This panel offers fresh takes on how a major, storied aesthetic mode—realism—interacts with a major, storied critical lens—form—to set into relief the relationships between art and representation. The notion of a “formal realism”—a realism whose real-ness is a matter of narrative technique rather than of subject matter—has been familiar since, for instance, Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, but recent criticism—such as Fredric Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism (2013) and Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015)—has called for more expansive considerations of the life of forms in the theories and practices of realism. Recent reconsiderations of realism have shown that some realist works have priorities other than mimesis: that photographic “realism” meant, for the Victorians, not a literal reproduction but a composite abstraction, as Daniel Novak has suggested in Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2012). Or that realism is about the phenomenology of feeling real, as Elaine Auyoung argues in When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind (2018). This panel builds on recent scholarship by examining, across different media, the forms that render—or trouble the rendering of—the “real.” Rooted in the nineteenth-century British novel, and tracing this genre’s afterlives into contemporary film and visual art, the panel considers three aspects of realist form: plot, abstraction, and ornamentality. Each talk will be allotted 20 minutes, with 15 minutes for discussion.

Alex Woloch’s talk, “Realism and Plot” will give an overview of the tensions we can elicit between realism, as a genre of narrative, and plot, as an element of narrative. Crucially, such tensions are multiple. The realist text often stigmatizes various conventions of plot (as improbable, melodramatic, unrepresentative, etc.) and, in its more formally radical manifestations, can strain against the principles of emplotment as such. Realism’s thematic commitment to the “everyday,” the “quotidian,” the “common,” or the “ordinary” can attenuate the scope and scale of plot, while its sociological commitment to totality or comprehensiveness often inflates or intensifies emplotment. At a more granular and stylistic level, realism’s inclination toward description, detail and tactile specificity is often established, step-by-step, at the expense of plot. Thus in Genette’s idea of the narrative “pause,” a temporal extension of the discourse (implicit in realistic description) causes a stasis or freezing within the story itself. This leads us to the relationship of story and discourse. Is plot something that always rests on the side of discourse (as what facilitates or constitutes representation) or can plot be understood as part of the story (and thus as an object of representation itself)? Woloch will suggest this tension—one of representation—gives us a new framework for engaging the aesthetics of realism. Looking at examples including Satyajit Ray’s film Pather Panchali, as well as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, this talk considers the way that realist narratives can trouble the formal location and thus the ontological identity of plot, as both a framework for and an object of representation.

Anna Kornbluh’s talk, “On Literary Abstractions: Realism Reprized,” reconsiders the polarities that have conventionally and perennially propelled debates about literary realism—subjectivity and objectivity, naivete and irony, reference and figure, totality and fragment, reification and invention—are bending under new pressures in the present. Cataclysmic conflicts over identity and belonging, resources and institutions, climate and extinction have raised concerns about, and stripped funding for, the arts and humanities in ways that paradoxically re-elevate realism, which lends itself more easily than other modes, Theodor Adorno long ago warned, to instrumentalization. Realism makes a readier touchstone for defending the uses of art than the sublime or estrangement, and indeed humanists both professional and amateur have recently reclaimed realism, along the way equating realism with content (Amitav Ghosh), clarity (Alison Shonkwiler/Leigh Claire LaBerge), empathogenesis (Rita Felski), and personal expression (composition and creative writing pedagogy; Hollywood). This paradigm understands realism’s value in light of aboutness: the depiction of things, a flashlight in the struggle for awareness, art as immediacy; it is the logical outgrowth of dominant methods like the historicist correlation of art to non-art discourses, the cognitivist fixation on the transaction between literature and the reader, and the computational reduction of figurative language to the calculable. As a way of grasping these contemporary tendencies and bracketing them, this paper reapproaches realism’s emphasis on mediacy, constructed realities, and epistemological skepticism, with the aim of revalorizing abstraction, impersonality, and objectivity. Taking inspiration from Austen, Dickens, and James, this talk explores how Free Indirect Discourse, detailed imaginary settings, typification, the present tense, and aestheticized generalizations are frequent formal and stylistic elements of realism which harken toward a commons and produce literary dialectics; realism’s projective modeling of possible relations is a synthesis sorely needed now.

Irena Yamboliev’s talk, “Ornamental Realism,” argues that the “realism” modeled on Dutch genre painting (à la George Eliot’s “manifesto” in Adam Bede) is not the only or even maybe most important strain at work in Victorian fiction. Engaging with art theoretical discourses by thinkers such as Gottfried Semper, G.H. Lewes, and Vernon Lee, this talk argues for an ornamental realism churning away at the center of Victorian novelmaking, rather than at the fringe. Ornamental form—form that doesn’t prioritize visual imitation but is relational, contrastive, and sensitive to contemporary empirical studies of the materialism of aesthetic experience. Novels by George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot import design principles (symmetry, graded variation, conventionalization) into the novel as literary principles. Their ornamental realisms get beyond depiction, working by another structuring dynamic, one that follows through on the lines of the natural environment, that compasses the pattern-based ways we conceive of other minds, and traces the “merely decorative” gestures that perpetuate the social contract’s affective violence. At the same time, this talk highlights the tension between ornament's apparent triviality and its inherent interdisciplinarity--a tension central to realism more broadly.

Together, these talks expand on, add nuance to, the realist project as one that draws its power from analogic relationships between literary art and non-verbal projects of representation, and afford a broader view of what realism can and cannot do, what realism—or the ideology of realism—is for.