Realism/anti-realism in 20th-century literature

224 Pages·2010·3.425 MB·English

by  Baron, Christine, Engel, Manfred

Realism/Anti-Realism in
20th-Century Literature
142 Internationale Forschungen zur
Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
In Verbindung mit
Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich
Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim
Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität
Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität
Wien)
herausgegeben von
Alberto Martino
(Universität Wien)
Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer
Anschrift der Redaktion:
Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien
Realism/Anti-Realism in
20th-Century Literature
Edited by
Christine Baron and Manfred Engel
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Cover image: Paul Baron
Cover design: Pier Post
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ISBN: 978-90-420-3115-9
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Table of Contents

Christine Baron / Manfred Engel
Introduction / Introduction 9 / 15

I. Realism and Anti-Realism – Terminological Clarifications

Christine Baron (Paris, Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Réalisme et antiréalisme
Une généalogie complexe 25

Jean Bessière (Paris, Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Égalité de la mimesis et de l’antimimesis
Quelques notes sur le paradoxe de l’institution de l’œuvre 41

Sieghild Bogumil-Notz (Bochum)
»Laquelle est la vraie?«
La parole hybride de la poésie 57

II. Modernist Anti-Realism

Manfred Engel (Saarbrücken)
Forms and Functions of Anti-Realism
in the Literature of High Modernism (Woolf, Proust, Kafka) 67

Micéala Symington (Nice)
Anti-Realism and the »Livre de peintre«
From Symbolism to Surrealism 83

Timo Kaitaro (Joensuu)
Le surréalisme comme réalisme ouvert 95
III. Variants of Realism After Modernism

Monika Schmitz-Emans (Bochum)
»À la recherche de la réalité perdue«
Ambiguous Alliances between Literature and Photography
(P. Härtling, C. Nooteboom, M. Vargas Llosa, M. Beyer) 105

Alberto Hernández-Lemus (Colorado Springs)
Gilles Deleuze and Italian Neorealism
The Irruption of the Virtual 127

Nathan P. Devir (Pennsylvania State University)
Social Action as Neo-Realistic Discourse
in Níkos Kazantzákis’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1960) 137

Virgil Nemoianu (Washington)
Realism and Fantasy in Novels
by Kubin, Raspail, and C(cid:259)rt(cid:259)rescu 149

Rose Hsiu-li Juan (Chung Hsing University, Taiwan)
Magic and Realism
The Tribal Imagination in Louise Erdrich’s Novels 159

Tumba Shango Lokoho (Paris, Sorbonne Nouvelle)
La littérature romanesque d’Afrique noire francophone
entre réalisme, postcolonialisme et postmodernisme 181

Holger Schulze (Berlin, Universitaet der Künste)
Realism as Efficacy
On the Tectonics of Texts in the Web 207
IV. Appendix
The Emergence of Realism in Asia – A Case Study

Mun-Yeong Ahn (Taejon, South Korea)
The Stories of Park Ji-Won
Pragmatic Realism Directed against the
Confucian Nobility in 18th-Century Korea 219

Select Bibliography / Bibliographie sélectionnée 229

The Authors / Les Contributeurs 233
CHRISTINE BARON / MANFRED ENGEL

Introduction

Today, »realism« is certainly one of the most common and at the same time
one of the most controversial terms in literary and art criticism. Although the
term is comparatively young – it originated as a philosophical (ontological
and epistemological) term and was hardly used in aesthetics and poetics be-
fore 1800 – it seems, at least in retrospect, to have been an artistic option
which always existed. Which, in a way, is true: mimesis, however we may
define it, is certainly one of the impulses which lie at the origin of art and lit-
erature – together with poiesis as its equally important counterpart.
Our volume will be able to provide its reader neither with an authoritative
definition of realism nor with a comprehensive survey of the manifold oppo-
sitions and alliances between »realistic« and »anti-realistic« literature. It con-
centrates on the 20th century, whose literature and art have been dominated
by what has been called a »crisis of representation« but might as well have
been called a lack of interest in mere empirical and social reality, and a dis-
content with habitualized perception and the world-view of convention, rea-
son, and pragmatism. This anti-realistic attitude which rebelled against the
Weltanschauung and the artistic and literary devices of 19th-century Realism
and Naturalism originated in the epistemological scepticism at the beginning
of the 20th century, a sort of ontological vertigo which Kafka in his early nar-
rative Beschreibung eines Kampfes (Description of a Struggle) once called a
»seasickness on solid ground« (»Seekrankheit auf festem Land«). The »lin-
guistic turn« and constructivism radicalized this scepticism, and Postmodern-
ism with its attack on logocentrism and its eclectic mixture of styles provided
it with a new poststructuralist (»semiotic turn«, »différance«) and multi-cul-
turalist philosophical foundation.
Yet it would be a gross simplification to describe the 20th century flatly
and globally as an age of anti-realism. Realism remained a hotly debated sub-
ject throughout the century,1 and again and again »realistic« movements of
very different kinds successfully opposed Modernism, or Modernists and
Postmodernists tried to integrate realistic elements into their writing. Espe-
cially in the second half of the century many neo-realist movements, starting
with Italian Neo-Verismo, were launched, and non-Western literatures (e.g.

1 For a comprehensive survey of these debates cf. for example Luc Herman, Concepts of Re-
alism (Columbia: Camden House, 1996), who discusses, among others, Jakobson, Virginia
Woolf, Breton, Lukács, Auerbach, Bloch, Adorno, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, Wellek, Jauß,
Iser, and Tom Wolfe.
10 Christine Baron / Manfred Engel
»magic realism«) challenged Western modernity and its constructivist epis-
temology. Today, we can not only read many texts which might be attributed
to a »postmodernist realism« but may even be watching the rise of a post-
postmodernist realism2 with a renaissance of straightforward narration.

Our volume tries to discuss this vast field of research in a series of theoretical
reflections and case studies of selected texts, movies and the internet which
geographically embrace Europe, the USA, Africa and Asia. The book is di-
vided into four parts: (I) Realism and Anti-Realism – Terminological Clarifi-
cations, (II) Modernist Anti-Realism, (III) Variants of Realism After Mod-
ernism, and (IV) Appendix: The Emergence of Realism in Asia – A Case
Study.
(I) Although Modernism has long become history and even Postmodern-
ism seems to be well past its prime, their anti-realistic reality-concepts are
still very much with us – which turns all attempts to define »realism« sys-
tematically into a precarious undertaking. CHRISTINE BARON in »Réalisme et
anti-réalisme: Une généalogie complexe« and JEAN BESSIÈRE in »Egalité de
la mimesis et de la antimimesis« both deconstruct the dichotomy between re-
alism and anti-realism, as, at least from the point of view of current episte-
mology, ontology and language philosophy, their opposition seems to be as
insubstantial as that between fiction and non-fiction. Baron shows this in a
historical archaeology of the discourses which led to the establishment of the
distinction and subsequently to its subversion in the 20th century, while Bes-
sière systematically exposes the linguistic ontology of the work of art.
SIEGHILD BOGUMIL-NOTZ in »›Laquelle est la vraie?‹: La parole hybride
de la poésie« approaches the same question from a more dialectical point of
view. If literature – and reality, for that matter – is nothing but language then
poetry, which has always been opposed to »fiction« as pure »diction« (to use
Gérard Genette’s opposition3), must be the acme of »literariness«. Yet Bogu-
mil-Notz argues that the poetic word, far from being just »monologically«
self-contained in a Bakhtinian sense, is at the same time »dialogical«: its
connection to its usage in other – poetic and non-poetic – discourses remains
present even in its very deconstruction. The importance of the essay for the
opposition between »realism« and »anti-realism« lies in its insight into the
importance of degree: even though the opposition may be non-existent in
principle, non-realism can always be increased – or decreased – in point of

2 Cf. for instance José Lopez and Gary Potter (eds), After Postmodernism: An Introduction to
Critical Realism (London: Athlone, 2001).
3 Gérard Genette, Fiction et diction (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1991); Fiction and Diction, trans. by
Catherine Porter (Ithaca, London: Cornell UP, 1993).