Reading Contemporary Realism

A great many literary and cultural scholars have observed a renewed academic and artistic interest in realism that has gained particular momentum since the early years of the twenty-first century. Yet, what do we, as students and scholars of literature and culture, mean when we describe a work of art as realist, let alone realistic? In this seminar, we will first delve into literary and cultural theory that tackles the “challenging […] wealth of definitions” of realism (Birke and Butter 2), and confront questions related to the following broad dimensions:

  • literary-historical concerns with the periodization of realism
  • literary-theoretical concerns with the relation between realist art and ideology/politics
  • cultural-theoretical concerns with realism as widespread ‘structure of feeling’
  • philosophical concerns related to our possibilities and limitations of gaining truthful knowledge of reality, as well as to the potential of art to make truth claims about reality, and/or problematise its own constructions of reality
  • form-oriented or aesthetic concerns with how to represent reality
  • content-oriented concerns with what kind(s) of reality/realities to represent
  • ethico-political concerns with the relation between realist and utopian art
During the first half of the semester, I will provide excerpts from various ostensibly realist texts and genres, including narrative as well as poetic texts, to illustrate some of these rather abstract concerns with the help of literary examples. During the second half of the semester, we will properly test our theorization of realism with a joint reading of Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), which has been praised for its particularly realist(ic) portrayal of social realities in contemporary Britain, and yet, has likewise been discussed as neo-modernist, metamodernist, postmodernist, etc. Finally, you will split into groups and choose another ostensibly realist (preferably narrative) text and, together, explore its negotiation of realism as a mode and claim of representation.