Understanding Realism: A Literary Analysis, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Understanding Realism: A Literary Analysis e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Narrative Realism Analysis of English Texts 2 John Style Universitat Rovira i Virgili What is Realism? Traditional views of realism The Structuralist view Marxism and realism Contemporary non-realist writing Traditional views of realism 02 ‘Realism’ is the name given to a literary movement, mainly novels, flourishing between 1830 and 1890. (e.g. George Eliot) So, ‘Realism’ is used to describe a genre of writing, which displays the formal features typical of work from the Realist movement. Realism can be seen as: 1. direct imitation of the facts of reality, or 2. a special reconstruction of such facts of reality, which Eric Auerbach calls ‘mimesis’ (1953). If 1, it is a style of writing that merely acts as a window onto the world, as if a direct transcription of events of the real world. If 2, the reader recognizes a view that corresponds to their reality, but more universalized or generalized. Traditional views of realism 03 Traditionally understood, ‘Realism’ implies: a. a certain subject matter (what the text depicts) b. a message about that subject matter (moral intentions of the text) Subject matter is typically ‘ordinary life’, home, work, relationships, stages of life. Ordinary people are shown to be complex and multifaceted, even if events are mundane or unexceptional. Even if they are based on specific lives, the moral message (usually secular and socially based) is implicitly universal. LANGUAGE IN REALITY AND REPRESENTATION Realism is presented in NON-REFLEXIVE LANGUAGE, language which does not draw attention to itself as language. As if transparent. But this apparent mirror-like quality is an illusion, as the text/reality relationship is always complex. Critics move focus away from relationship between how the text relates to the material world outside the text, to study the relations between words within the text, which creates the impression of transparency. Traditional views of realism 04 HOW TRADITIONAL REALISM SHAPES WAYS OF READING Realism has connections to stereotypical notions of authenticity, as if certain experiences, individuals are more ‘real’, closer to ‘life’ than others. Novels by women are frequently assumed to be autobiographical, novels by working-class writers to be documentary accounts of their lives. Novels by black writers are often read as documenting inevitable personal struggles against oppression, even if they concerns universal issues affecting white and black people. The Structuralist View 03 Conventions can be seen in ‘realist/ic’ dialogue: 1. Hesitations, interruptions and redundancies of real speech are left out, but 2. Inverted commas are used 3. Colloquialisms are used. Conventions of description noted by Roland Barthes in The Rustle of Language, (1989): 4. Profusion of descriptive detail, generally as scene-setting (contextualization) 5. But some details seem included to signal to the reader that what is being described is ‘the real’; to create a kind of ‘verisimilitude’. These details are ‘realist operators’ which serve to create a ‘reality effect’. They give the reader the sense that what is being described is anchored in a pre-existent reality, and is not being made up on the spot. 6. Details mean texts draw on a cultural code, a common knowledge shared by writer and reader, based on stereotypes and ‘common’ knowledge. The Structuralist View 03 Naomi Alderman, Disobedience, 2007 “I marched through Golders Green, passing by the rows of Jewish stores. The little world my people have built here. The kosher butchers’ shops frowned at me, asking why I hadn’t tried their chopped liver, now only £2.25 a quarter. The recruitment agency smiled widely, inviting me to apply for a job with a Sabbath- observant company, half-day Fridays in the winter. Moishe’s salon raised an eyebrow at my hairstyle and wondered if I wouldn’t like something, maybe, a bit more like everyone else? […] I walked on, down Golders Green Road, past the bagel shops where crowds of teenagers were shouting and laughing, past the grocery stores and the little kosher cafés which we used to visit so often we knew the menus off by heart…” The Structuralist View 04 The traveller with the cart was a reddleman--a person whose vocation it was to supply farmers with redding for their sheep […] […] The reddleman turned his head, and replied in sad and occupied tones. He was young, and his face, if not exactly handsome, approached so near to handsome that nobody would have contradicted an assertion that it really was so in its natural colour. His eye, which glared so strangely through his stain, was in itself attractive--keen as that of a bird of prey, and blue as autumn mist. He had neither whisker nor moustache, which allowed the soft curves of the lower part of his face to be apparent. His lips were thin, and though, as it seemed, compressed by thought, there was a pleasant twitch at their corners now and then. He was clothed throughout in a tight-fitting suit of corduroy, excellent in quality, not much worn, and well-chosen for its purpose, but deprived of its original colour by his trade. It showed to advantage the good shape of his figure. A certain well-to-do air about the man suggested that he was not poor for his degree. The natural query of an observer would have been, Why should such a promising being as this have hidden his prepossessing exterior by adopting that singular occupation? Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, 1895, Chp 2. Marxism and Realism 02 Bertholt Brecht (1977) saw realist novels as a form of anaesthesia, as readers were hypnotized and became uncritical of values expressed in the text, that also exist in society at large. His art denied reader comfort, and highlighted contradictions in capitalism. Lukács was therefore nearer a traditional understanding of realism, Brecht nearer a Structuralist understanding. Non-realist texts Contemporary writers challenge (i) traditional notions of realism (Surrealism, SciFi, Fantasy, or (ii) what notions of reality are, by narrators & characters of different or altered states of consciousness, or (iii) both. E.g. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). [See extract, WOR, 300-1]. Certain details are excessive, certain important details supressed; not a trustworthy narrator as in classical realism. Other writers like David Foster Wallace go to another extreme, a type of Hyperrealism, in which the reader is given a surfeit of information, rather like a consumer ‘blow-out’. This highlights the arbitrary nature of fact selection in classical realism. [see next example] David Foster Wallace, Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown & co, 1999