From the insight into social and mental construction, postmodernism concluded that there is no objective reality. Countering postmodern constructivism, new realism seeks to re-vision the very concept of the real. You don’t have to be a materialist/naturalist to be a realist. What is the irreducible reality of literary phenomena? Literature is world-making: how do we account for its existence among the realm of brute physical facts? Literary form has material aspects—such as print—but its gist is non-material. Form is an organized pattern of meaning, an intelligible whole, a hermeneutic configuration. Historically, literary realisms were generated by experimentation with style (George Levine), a fact that “old realism” effaces in its posture of unmediated representation. Detaching realism from materialism, this session sheds fresh light on “what counts as real/realist.” Abandoning reductionism for a pluralist realism, this panel explores literary realism in its double manifestation (Jameson) both as a critical problematic and as an aesthetic/literary style. Building on recent reconsiderations of realism (the 2012 MLQ special issue on Peripheral Realisms), this session traces literary realism across a wide geo-historical swath, from the long eighteenth century to realism in/after modernism and postmodernity.
Aaron Hanlon develops a logic of novelistic realism. Ian Watt’s account of eighteenth-century realism and the “rise of the novel” has proven valuable, but also limited by Watt’s exclusion of female authors (Nancy Armstrong) and of genres that clearly overlapped with the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Ros Ballaster, Sarah Kareem, and others). Hanlon’s paper will define novelistic realism not against the materialist conception of the quotidian outside world (as has been a prominent way of understanding eighteenth--‐century theory of the novel), but in terms of the wider genre of Enlightenment systems. In other words, like what Clifford Siskin calls the Enlightenment genre of “system”—the efforts of Isaac Newton to systematize nature, or Adam Smith to systematize social relations—the early novel in English became a system in its own right. And one of the main functions of this system was to supply an internally--‐consistent logic of experience that readers could use to navigate contingency in the material world.
In “‘Citizens of That Other Country’: Doris Lessing and Late Realism,” Philip Tsang considers the waning of empire as a decisive factor in the production and reception of British realism. The challenges to metropolitan realism in the late nineteenth century reflect the ongoing crisis of a declining liberal empire (Stephen Arata, Nathan Hensley), whereas the turn to working-class description in the 1950s and 60s signals a “localized posthegemonic realism” (Jed Esty). If the loss of metropolitan perception strips English writers of the epistemological authority with which to explain imperial realities, this paper argues that writers who grew up at the periphery of empire occupy a unique vantage point from which to understand the uneven decline of empire. Doris Lessing develops an aesthetics of “late realism” that is contingent on her peripheral perception of imperial history. Lessing sees herself as a latecomer to the tradition of English realism pioneered by Daniel Defoe (a tradition that played a formative role in her upbringing in Southern Rhodesia), and she charges her realist style with what Edward Said calls lateness or untimeliness, which defers the proper ending to empire and implies a withdrawal from the teleological time of history. Lessing’s late realism not only complicates recent accounts of the destiny of British realism, but it also prompts us to rethink the geopolitical differentiation of time in metropolitan and peripheral cultures.
In “Modernism as Fields of Sense Realism: Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,” Derek Wiebke reconsiders the dichotomy between realism and modernism, showing how a new realist reading might freshly illuminate the singular realism underpinning the innovative form of modernist fiction. Specifically, the context-based realism of Markus Gabriel’s fields of sense ontology foregrounds the world-making powers of form. As Gabriel contends, existence is not the intrinsic property of isolated objects: existence is defined as “the fact that something appears in a context”—a field of sense. Objects don’t ground fields; fields ground objects. Form, which old realism’s posture of unmediated truth-telling elides, is newly recognized as the sine qua non of the real. Rilke’s quintessentially modernist emphasis on the mediatedness of narration, as Wiebke shows, can be appreciated as “new realist” in mapping fields of sense rather than referencing objects.
In “Realism and Post-Modernity: The Texas Gulf Coast Fictions of Oscar Casares and Bret Anthony Johnston,” José Limón turns to contemporary neorealism after postmodernism. Oscar Casares and Bret Anthony Johnston practice not postmodern fiction but a realism within postmodernity, akin to “dirty realism” (Bill Buford). Historically, Mexican American and Anglo-American population on the Texas Gulf Coast have cohabited in intense socio-cultural conflict. They do so now in greater social equality, but it is as if any progress that has been made in historically vexed racial relations has also come at a cost produced by a postmodern political economy David Harvey has characterized as “flexible accumulation.” In bearing realistic witness to its human outcomes, Casares and Johnston testify to the enduring necessity of realism as what Auerbach termed a mode facilitating the serious treatment of ordinary people and their lifeworlds.