Abstract
In this article the transition from literary realism (Balzac, George Eliot, Verga) is described as a shift from mimesis to constructivism. It is indicated how the realist confidence in the ability of the writer to represent reality as such yields to a modernist skepticism which recognises the contingent character of all fictional constructs. In spite of this discovery, modernists such as Kafka, Proust and Sartre still believe in a meaningful search for reality, authenticity and truth. This belief seems to disappear in the works of postmodernist authors such as Robbe-Grillet, Eco or Fowles who tend to dissociate fiction from any kind of meaningful search, transforming it into a game: a gadget for the reader. The author, who adopts the perspective of Critical Theory, argues towards the end of the article that the latter is modernist insofar as it refuses to follow the postmodernists in their playful abandoning of key realist and modernist concepts such as truth, authenticity and critique.
Highlights
Like many other historical titles which announce a narrative presentation o f facts - e.g. “From Baudelaire to Surrealism”, “From Hegel to Marx ” - the title of this article suggests that it develops one of those metanarratives or métarécits which Lyotard so eloquently warns us against
As I shall try to show in the course of this narrative, it has become a commonplace o f modem and postmodern literature, of fiction
The transition from realism to modernism - both in the chronological and the theoretical sense - is a shifi from representation or mimesis to construction or semiosis
Summary
Like many other historical titles which announce a narrative presentation o f facts - e.g. “From Baudelaire to Surrealism”, “From Hegel to Marx ” - the title of this article suggests that it develops one of those metanarratives or métarécits which Lyotard so eloquently warns us against. It seems that it is well-nigh impossible to engage in theoretical discourse without producing narrative sequences of varying lengths This insight need not have a discouraging or daunting effect upon us; on the contrary, it should encourage us to put our cards on the table and to present our analyses and explanations as contingent constructions, not as representations of reality as it is in itself. The transition from realism to modernism - both in the chronological and the theoretical (epistemological) sense - is a shifi from representation or mimesis to construction or semiosis It is the aim of this article to describe this shift and to evaluate it in a conclusory remark on Critical Theory. One o f the major differences between modernism and postmodernism, I shall argue, is the fact that whereas modernists such as Proust, Sartre and Kafka believed in -the existence o f a possibly inaccessible - reality and truth, postmodernists such as Robbe-Grillet, Lyotard or John Barth discard the latter as metaphysical concepts
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