Realism Wars

Abstract

In English and comparative literature, the question of realism has reemerged in the last fifteen years as vital to readers and writers of the global novel. A realist turn, so-called, implies a shift in tastes, canons, and markets; it also entails a heightened form of disciplinary attention to realism freshly unlocked from its subordinate role in a promodernist critical climate. Both shifts—in the practice and in the theory of world realism—can be understood as post–Cold War effects. Surveying the recent rise of realism as a favored object and methodological reference point in novel studies, this essay attempts to trace the lineage of disfavored realism back through the “realism wars” of the late nineteenth century in the United Kingdom and the mid-twentieth century in the United States. In both phases, literary authorities cast realism as a European aesthetic mortmain, somehow alien to the liberal Anglophone West and its expanding frontiers. Realism wars seem to erupt at the sites of struggle between norms of finite social description and dreams of expansive political projection. That tension runs as a fault line between the integrated secular authority and broad universalist myths of both British and American power in their turns. If the eclipse of British hegemony conditioned the realism wars of the 1880s–90s and the rise of US hegemony conditioned the realism wars of the 1950s–60s, is it possible to comprehend our own emergent realist turn—and the debates it has begun to generate—as indexical of larger geopolitical change at the far end of the American Century?

Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction

“…Taking in a range of examples from contemporary global fiction, Esty argues that "worldly realisms are emerging as central to newly forming literary canons insofar as they appear to move us beyond the stale paradigms of the late twentieth century such as postmodernism or magical realism and to offer more direct access to problems of social and economic justice at the global scale." 7 This development is not restricted to novelistic practice alone; as he suggests, "new kinds of reality-based forms have challenged the social and entertainment value of fiction-its ability to sift and condense experience into aesthetic form, to reorganize the kaleidoscopic real into a legible pattern." 8 Esty concedes that "the problem of contemporary realism begins with the pressure of the recirculated, mediated, and curated 'real' bearing down even on traditional realisms."…”

“…7 This development is not restricted to novelistic practice alone; as he suggests, "new kinds of reality-based forms have challenged the social and entertainment value of fiction-its ability to sift and condense experience into aesthetic form, to reorganize the kaleidoscopic real into a legible pattern." 8 Esty concedes that "the problem of contemporary realism begins with the pressure of the recirculated, mediated, and curated 'real' bearing down even on traditional realisms." 9 But a further problem arises in the attempt to assimilate to a previous era's critical opposition between "realism" and "modernism"-singular terms in Esty's usage-the recent turn toward what David Shields terms "reality hunger," a cultural tendency by-passing the socially mimetic ambitions of realist fiction (as consolidated from the nineteenth century onward) in favour of a more direct route toward a presentation of the "real."…”

“…8 Esty concedes that "the problem of contemporary realism begins with the pressure of the recirculated, mediated, and curated 'real' bearing down even on traditional realisms." 9 But a further problem arises in the attempt to assimilate to a previous era's critical opposition between "realism" and "modernism"-singular terms in Esty's usage-the recent turn toward what David Shields terms "reality hunger," a cultural tendency by-passing the socially mimetic ambitions of realist fiction (as consolidated from the nineteenth century onward) in favour of a more direct route toward a presentation of the "real." 10 In aesthetic terms, this phenomenon is in fact closer to collage (or sampling) than the artisanal rendering of social detail associated with classic realism.…”

“…13 One answer is hinted at in Esty's observation that "if new realist novels find ways to represent 'combined and uneven development' in the global frame where it cannot be mediated into the destiny of a single people, this may well explain the rising force of apocalyptic and Anthropocene models as ways to identify collective problems operating at planetary scale." 14 As the spectre haunting all attempts to provide Streeck's "realistic accounting of the real," climate change poses threats not only in terms of global overheating, rising sea levels, desertification, super-storms, flooding and ecocide, but also to literature's capacity to grasp and make sense of these developments in narrative form. An extreme example of what Rob Nixon describes as slow violence, the processes and consequences of anthropogenic planetary heating raise questions concerning the potential of fiction-as well as other forms of cultural production-to adequately register the scale, complexity and dynamic of what is happening and about to happen.…”

Introduction: Realism in the post‐truth era

“…A recent resurgence of realism is noticed by critics in academia. To some, the post‐Cold War world is restituting the value of realism which was skewed during the Cold War period when antirealist rhetoric favored modernism as a beacon for the Anglophone liberals (Esty, 2016, 316–342). Another prevailing fact of our world, a fact perhaps more relevant to the common reader and not far from the geopolitical landscape, is that ours is also an age of post‐truth, and a world allegedly encompassed by fake news and preconceptions.…”