Revisiting the Realism/Modernism Debate: Marxist Thought and the Ethics of Representation

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In Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature (2005), Nicholas Brown remarks on the difference between realism and modernism as one that expresses a conflict between “a responsibility to historical truth” and “a fidelity to the formal energies released by the emergence of a form of subjectivity liberated (or alienated) from historical consciousness” (182). This raises several issues that might be useful for us to develop since, despite the emergence of diverse critical lines of thought since the development of postwar critical theory, realism and modernism have continued to affect the intricately interconnected modes of philosophical and political attitudes towards the relation between aesthetics and politics. Marxist thinkers, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Fredric Jameson, among others, explored the dichotomy of realism and modernism in terms of the dialectic of form and content. While they shared that there is an essentially inextricable relationship between literature and the underlying contradictions of our society, how they described the aesthetic expression of social contradictions was distinct, leaving the important question unanswered: “what does it mean to be ‘real’?” In this paper, I revisit the realism-modernism debate to explore this fundamental antagonism to see how these thinkers help clarify the following issues: what is realist form, and what are its features? How does realism negotiate the history of aesthetic forms? Are “formal energies,” as Brown puts it, by themselves an attempt to be free of “historical consciousness” or ones that, as form, highlight historical consciousness? And finally, how does realist form make political action possible? These questions also help us see what it means that the aesthetic choices of an older realism have been persistently replicated after modernism in the global periphery.