophone Realism” In February 1878 Eça de Queirós publishes his novel O Primo Basílio, whose plot is heavily concerned with the causes and consequences of an adulterous love affair. Two months later, Machado de Assis publishes in Brazil a famous review bitterly criticizing Eça’s novel as derivative, borderline plagiarism of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, among other French sources. In 1881 Machado would go on to publish Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, a novel that is heralded as the first Brazilian realist piece of fiction and that Castro Rocha (2011) suggests is an instance of Machadian emulative poetics in regard to Eça. Like O Primo Basílio, adultery is one of its major plot elements. These two novels and the links between Eça and 17
Machado form a node which is crucial to understand lusophone realism: themes and literary techniques derived from French authors are transplanted to different cultural contexts in a way that challenges the relationship between a French core and Portuguese-speaking peripheries. This takes the shape of connections between slave labor, money and illicit sex in the two works under analysis, which provide insight into the specificities of this Atlantic strand of realist literature. Keywords: money, adultery, slavery, poetics of emulation, periphery, Eça de Queirós, Machado de Assis, Realism and Naturalism
Sotirios Paraschas (King’s College London): “Zola, Realism and Naturalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Greece” This case study argues that Realism is introduced in nineteenth-century Greek literature through the debate on the translation of Émile Zola’s Nana in 1879. Before that, prose fiction (which is a “novelty” not cultivated in Greece before 1830 and subject to accusations of immorality, directed especially towards the translations of foreign novels) may exhibit “realist” tendencies which remain largely untheorized. It is the attacks against Nana which force Greek critics to reflect on the notions of Realism and representation systematically, from an abstract, theoretical point of view. If the problematic of Realism is introduced in the 1880s, actual prose fiction turns towards the (initially) idealized depiction of life in rural areas, a wave of fiction called ethografia, whose ideological premise is consistent with Romantic nationalism and which can be seen, at least initially, as a reaction against Realism and Naturalism which eventually enters into dialogue with them. The second part of the case study discusses two turn-of-the-century short novels by Alexandros Papadiamandis and Andreas Karkavitsas which are crucial in this turn from the naïve beginnings of ethografia towards a more sustained engagement with a realist/naturalist theory and practice.
Benedikts Kalnacs (University of Latvia, Riga): “The Polyphony of Late Nineteenth-Century Baltic realism” Taking a comparative literary approach, this exploratory essay traces the polyphony of late nineteenth- century realism in the rapidly developing literary field that comprises Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian literatures. It highlights both the traditional and innovative aspects of literary style in the oeuvre of the most important authors, such as Eduard Vilde in Estonia, Rūdolfs Blaumanis in Latvia, and Žemaitė in Lithuania, usually considered pioneers of realism in their respective cultures. Baltic literatures are deeply embedded in the development of European literatures, and during the period of realism also started to make innovative contributions to the world republic of letters. Diverse aspects, such as the late maturity of Baltic literary cultures; the coexistence of different modes of representation during the last decade of the nineteenth century; the competing representations of the country-side and the city; the growing self- reflexivity and subjectivity of the characters, all point toward the variety of literary strategies in late nineteenth-century Baltic literatures. This case study traces the relationships between realism, romanticism and nation building; realism, sentimentalism and popular culture; realism and naturalism; as well as realism and modernism. Keywords: realism, naturalism, modernism, Baltic literatures, Estonian literature, Latvian literature, Lithuanian literature, Eduard Vilde, Rūdolfs Blaumanis, Žemaitė
6. “Straw Man or Profligate Son? Transformations of Literary Realism since 1900” (Robert Weninger, King’s College London) Core essay: We tend to think of literary realism largely as an invention and product of the nineteenth century. However tenuous and misguided this attribution may be, literature after 1900 is nonetheless typically seen as ideologically and expressively at variance with the nineteenth-century’s formulas for and formulations of realist aesthetics and practice. This chapter illustrates just how wrong this perception is. Its underlying premise is that realism, in whatever shade or shape, has lost none of its former appeal, manifesting itself especially in the continuing immense popularity of the historical novel and the Bildungsroman—two realist genres par excellence—but also in the diverging trajectories of the social realist novel and the (rather short-lived, as we now know) socialist realist novel. Focusing for practical reasons on the most axiomatically realist of all literary genres, the novel, the story told in this chapter is 18
not just one of realism’s ebb and flow as it meanders through the landscape of post-1900 European- language literary history, but also one of its ups and downs, its bifurcation, transposition, amalgamation, overlay and transfer. It is also a story of realism’s intersection with and osmosis into modernism and postmodernism, both of which are all too customarily—although wrongly, as the argument here illustrates—seen as diametrically opposed to realism. Keywords: Realism, Socialist Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Bildungsroman, Historical Novel, Stream of Consciousness Novel, Adultery in Literature
Case studies: Paolo Noto (University of Bologna) and Francesco di Chiara (Open University, Italy): “Realism across borders: The role of state institutions in making Italian neo-Realist film transnational” This case study investigates the role of state institutions in the molding of Italian Neo-Realism as a transnational phenomenon. Conventionally, the birth of Italian Neo-Realism is associated with Rossellini’s Open City and the end of World War II; however, its transnational story begins already in the late 1930s and early 1940s when the project of a new Italian cinema was initiated by a group of young film intellectuals. Focussing on the discourse surrounding the creation of this new Realism in Italian film, we examine its transnational dimension as it manifests itself in the production history of a sample of lesser known films that put Italy in touch with other countries. Some of these films were the result of international co-production agreements (for instance René Clément’s The Walls of Malapaga), some represented foreign characters or involved foreign professionals (Joseph Losey’s Stranger on the Prowl), whereas the international distribution of yet others resulted in diplomatic tensions and wrangles (Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle). Of special interest in these contexts will be to scrutinize the means deployed by Italian government institutions to control film production and police the kind of realist content that could be sanctioned, but also to examine how the films’ potential for international circulation in turn curbed and modified those very decision-making processes. Keywords: Italian Neo-Realism, Transnational Cinemas, Film Industry, Film Censorship, Film Policies
Paul Martin (University of Nottingham, Ningbo/China): “Realism in play: The uses of Realism in computer game discourse” There is no school of realism in game development, but the term “realism” is used extensively by game developers, players, critics and journalists. This chapter analyzes 1,039 documents written by these groups to investigate how the term “realism” is deployed in gaming discourse. Within this corpus, the term realism is used to describe two kinds of formal characteristics of games. The first—functional realism—relates to how a game behaves as a simulation; the second—perceptual realism—relates to how a game looks and sounds as a set of moving sound-images. In both of these forms, realism discursively constructs gaming in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, authors use the term realism to align gaming with other media forms in a way that elevates gaming to the status of cinema, art and literature, on the other, they use the term to distinguish gaming from other art forms and media to establish gaming within its own autonomous cultural space. Drawing on Roger Caillois’s categorization of play, the chapter argues that the discursive construction of games through the term realism is a form of boundary work that seeks to establish what counts as a game and who counts as a “gamer.” Keywords: Realism, Computer Games, Game Studies, Corpus Analysis, Document Analysis, Discourse, Subculture
Birgit Neumann (University of Düsseldorf): “Realism and postcolonial subjectivity in the Black British Bildungsroman” The case study critically assesses theoretical responses to realism and the attendant privileging of non- realist modes of writing in postcolonial studies. While some postcolonial scholars disparage realism for its presumed affinity to imperial ideology, others argue that it is inimical to the more open, fluid and pluralized identities of the postcolonial subject. The essay then moves on to analyze Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) as an instance of the Black British Bildungsroman, also considering the controversies caused by the novel’s realism. According to critics, the novel’s realism underpins the construction of cultural stereotypes and the promotion of genuinely Western ideals, including individualism and neo-liberal self-fulfillment. Against 19
the backdrop of this critique, this case study sets out to develop a more nuanced understanding of realism’s affordances and limits in Ali’s Brick Lane. Such a nuanced understanding pays attention to the historicity, functional polyvalency and semantic ambivalence of literary forms. Keywords: Monica Ali, Realism, Modernism, Postcolonial Criticism, Bildungsroman, Burden of Representation
Robert Weninger (King’s College London): ”The rise and fall of socialist realism: The case of Christa Wolf” Germany was unique in the postwar period, specifically the four decades spanning the years 1949 to 1989, in that the nation’s geopolitical division into two ideologically opposed states—one capitalist, Western and a member of NATO, the other communist and a member of the Warsaw Pact—was reflected in the competition in the literary field between Western experimental modes of writing, in particular modernism and postmodernism, in the Federal Republic and a far more conventional and state-sanctioned socialist realism in the GDR. The subject of this case study is Christa Wolf, a prominent figurehead of GDR literature, whose trajectory as a writer quintessentially mirrors the contradictions intrinsic to a mode of writing—socialist realism—that on the one hand programmatically aspired to describe the world realistically, albeit with a socialist resolve and agenda, but which was on the other hand, precisely because of the ideological demands and aesthetic strictures placed upon it, effectively unable to do so. Wolf’s development as a writer provides a particularly instructive illustration of these contradictions in that in her œuvre Wolf moves from a largely conformist Socialist Realism in her earliest novel to unorthodox and experimental forms of Critical Realism in her later work, forms which reflect her growing ideological disillusionment and discontent with the state-imposed regulatives of socialist realism. Keywords: Christa Wolf, Realism, Socialist Realism, GDR Literature, Marxist Aesthetics, Anna Seghers
Simão Valente (University of Lisbon): “Realism in crime fiction: Reason, morals and language” For the century following the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841 crime fiction would follow lines set by that foundational work: the main character must solve mysteries by the application of reason alone. In an effort to ennoble a genre of popular literature that had its roots in nineteenth-century sensational fiction, in which the otherworldly was commonplace, the Golden Age of the genre, the 1910s to 1930s, saw the emphasis on rational thought and realistic explanations become enshrined in rules that sought to root out any supernatural solution. This formula was codified by Raymond Chandler in his article “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944 and 1950), which took stock of a new style of crime novels published in the previous decade and coined the term ‘hard-boiled’ to define them: realistic depictions of criminals and their motivations, with a particular emphasis on realistic language. Realism based on the use of everyday language and the depiction of morally reprehensible behavior displaced realism based on rationality as the cardinal rule for the detective story. Upon closer inspection, however, the very novels championed by Chandler display inconsistencies: language is stylized and the detective is often nothing but a romantic hero facing off evil. In both periods realism appears as a ploy to grant canonicity for a genre of popular literature. Keywords: Realism, crime fiction, popular literature, Raymond Chandler, film noir
Lucia Boldrini (Goldsmith College, University of London): “Biographic Fiction’s Challenge to Realism: Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl and Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Una habitación ajena” Starting from a brief discussion of biographical fiction and the challenges it poses to realism, this case study compares Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl (2015), centered on George Eliot alongside various real and fictional characters (some of whom drawn from Eliot’s own fiction), and Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Una habitación ajena (1997), focused on the (fictional) diary of Virginia Woolf’s cook Nellie Boxall and on the relationships between the writer and her domestic servants. This study considers the texts’ complex narrative structures, the reliability or otherwise of their narrators and the hypocrisy or otherwise of the historical protagonists, and, crucially, the critique of their authors’ discussions of realism in their respective ‘manifestos’ (in particular Chapter 17 of Eliot’s Adam Bede and Woolf’s “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”). In their investigation of the gaps between theory and practice, between present and past, between authorial, narrative and historical subjectivity, and between conceptions of how reality can and should be represented, the novels seek not so much to give us historically believable contexts and 20
individuals, as, rather, to explore the distances and continuities between the intellectual, literary and ethical premises that shape our constantly transforming understanding of these concepts. Keywords: biofiction; heterobiography; reference; Patricia Duncker; Alicia Giménez Bartlett; George Eliot; Virginia Woolf; Nelly Boxall; John Fowles
Abstracts Volume II: “Pathways through Realism”
1. “‘Memories inwrought with affection.’ Emotion and Memory in Realism” (Svend Erik Larsen, University of Aarhus, and Patrizia Lombardo†, University of Geneva) Core essay: With the development of the secular urbanized and industrialized society from the mid- eighteenth century, traditional ways of life lost authority and opened for new approaches to the past, and in the same period emotions began to be seen as a fundamental and universal core of humanity. Gradually individual sensibility in public and private life and memories based on personal experience were given priority over the power of established traditions from the past to forge social and individual identities. Not least the French Revolution weakened the monopoly of existing institutions of religion, law and governance to determine cultural norms and traditions. With the pre-revolutionary ideas of emotion and memory as a prism, the early phases of realism explored the consequences of this historical shift. However, as realism gained momentum through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, it also intensified its questioning of the positive consequences of an effacement of the past and the adulation of the new, couched as it often was in unrestrained emotional pursuit of individual ambitions for social advancement. Without suggesting radically new ideas about emotion and memory until the end of the nineteenth century, realist writers exposed the dilemmas that triggered the transformations of the culture of emotion and memory in the nineteenth century. Keywords: individualism, internalization, secularisation, revolution, Bildung, friendship, love, technological sublime
Case studies Patrizia Lombardo† (University of Geneva): “The Interplay of Emotion and Memory. Stendhal, Zola, Musil” Stendhal is one of the key writers of European realism, in particular when it comes to the nature of emotions and their relationship to memory. The young Stendhal’s ideas in Histoire de la peinture en Italie (1817) and De l’amour (1822) are rooted in the old European notions of emotions as they were embedded in the theory of humors and classified as a fixed number of categories. The mature Stendhal, from Le rouge et le noir (1830) to the posthumous Vie de Henry Brulard (1890), points forward both to later writers like Robert Musil and to new research on the interplay between emotions and memory as it emerged in late nineteenth-century philosophy and psychology and was further developed in contemporary research, including recent neuroscience. This case study analyzes Stendhal’s work as a contrast to Émile Zola’s biological determinism and as a parallel to Robert Musil’s sophisticated engagement with the fluidity of, and microscopic movements and entanglement between, emotion and memory. The analysis attempts to embrace the main features of both the literary and the scientific developments in the understanding of emotion and memory through the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. Keywords: Stendhal, Robert Musil, Émile Zola, theories of emotions, theories of memory, re-enactment
Tone Selboe (University of Oslo): “Situations of Sympathy: Eroding Emotions and Everyday Life in the Realist Novel” This essay ventures to show how the novel and its many negotiations of feelings, sympathy in particular, but also its antithesis, antipathy, feeds into an exploration of emotional life as connected to the sphere of everyday practices related to home and family, often embedded in situations of crisis. My main examples are Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–3), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–7), and Knut Hamsun’s Sult (1890; Hunger, 2001), three nineteenth-century novels that in terms of style, plot and character are quite distinct in varying ways, hence suited to challenge and broaden the notion of realism. Style, 21
character, and plot are in each novel inextricably interwoven with the landscape in which it is set, whether it be the outdoor life or the home, but inner and outer ‘realities’ are played out differently, thus forming specific versions of the realist project. While Bleak House and Anna Karenina stay within the realm of literary realism, Hunger does not, hence it represents a sort of crisis not only in terms of emotions, but also in terms of the novel genre. Keywords: sympathy, empathy, antipathy, novel, Dickens, Tolstoy, Hamsun.
Stefan Hajduk (University of Adelaide): “Attunement: Mood and Memory in Goethe, Flaubert and Dickens” In European antiquity the harmony of the spheres was a central cosmological notion from the fifth century BC on. The atmosphere, atmósfaira, was regarded as an intuitive emotional grasp of the synthesis between the microcosmic order of human society and the stable macrocosmic order of the universe, supported by an aesthetic experience of musical harmony. With the changing conceptions of emotion in the emerging secular culture of the eighteenth century, priority was given to interpersonal emotional relations, notably sympathy, which then became the foundation for the establishment of broader human connections and of social order at large. In this process, the holistic dimension of emotions lost its cosmological meaning. Instead, such totalizing moods were internalized as individual states of mind that encompassed entire social situations in which they occurred. In the individualized secular world of nineteenth-century realism the attunement between a person’s situated moods and the atmosphere of a situation as a whole may evoke personal memories and, hence, attunement is concerned with the fragile and not always successful formation of a comprehensive individual identity rather than with an embracement of a stable cosmic harmony. The Bildungsroman becomes a central genre in this dynamic. Using Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Gustave Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield as three exemplary cases in point, this case study analyzes the transformation of attunement, or Stimmung, in nineteenth-century realism. Keywords: attunement, atmosphere, mood, memory, Goethe, Flaubert, Dickens
Hans Lauge Hansen (Aarhus University): “Spanish and Latin American Memory Novels” The contemporary recuperation of the “dark” memory of civil wars and dictatorial pasts has led to a considerable alteration of the realist novel in the Spanish-speaking world. The memory of past violence and atrocity is a topic capable of arousing strong emotions and ethical engagement, and the sub-genre of the memory novel has emerged as one of the most popular in Spain as well as in Latin America. This new realist novel dedicated to the memory of violent pasts is characterized by its social commitment to pay tribute to the victims of repression and by the inclusion of non-fictional elements (docufiction, autofiction, novel without fiction etc.), but there are also differences. This article takes its point of departure in the description of the Spanish memory novel as it has emerged since the turn of the century, with the aim of comparing its defining traits to the Latin American novel, primarily in relation to the concept of trauma. A hypothesis governing the article is that the Spanish memory novel is primarily oriented towards the cognitive creation of knowledge and truth authentication of the past, and uses emotion as a way to arouse compassion. The Latin American memory novel, on the other hand, mostly follows the narrative template of trauma literature in order to represent what is not expressible: the memory of the horrific experience itself. The article discusses how and to what extent differences in the memory cultures involved might explain such differences in the form of the novel. Keywords: Civil war, dictatorship, violent past, cultural memory, social trauma, affiliative memory,
Riikka Rossi (University of Helsinki): “The Poetics of Disgust in Realist Fiction” Nineteenth-century naturalist literature received adverse publicity as “disgust literature,” inciting moral indignation and accusations of indecency in reading audiences. Depictions of lower classes, primitive instincts and sexuality, sickness, ugliness, and degeneration were considered vulgar topics that exceeded the limits of good taste and morality. In this chapter I investigate the poetics of disgust in naturalist fiction by analyzing two case studies in French and Finnish naturalism. It is my contention that disgust is essentially intertwined with realism’s and naturalism’s aesthetic ideals as an emotion capable of documenting real life, and it contributes to the creation of effects of reality peculiar to naturalist fiction. By analyzing Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1868) and Nana (1880) I illustrate how the poetics of disgust 22
in naturalist fiction reflects the anxiety about our animal selves and combines with fear and horror, yet producing contrasting emotional effects, an ambivalent allure of the disgusting. On the contrary, while disgust has sometimes been considered a morally suspect emotion or an ugly feeling, examples in Nordic naturalism demonstrate disgust’s critical power and even its moral potential. In moral disgust, the reaction of rejection characteristic of disgust extends to a refusal to violate sociomoral codes. Depiction, evoking, and triggering disgust in readers can be used to “debate social problems,” which, according to the Danish critic George Brandes, constitutes the core of realism. The moral potential of disgust reverberates in the works of Nordic authors in particular, who have employed the naturalistic narratives of sickness and degeneration to shock conservative audiences and provoke critical discussions on the female condition. Keywords: naturalism, disgust, effect of reality, horror, the primitive, ambivalent emotions, moral emotions, Émile Zola, Sofi Oksanen
Maya Boutaghou (University of Virginia): “History and Untold Memories: New Historical Realism in Assia Djebar’s films” Assia Djebar’s films use Maghrebi musical genres to represent the complex cultural memory of the Maghreb opposing the official historical narrative promoted by a post-colonial authoritarian regime. Both films represent the Maghreb as a cultural ensemble. In La Nouba des femmes du Mont-Chenoua (1977; The Nouba of the Women from Mount Chenoua) et La Zerda et les chants de l'oubli (1982; The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetfulness) Djebar uses mixed techniques of assemblage, collage and citation. Her films are all about reconstruction of memory, —mainly the oral traditions transmitted by women— and recover repressed collective past during both colonization and postcolonial periods. Situating the aesthetics of Djebar’s film within the modern political and cultural context of Algeria, as well as the broader Maghreb context, this case study asks the questions: How does cinema translate the complexity of oral memory? And how can it contribute to a representation of the past in order to decolonize the nationalized history of the Maghreb? Through a close analysis of the two films the essay shows how Djebar’s cinematic project suggests answers by constructing as new historical realism that opens a pathway to the experience of a silenced past. Keywords: Assia Djebar, The Nouba, The Zerda, memory, decolonization, Maghreb, multilingualism
2. “Material Matters: The Surfaces of Realism” (Simon James, Durham University) Core essay: The representation of objects is one of the guarantors of a particular kind of literary text being characterised as realist. The mimesis of objects, possessions, and interiors, marvelled at by James when writing on Balzac, deplored by Woolf when decrying Bennett, grounds nineteenth-century in the material and the real, making a claim that the world of these novels operates according to physical, social and economic laws comparable to that of their readers. Objects are inanimate but they bear meaning, signifying both the place in the world of the characters that own them (the collection of the aesthete, the scanty possessions of the labourer), and, at a wider scope, material environments are shown to shape the being of these characters (Bennet’s Potteries, Balzac’s lodging house). At the interstice of being and the object is clothing which is employed to read and write identity across the nineteenth century. The scrutiny of codes of physical appearance also generates meaning in such further developed discourses as physiognomy and caricature. Keywords: realism, object, thing, possession, environment, appearance, clothing
Case studies Anthony Walker-Cook (University College London): “The Influence of Collecting in Victorian and Edwardian Literature” The museum became a cultural institution during the Victorian period, but in what ways did they influence the writers of the time? This chapter explores how the collecting impulse fostered by the museum intersected in the role of realism in Victorian fiction. Following a brief exploration of how literature constructs the role of the museum, the chapter focuses on the work of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle to explore the concept of realism through the methods in which it ascribes a status to the objects that vitally litter Victorian novels. The first section assesses the impact of the Victorian natural history 23
crazes on contemporary fiction, which began with palaeontology; collecting fossils was an act as equally exciting as it was temporally disorientating, but it also established a distinction between whole specimens and fragmentary bones. In focusing on the presence of the pre-historic in Dickens and Doyle, it is argued that the motif of collecting in their works is indicative of this public fascination, which had been sparked by the formation of the museum as an institution. The second half of this chapter argues that the literary detective represents an analogous figure to that of the museum curator, a character missing throughout much of the period in spite of the museum’s prevalent presence. In examining the routines and processes of Sherlock Holmes, which include description, deduction, speculation and display, it is argued that the detective as a figure emerged through the cultural pre-occupation of collecting. The works of Dickens and Doyle represent the cultural milieu of collecting that was fostered by museums, and this historical context is tied with the role of realism in contemporary literature – this chapter thus opens a discussion of how the curation of objects (broken or whole) was integral to the writers and audiences of the Victorian period, through which realism itself was on display. Keywords: museums, collecting, literary detectives, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle
Svend Erik Larsen (Aarhus University): “‘Distance avails not.’ Representing the Modern Mass” Around 1850 the major cities in Europe approached the one-million mark. With the influx of people of all kinds a new urban mass emerged that was different from the well-defined social classes of citizens from top to bottom of society. From that point the urban environment, its objects and the composition of its people changed incessantly. All classes, old and new, mingled in the bustling street life, and all classes depended on the same infrastructure for transport and sanitation that determined everybody’s movements and not least their health. In this new context, the distance between the individual and the mass began to shrink, because the very volume of inhabitants created a mutual dependency between them that challenged the understanding of both individual and collective identity. To interpret urban life arts and literature began to explore new ways of representing the mass and thereby city life in general. In this case study, Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman and Bruno Wille will open the discussion. Works of Eugène Delacroix and Honoré Daumier will show the early attempts to represent the new mass in the visual arts, while Charles Dickens’s novels Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) illustrate the realist representation of the mass as an ongoing project in a changing social reality. Keywords: distance, urban mass, body experience, visual and literary representation, observation, interaction
Jeremy Tambling (University of Manchester): “Realism and Allegory: Balzac, Dickens and James” Through La Peau de chagrin, The Old Curiosity Shop, and The Golden Bowl, I examine writing which finds that it must supplement a realism which the writers are committed to. Realism seems deficient to convey a sense of spectrality which haunts the most empirical of forms of writing, and which attracts Balzac, Dickens, and James, chosen here for the common motif of the shop full of bric-à-brac and old curiosities, which themselves have a talismanic, or ghostly influencing effect. These “things” the writers discuss themselves are spectral in being fetishes, partaking of the nineteenth-century sense of the commodity, which Walter Benjamin discusses, following Marx. Keywords: realism, physiognomy, spectralism, automata, allegory, phantasmagorias, bric-à-brac, commodity-fetishism
Tomáš Jirsa (Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic): “Performing the Reverse Side of the Face: Toward Affective Realism” There are two sides to the human face. It is familiar from the outside, yet from the inside it is hardly thinkable, uncanny. This case study addresses the question of what happens when the face is disfigured and turned inside out. In order to address this question I will examine several encounters between subjects and disfigured faces before, during and after the First World War. Based on the war experiences of extensive facial injuries, I argue that rather than being simply represented the hardly thinkable disfiguration is affectively performed. The so-called gueules cassées are at the center of the novel Au ciel de Verdun (1918) by Bernard Lafont and the war memoirs Hommes sans visage (1942) of the Swiss front nurse Henriette Rémi, and faceless images are also key to two modernist texts, Die Aufzeichnungen des 24
Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) by Rainer Maria Rilke and the short story “Smazaný obličej” (1919) by Richard Weiner. Not only do the witness accounts from the battlefront and literary fictions share an emotional force of the traumatic images but they also enable affects of shock, disgust, and fascination to structure their discursive forms. Consequently, the aesthetic force of what I suggest to call ‘affective ‘ lies in literature’s capacity to trigger a potential experience while pushing the realist representation toward its limits. Keywords: disfiguration, affektive realism, First World War, Rainer Maria Rilke, Richard Weiner, Bernard Lafont, Henriette Rémi
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (Aarhus University): “Posthumanism and Realism” The presence of posthuman figures in literature is not realist as in corresponding to something existing. As a style, however, realism has been very important to writing about societies that may be inhabited by successors to the human race. After providing a short overview of the most important distinctions that characterize posthumanist fiction, I will focus on the following texts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a quintessential classic in posthumanism, uses many techniques to establish authority of the story. Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and Robert Musil’s “Flypaper” deals with human-animal relations on many levels driven by a painstaking attention to detail and provides multiple levels of interpretation. Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island is an example of a use of the posthuman as part of a dual narrative, one that relates to a recognizable presence and one to a future turned from utopia to dystopia, each narrative presenting an undesirable condition. Finally, Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy shows the engagement with traumatic history, while using the posthuman figures to suggest that there can be a future where new categories will take hold. Keywords: realism, posthuman, Shelley, Kafka, Butler, utopia, dystopia, trauma
3. “Dynamics of Realist Forms” (Steen Bille Jørgensen, Aarhus University) Core essay: Nineteenth-century realism is often identified with a mimetic representation of socio- historical reality in the narrative form of the novel. However, a closer look at the wealth of new genres and literary forms that were created by writers and artists within the various fractions of realism offers a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of realist art, which builds on new communicative, creative and social challenges and opportunities. In this chapter, we want to explore and analyze different aspects of the double self-reflexivity related, on the one hand, to the new subject of class and social reality and, on the other, the search for literary forms expressing new experiences of the real. To further investigate the dynamism of realist forms, we need to move beyond simple taxonomic account of genres but also to interrogate the idea of style, which is often associated with the individual writer when we use terms like réalisme balzacien. Taking a point of departure in the notion of “composition”, our aim will be to grasp the disruptive innovative force of realist writing (and its naturalist radicalization), taking into account the boundaries between literary and non-literary texts. With the modern historical reality and focus on the contemporary life and the present moment, new creative solutions were required and writers were fully aware of the literary potential of fuzzy intertextual and “intermedial solutions”. Where we can detect a movement from grand narratives to smaller forms in the nineteenth Century, we may ask if much metafictional writing does not precisely exploit the formally self-reflective tension between the macro- structure of the novel and the micro-structure of “pictorial” short forms. In the 20th century more overtly reflective structures provoke the involvement of readers seeking to apprehend reality. From Brecht’s reflections on realism and distance, to contemporary activist and interventionist strategies, more or less political avant-garde strategies equally count on the commitment of readers as a way of changing social reality. Keywords: composition, reflexivity, intermediality, form, scale, reader
Margaret R. Higonnet (University of Connecticut): “Forms of Realism in Children’s Literature” Realism in children’s literature has been confused with didacticism, suppressed by censorship, and understudied in the nineteenth century, when crossover reading blurred the line between children and adults. Yet the roots of realism lie in earlier encyclopedic and even alphabetic forms, which modeled and 25
foreshadowed nineteenth-century experiments in historical fiction, science fiction, and three-dimensional “movable” forms that in turn supported enthusiasm for “illusions in motion” and early film. Underestimating the capacity of a child-audience to appreciate sophisticated forms of representation and metanarrative, critics have focused on descriptive conceptions of mimesis in texts for the young, at the expense of self-conscious practices of verisimilitude and the comic—another dimension of realism central to the child-reader’s play with texts that has been underestimated by theorists of realism. Examples that range from nursery play to serious adolescent fiction (e.g. adventure, historical narratives, domestic fiction) expand our understanding both of children’s readings and of the potential range of realism. Keywords: censorship, crossover audiences, G. Bruno, Lothar Meggendorfer, Catharine Sedgwick, Mildred Taylor, Mark Twain, Jules Verne
Joan Templeton (University of Long Island): “Early Theatrical Realism on Page and Stage: Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg” This essay discusses Zola as a pioneer of theatrical realism, focusing on the modern, anti-idealist notion of “le vrai” [the true] in the twin volumes Le Naturalisme au Théâtre and Nos Auteurs Dramatiques (1881). It then analyzes the work of Ibsen, disproving the conventional wisdom that the inventor of realist drama had no interest in its theory. Ibsen’s correspondence reveals that both his conception and invention of the realist play were the fruit of his deliberate attempt to create a drama for the contemporary world, characterized by an anti-idealist purpose and a “fourth wall” stage. The essay traces Ibsen’s development as a realist writer, drawing on his critical thought and focusing on A Doll House (1879) and Ghosts (1881), before discussing the great variety of realism in Ibsen’s plays. It then examines Strindberg’s notion of realism as a “great naturalism” and its manifestation in Strindberg’s The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888). It analyzes the canonical theoretical document of realist theatre, the “Preface” to Miss Julie. The essay then discusses the essential work of the Art Theatres in staging realist plays: Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris, Brahm’s Freie Bühne in Berlin, and Grein’s Independent Theatre in London. Keywords: André Antoine, anti-idealism, Otto Brahm, the fourth wall, Jacob Grein, Henrik Ibsen, Naturalism, realism, August Strindberg, Émile Zola
Alena Rettová (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London): “The Making of the Historical Narrative in the Swahili utenzi: the Realism of a Poetic Form” This article argues that a literary tradition, with its inventory of literary genres, provides a mould to understand experience and thus defines what “reality” is in a specific culture. This is the epistemological, experience-shaping working of literary genre in the constitution of “reality”: processing lived experience into "reality". Genre equally establishes a diachronic dimension, ensuring a continuity of concepts through time. This article explores these roles of genre through the example of history-writing along the East African coast, as a culturally specific mode of realist representation. In particular, this article looks at the tradition of history-writing through poetry, through the genre called utenzi. It shows how, through the utenzi, East African history-writing maintains at its base a specific conception of time and of historical development, encoded in the style of emplotment and the temporal scheme of the utenzi. The structure of the utenzi is then projected onto (unrelated) historical events or processes to make sense of these through a contextualized historical narrative. The article connects to earlier research on the utenzi tradition and studies three instances of post-independence tenzi. Despite the significant “revolutionary” redefinition of the utenzi genre during the period of Tanzanian socialism, ujamaa, the structure of the utenzi is preserved in continuity with the past. The utenzi then becomes a “pattern of narrating history” (Vierke 2016) across pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods. Keywords: Swahili poetry, genre, utenzi, historiography, post-independence literature, African literature
Jeremy Tambling (University of Manchester): Pessoa (title tbc) To be added
Katharine Capshaw (University of Connecticut): “Photography and Dissent in John Lewis’s Graphic Novel March” 26
This essay argues for the vitality of the graphic novel within analyses of realism. Focusing on John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell’s trilogy, March, the essay embraces a definition of the real that accepts the subjectivity of historical narrative. The essay examines the photographic antecedents for images within the three novels, arguing that the texts invoke the documentary by conjuring up iconic photographs in memory. Through re-inscribing and reshaping those images in drawings, the books surprise the reader with a fresh engagement with historical experience, especially by rendering the psychological experience of landmark events. The essay also argues that March participates in a tradition of realist counter- narratives, as do texts by women writers and writers of color. Through destabilizing photography, the series embraces multiplicity, variability, and instability in order to articulate a vision of the civil rights movement as open-ended and unfinished. Keywords: graphic novel, photography, politics, civil rights, history
Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta (Massachusetts College of the Arts): “The Visions of John Ball: Iain Bell’s Opera In Parenthesis” David Jones’s epic In Parenthesis (1937) was generated by the Welsh author's traumatic experiences at the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, at Mametz, as well as his 2.5 years at the front. In Parenthesis fuses the vernacular and detailed sensory observations of war-realism with Welsh myth in a modernist free-verse hybrid of prose and poetry that contemporaries saw as "authentic realism." At the centennial of World War I, this epic poem became the basis for a libretto and opera performed by the Welsh National Opera in 2015, to commemorate the tragic losses of WWI and to explore their meaning. This paper traces the layers of adaptation across media from Jones’s poem to the libretto by David Antrobus and Emma Jenkins, and from language to Iain Bell's music and ultimately to the staging by David Pountney. Jones’s poem and Bell’s opera both draw on myth (e.g. sacramental Marian and pre- Christian Welsh motifs) to endow the historical moment of rupture and massive human sacrifice with meaning. Thus there is both a historical level of "real" experience and a performative level of adaptation, translation, and dialogue between the "realist" underlying material and the "surreal" of more transcendent moments in the opera. The linguistic "coding" in the poem that records the experience of Jones is adapted musically and recoded in the operatic narrative and dramatized in yet another dimension by the Pountney transposition into lighting and stagecraft. Each of the different aspects of opera tests the possibilities of representation and transforms the realm that Jones’s original readers found to be so “realist.” Keywords: David Jones, Iain Bell, In Parenthesis, opera, adaptation
4. “Worlding Realism: Dialogic Encounters” (Margaret Higonnet, University of Connecticut) Core essay: This chapter directly tackles the dissemination and migration of realist practices beyond the boundaries of Europe (and back), along pathways that are not just linear but radiate in many directions and that foster circulation and dialogue. Often treated as antithetical to modernism, realism here will be shown to travel as a result of modern technological innovations that foster encounters and that transform the modes of realism itself, as in the hybrid ‘neo’ forms that arise from the development of photography and cinema. It focuses explicitly on topics such as the consequences of colonialism and globalization, as well as the roles of translation and mistranslation. Unlike previous ostensibly purist studies of realist practices that travel, this essay attends to the hybridization of indigenous traditions and cultural epistemologies with external models. Such encounters can stimulate innovation through adaptation and appropriation; they also travel onward to stimulate transformation of other literatures. The ‘worlding of realism’ then, attends to the ‘value added’ through the play of intertextuality, mimicry, recovery and resistance at each encounter. The goal of this examination of alternative and variegated emergent realist practices is to engage with questions not just about the possible coexisting forms of realism but also about our own critical practices and their impact on what we recognize as realist. Keywords: globalization, translation, migration, transnational, international networks, magical realism, Zola
Case studies Joan Templeton (University of Long Island): “Varieties of Theatrical Realism after Ibsen” 27
The major theorist of realist theatre after Ibsen was Bernard Shaw, whose critical writings constitute the most important case for theatrical realism since Zola, and whose own plays are an idiosyncratic blend of fourth-wall realism, drawing-room comedy, and opera. The plays of Shaw’s contemporary Anton Chekhov—Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard—are widely recognized as the zenith of the fourth-wall, illusionist stage. Chekhov’s director Konstantin Stanislavski’s realist Moscow Art Theatre became the most important theatre of the twentieth century. Reactions to fourth-wall realism are found in the poetic realism of the two great playwrights of the Irish Renaissance—J. M. Synge and Sean O’Casey—and the sui generis Luigi Pirandello, whose realist theatre serves to argue the complexities of depicting reality. The declared post-realist Brecht criticized realism as inherently conservative, but his theories contain historical and logical fallacies, and his own antidote to realism—his “epic theatre”— depends heavily on realism itself. In contrast, the German "Documentary Drama" of the 1960s aimed to present the "truth" of history through realist enactments of it. Lastly, the essay discusses the dominance of realism in the American theatre, where it characterizes the best work of Eugene O’Neill and the drama of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and their descendants. Keywords: Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, the Moscow Art Theatre, the Irish Renaissance, the epic theatre, post-structuralism, performance theory, phenomenology of the theatre.
Nicolas Zufferey (University of Geneva): “Is There a Notion of ‘Realism’ in Traditional China?” Realism has been the main genre of fiction in twenteeth-century China, with critical realism and socialist realism (in the Soviet sense) as its two main forms. It is usually implied in manuals of Chinese literature that realism was a Western import, and that the adoption of Western realism was a defining characteristic of the "New literature" that broke with tradition, classical Chinese and ancient culture around 1920. But while there is no question that there had been no concept of “realism,” and no realist literary school in traditional China, one can however find in ancient texts ample evidence of descriptions that can be labelled “realist,” moreover with social concerns that to some extent antedate the spirit of modern Chinese literature. In this case study, examples taken from classical fiction and poetry will substantiate the idea that realism was perhaps not a complete newcomer when it prevailed in its Western form at the beginning of the twentieth century. A possibility is that modern Chinese realism was indeed influenced by ancient notions of literature or, at the least, that ancient forms of realism helped modern authors to adopt Western realism. In more general terms, this essay will also contribute to the idea that the break between ancient literature and modern literature was not as thorough as Chinese orthodox manuals of modern literature routinely present it. Keywords: ancient Chinese literature, modern Chinese literature, Chinese historiography, Sima Qian, Ban Gu, Bai Juyi, Lu Xun
Wen-chin Ouyang (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London): “Worlding of Realism: The Case of Naguib Mahfouz” The routes of European realism into the Arabic cultural and literary expressions are many. They also overlap in both the travel and arrival of this complex package of politics and aesthetics, simultaneously and randomly, through translation and adaptation, at Arabic print culture, cinema, storytelling and theatre, where it is subject to further conceptual blending of all kinds: global with local, visual with verbal, and creative with critical. Reception is the site on which Arabic realism finds articulation. Each articulation is, however, unique, responsive, as it were, to the worldview, priorities and techniques deployed. Tracing the movements and transformations of European realism through Naguib Mahfouz—centrifugally into his novel and film stories and centripetally into Egyptian cinema and criticism—it is possible to track the worlding of Realism in the globalization of Mahfouz. Read outside a linear progressive chronology that implies a cause-and-effect trajectory of worlding (that Egyptian development is directly influenced by European exports), and against a backdrop of visualization and embodiment in Egyptian and Mexcian cinemas, class-conscious discourses of Egyptian criticism, and political allegory of his later novels, Mahfouzian literary realism is theorized as reliant on the ability of the word to unleash the creative potential of the human imagination to relate writing to lived experiences. Keywords: Naguib Mahfouz, globalization, the novel, socialist realism, Marxist criticism, cinema, Chinese orientalism 28
Karen-Margrethe Simonsen (Aarhus University): “The Real Magic in Miguel Angel Asturias’ Magical Realism: Legends of Guatemala and The President” In this case study it is argued that the Latin American magical realism is a ‘laboratory’ for exploring the relation between realism and the real. Furthermore, it is argued that magical realism should not be seen as an enchantment, but rather as an investigation of the real, especially of causality and temporality. The study begins with a discussion of the general understanding of magical realism and its position within world literature. It presents Asturias’ form of magical realism as transcultural. The main focus of the study is a comparative analysis of two texts by Miguel Ángel Asturias, the mythologically founded Legends of Guatemala (1930), and the novel The President (1946), which is often considered to be a portrait of the dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera and his authoritarian regime (1898-1920). Despite the differences between the texts, this study argues that the texts share the same realistic ambition and that their combination of styles inspired by the Maya text Popol Vuh and surrealism serves the function of exploring particularly strange experiences of reality. At the end, Asturias is briefly situated within the Latin American tradition. Keywords: magical realism, the real, Asturias, myth, Maya, surrealism, enchantment, transcultural, object-oriented ontology, causality, temporality
Eleni Coundouriotis (University of Connecticut): “Narrate or Describe: Documentation and the Tasks of Realism” Contemporary African novelists have turned repeatedly to historical forms of narration. Arguably, history has been key to the postcolonial novel all along but this essay 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 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 essay recovers documentation as a dimension of historical narration by arguing for its importance in establishing the historicity of postcolonial subjects. Furthermore, it 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 and the novel, Edward W. Said, African Literature, Teju Cole, Ghassan Kanafani
Ulka Anjaria (Brandeis University): “Realism in the Colony” Initially, realism was a colonial important, a means to modernize India’s literary culture, which was thought to be excessive and irrational. Yet in the early twentieth century, realism was claimed by Indian writers as an apt mode in which to imagine their own national future. This malleability of realism suggests that at any given moment, the significance of realism must be historically situated rather than assumed. This is clear throughout India’s postcolonial history as well. While Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children rejected knowability through a rejection of realism, newer Indian writers have embraced realism as a means of rethinking the nature of politics in the twenty-first century. Keywords: colonialism, postcolonialism, Indian literature, economic liberalization, contemporaneity
Other relevant information: N/A
Timetable
Indicate the timeframe for each broad stage: Volume I: 29
Submitted to John Benjamins on 20.7.2020. Publication expected spring 2021.
Volume II: To be submitted to CHLEL peer review by end December 2020. CHLEL reader reports expected by end March 2021. CHLEL approval before annual meeting 2021? Any revisions by end May 2021 to enable submission to John Benjamins by 10 June 2021. Publication by end 2021 hoped for.
Date of MS delivery: We expect to submit volume II to CHLEL peer review by end December 2020.
Other relevant information: We expect to apply to CHLEL for funding to cover illustration costs for Volume I in September 2020.