Bourgeois Realism Research Articles

Form and the Anticolonial Novel: William Gardner Smith's The Stone Face

Abstract The category of the postcolonial novel is familiar, but what makes a novel anticolonial? This article attempts to answer this question by reconstructing a genealogy of anticolonial fiction. I argue that these novels are preeminently the product of a social and intellectual class that inherits Franco Moretti's novel of bourgeois subject formation with all the attendant problems and opportunities of traditional bourgeois realism, while seeking to replace the privileged place of irony in those texts with a partisan spirit of conviction. One consequence of this is a deeper investment in allegory and metonym, pressed into the service of a totalizing metaphor for the wholesale corruption of a society that must be entirely dissolved. Drawing on the work of Anne-Lise François, the article suggests that, more specifically, the history of decolonization and the literature that it engenders repeatedly figure torture, and scenes of torture, as the “open secret” that reveals the peculiar nature of social relations under colonialism. Examining these scenes closely reveals a set of problems for literary form that are inherent to the anticolonial novel of the postwar years of decolonization, recurring problematics that nonetheless make the case for its existence as a distinct genre. No novel better emblematizes this genre than William Gardner Smith's The Stone Face (1963). Smith's novel is read as an attempt to narrativize the problem of intersectionality for a revolutionary internationalism and to push back against some critiques of the novel, such as Paul Gilroy's, that have questioned the limits of its conception of solidarity and the function of racial blackness in its politics. The novel exemplifies, the article argues, both the greatest qualities and the greatest limitations of the anticolonial novel as a genre and offers an unromantic and ultimately sobering account of the ethical and aesthetic costs of revolutionary conviction.

„Za dużo światła, to niedobrze, ale takie przytłumione, to w sam raz”: motyw zdrady małżeńskiej w niemieckim realizmie poetyckim na podstawie „Effi Briest” Theodora Fontanego

This article examines the concept of German Realism, also known as poetic realism or bourgeois realism, using the example of the motif of marital betrayal. Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest is the most widely known literary work that portrays infidelity and the punishment inflicted on the wife who breaks her marriage vows. The novel is often compared to Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. It depicts not only the young wife’s affair but also its consequences: divorce, losing the rights to her child, social isolation and finally her premature death, caused by her “anguish”. A superficial reading suggests that Fontane was inspired by the literature of European Realism and Naturalism; however, even a cursory comparison of Flaubert’s and Fontane’s works reveals the distinctive features of German Realism. It is this specificity of the mid-19 century German novel that constitutes the main focus of this article. The key aesthetic category characteristic of the German 19th century prose was “humour”, defined by Wolfgang Preisendanz as finding the connection between two seemingly unrelated things. Fontane wrote about the “beautifying veil”, which makes it possible to portray extreme social problems in a poetic way, never directly. The reader must uncover aspects of the literary work which evoke the dilemmas of a world on the verge of modernity.

Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973 by Curtis Swope

Reviewed by: Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973 by Curtis Swope Robert Blankenship Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973. By Curtis Swope. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Pp. xii + 257. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-1501328121. Themes of architecture, design, and building are ubiquitous in East German literature, in part because the German Democratic Republic had the mission of building an antifascist state out of the ruins—"aus Ruinen," as the country's national anthem reminds us—of a territory destroyed by fascism, genocide, and war. As such, workers building, citizens interacting with buildings and streets, and thinkers struggling to determine what a socialist design ought to look like are themes that appear regularly in East German literature throughout the forty-year period of the GDR. Some scholarship on the topic of architecture in GDR literature already exists. For example, David Clarke makes the case that the Plattenbau apartment in Christoph Hein's Der fremde Freund (1982) is a microcosm of the restrictive GDR. Several scholars, such as Christl Kiewitz and Bärbel Lücke, have written about the space of Bad Guldenberg in the works of Hein. Similarly, Hunter Bivens has explored architecture and affect in Brigitte Reimann's novel Franziska Linkerhand (1974). Nonetheless, given the strong presence of the topic in GDR literature, much work remains to be done. With his well-researched Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973, Curtis Swope has, indeed, tapped into a topic with expansive potential. Juxtaposing the architectural theory of thinkers such as Hermann Henselmann, Richard Neutra, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin with ekphrastic moments in works of GDR literature, Swope illustrates the extent to which GDR writers were influenced by—and perhaps even influenced—architectural thought. That is, the book is at least as much an intellectual history of GDR thought on what Swope calls "built space" as it is a study of GDR literature. Rather than showing "built space" to be metaphorical or narratological (which it surely also is), he finds intellectual contributions to architecture and design embedded in works of literature by way of ekphrasis. The result is a gambit: Swope creates a remarkable intellectual history, but literary savvy readers might find themselves wanting more in the way of close readings. One theme that appears repeatedly in the volume is that of Kulturerbe, even if Swope does not describe it in quite those terms. That is, just as writers, readers, philosophers, and functionaries in the GDR were struggling to define the prospective heritage and path of socialist literature following the destructive caesura of Hitler-Fascism; architects, dwellers, and also writers were struggling to define the appropriately socialist lineage of "built space." There were debates about, for example, whether to use old bourgeois furnishings, and whether Plattenbau buildings actually created a social(ist) space. It is, I think, relatively common knowledge among scholars of GDR literature that there was an ongoing struggle in the GDR to fashion [End Page 187] a literary heritage that posited bourgeois realism as a precursor to socialist realism, in part in the spirit of Georg Lukács. This literary heritage unraveled in the 1970s and 1980s, as scholars such as Theo Honnef, Daniel J. Farrelly, John Pizer, Matthew Philpotts, Sabine Rolle, and Robert Blankenship have shown. However, Swope shows something similar at work in architectural thought, which gets even more complex as architectural thought and works of literature interact with one another. Swope's chapter organization may seem bewildering at first, despite the fact that there are two descriptions of it in the volume, one a few pages into the introduction and another at the end of the introduction. The reason the chapter breakdown is tricky is because the chapters, particularly chapters 4 and 5, are not quite aligned by specific literary works. Instead, each chapter works through a complex constellation of theoretical ideas about "built space." This is not necessarily a flaw in the volume; it may offer more productive juxtapositions, but it does keep readers on their toes. In the brief conclusion, Swope finally adopts a refreshingly colloquial tone. The conclusion—easily the best part of the book—finally frames...

Against bourgeois realism: Amelia Pincherle Rosselli's feminist theatre in liberal Italy

ABSTRACTAmelia Pincherle Rosselli's dramatic works evidence a commitment to early feminist principles – a contribution that has been largely neglected by the Italian theatrical canon. Rosselli's plays treat domestic themes such as marriage, family, and the home in order to comment incisively on the political, social, and juridical status of women in Liberal Italy. Rosselli defies the prevailing theatrical conventions of naturalist drama and uses theatre specifically as a means by which to observe and critique her contemporary political and cultural milieu. Her plays should be read in light of her political engagement, activism, and commitment to progressive causes, all of which were fostered by her upbringing in an intellectual Venetian-Jewish household whose members were dedicated to Mazzini's democratic principles.

Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia: Bakhtin on Goethe’s Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister and the carnivalesque

This paper explores Bakhtin’s reception of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre with a view to assess how Bakhtin’s interest in this early chronotopical masterpiece can be understood in the wider context of his utopian thinking and his political eschatologies. Bakhtin reads Goethe’s novel as a critique of totalitarian forms of Socialist Realism as well as Dostoyevsky’s bourgeois realism. Like his contemporary Ernst Bloch, Bakhtin praises the complexity and richness of Goethe’s concept of realism. In the wake of Hermann Cohen, Georg Simmel and Friedrich Gundolf to whom Bakhtin alludes and whom he quotes, Goethe is regarded as a modern literary and anthropological role model, the epitome of Bildung. For Bakhtin, Goethe’s and Rabelais’ writings about the carnivalesque constitute complementary forms of reflection of and agents for social and cultural transformation in modernity.

Theatre and citizenship: the history of a practice

1. Introduction: citizenship and theatre 2. Athens: democracy and chorality - The Frogs - Plato and Aristotle 3. Florence, Rome and Machiavelli: Machiavelli's political works - Cicero - Terence's Andria - The Mandrake and the Society of the Trowel - 'The Sunflower' in a politician's garden - coda: Goldoni, Ayckbourn and the comic genre 4. From Coventry to London: Christian fraternity - the Weavers' Pageant in Coventry - Elizabethan London: Shakespeare and Heywood - John Milton and revolutionary tragedy 5. Geneva: Rousseau versus Voltaire: Geneva - Rousseau - The Letter to d'Alembert - the battle for a public theatre - conclusion: two ideals 6. Paris and the French Revolution: Brutus and the active citizen audience - tragedy as a school for citizens: the career of M. J. Chenier - the revolutionary festival - Diderot and bourgeois realism 7. The people, the folk, and the modern public sphere: collectivism in pre-war Germany - the Indian People's Theatre Association - in search of the public sphere Epilogue: Washington's monuments to citizenship.

Fantasies of the Origin and Dreams of Breeding: Darwinism in German and Austrian Literature around 1900

A reckoning with Darwin's theory of evolution and the conclusions derived from it by the Jena biologist Ernst Haeckel, left significant traces in the writings of several generations of German-language authors around 1900. While the milieu of Bourgeois Realism is primarily shocked at the thesis of the struggle of existence and the newly asserted ape kinship, representatives of naturalism foreground their satisfaction with the connectedness of the human with the entire world—under the sign of monism—and with the valorization of natural sexuality. The teleological view of evolutionary history cultivated here also leads to different perspectives on the of a new- or superman, as was formulated philosophically primarily by Nietzsche, and in literature most markedly by Lasswitz (and in 1933 by Benn). Yet such optimistic hopes for the future are later met with profound skepticism: already in Nietzsche's thought, in the poetry of later modernism, and even in the late works of Hauptmann. This skepticism clarifies the longing, dominant in Expressionism, for regression back to early stages of development, as well as the vision of a new barbarism, which is related in Doblin's novel Mountains, Seas and Giants to horrific ideas of new forms of breeding and hybrid beings.

Bourgeois Realism or Working Class Kitsch?: The Aesthetics of Class in Composition

Bourgeois Realism or Working Class Kitsch?: The Aesthetics of Class in Composition

Gendered Nationalism in Xicotencatl

In 1826, William Stavely Publishing House of Philadelphia first published what is now a little discussed anonymous historical novel in Spanish entitled Jicotencal. Long familiar to mainstream Americanist scholarship as a center of Anglo-American revolutionary history, Philadelphia, in early nineteenth century, was also a hotbed for liberal political ideologies, one of which promoted complete political separation between Spain and its territories in Americas. As such, novel emerged as one of many endorsing not only political independence, but also a cultural distance between Americas and Europe. The liberal political charge of text explains author's decision to publish piece anonymously since Fernando VII of Spain often proclaimed death sentences in absentia for political dissidents of Spanish territories. Fernando VII issued one such death sentence for Felix Varela, a Cuban priest, philosopher, and political liberal, who fled to United States, where, well-known literary critics Luis Leal and Rodolfo J. Cortina have persuasively argued, he wrote Jicotencal: first hispanophone historical novel written in United States, or in Americas. (1) Despite these claims for primacy, which leading nineteenth-century scholars have corroborated, text was only recently recovered in Spanish form by Recovering U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage series in 1995; and Jicotencal was not translated English until Guillermo I. Castillo-Feliu published his translation in 1999 as Xicotencatl. (2) Despite recent English access to text, English language scholars have given little academic attention to novel because Americanists continue to largely ignore non-English writings and Latino/a cultural forms; ethnic Americanists persist in focusing mainly on twentieth-century literary forms; and US Latin Americanists continue to ignore issue of hispanophone US literary production. (3) Moreover, handful of Latin Americanists who have critically examined text have focused on debating authorship of text to extent that they have largely ignored its issues of post-coloniality and gender. Most scholars, therefore, have only peripherally examined how text represses while dismissing female as a participant and constructor of that history. Moctezuma, as primary power in pre-colonial Mexico, resisted Spanish colonial enterprise while second most powerful nation in pre-colonial Mexico, Tlaxcala, became Spaniard's greatest ally. In 1821, three hundred years after Cortes conquered Aztecs, and eleven years after Mexico achieved independence from Spain, Agustin de Iturbide I became emperor of new nation and fashioned a royal court in Spanish tradition after disbanding Mexican national congress. As such, Xicotencatl revisits and aestheticizes moment of colonial conquest a series of and political lessons for novel's contemporary readership. The text oppositionally represents historical trajectory of fall of Aztec empire and dramatizes classical a partisan glorification of Amerindian past in order to summon social conscience of novel's contemporary period against reinstating a European monarchy in post-independence Mexico. Georg Lukacs argues that modern writers of historical novels such as Xicotencatl take from historiography and historical philosophy of their time not only facts, but theory that these facts may be freely and arbitrarily interpreted [...] and therefore that it is necessary to 'introject' one's own subjective problems 'amorphousness' of history (244). As such, he rightly identifies this manner of fictionalizing as the decline of bourgeois realism, in which historical novel develops social critical novel because author's moral subjectivism interprets historical past into a moralizing fable intended to dramatize superiority of virtue over vice (78-80). …

Figuring Modernity: Juan Ramon Jimenez and the Baudelairian Tradition of the Prose Poem

T HE PROSE POEMS of Juan Ram6n Jimenez's (1881-1958) Diario de un poeta recidn casado (1917), the landmark inititation of his segunda 6poca of poetic creation, frequently provoke critical perplexity. The uneven tone and quality of these works, in which he abandons Decadentism to cultivate his desnuda, and their often jarring difference from the surrounding verse prompted the poet himself to suggest separating Diario's prose and verse (Michael P. Predmore, La poesia 12-13). Yet the circumstances that surround Jimenez's generic substitution (of prose for verse) help us better to understand the genre of the prose poem historically, both as the result of the modern poet's desire to transform poetic expression and as poetic vision in reaction to bourgeois realism (Suzanne Bernard 97). These circumstances also permit us to consider the prose poem in relation to the experience of the modern city. For such a consideration, Tzvetan Todorov reminds us, It is natural to begin with Baudelaire. He is not the inventor of the form ... but it was he

Disabled Powers: A Reading of Voltaire's Contes

This is a reading of the Romans et Contes of Voltaire in the light of Bakhtin's concept of the Carnivalesque. Part I of this study establishes a paradigm for the twenty-six Contes. It focuses on generic patterns and a thematics of disablement. Part II offers carnivalesque readings of two tales, Le Monde comme il va and Candide. The last Part considers successively six of the later Contes, including L'Ingenu and Jenni, and the historical changes in consciousness that they reflect. The shift towards bourgeois realism is evident in the rise of sentiment and the patriarchal family on the one hand, materialism on the other. These tales exhibit an increasingly deep ambivalence towards corporality. In conclusion the study traces the changing forms of the carnivalesque figure, from geometrical to vitalist, within the Contes as a whole.

The Commercialization of Avant-Garde Movements at the Turn of the Century

There has not really been a significant avant-garde movement in Germany since the failure of the 1848-49 revolution. The freedom fighters and student associations of the period between 1812 and 1819 and the Young Germans and Vormirzler of 1830 to 1848 were exponents of authentic avant-garde movements characterized by clear parallels between political, ideological and aesthetic programs.1 For the freedom fighters and students, the political determination to unify the German Reich under the banner of "Justice and Freedom" was represented on an aesthetic level by those elements of Romantic, Nazarene and Neogothic styles which still had an undeniably subversive character due to their popular and national focus. Among the Young Germans and Vormnrz activists, this revolutionary thrust was expressed aesthetically in agit-prop poetry, tendentious painting (in Diisseldorf, for example), revolutionary opera conceptions (Wagner) and the agitational journalism of Karl Marx. In the post-1848 period of the 1850s and 1860s, this revolutionary aesthetic impulse was extinguished along with revolutionary political activism.2 What emerged was a bourgeois realism which was firmly rooted in an acceptance of the status quo and quite explicitly committed to values like stability and moderation. Not even the National Liberals, who continued to agitate in favor of national unity for economic reasons, displayed any avant-garde tendencies. And after the struggle for unity was finally resolved in the Hall of Mirrors ofVersailles in 1871, an essentially restorative ideology prevailed in the new German Reich, an ideology which foregrounded legitimation, not

From Aristotelean mimesis to ‘bourgeois’ realism

The paper reconstructs, by way of conceptual analysis, the theories of Mimesis and Realism and argues for a clearer distinction between the two. The Greek concept of mimesis denotes the representative nature of aesthetic works: images, plots and characters follow the same schema as real objects, actions or persons, they are oriented towards reality, even though they are imaginary and not part of a reality context. Mimesis does not denote a particular - realistic - mode of representation, as distinct from other, non-realistic ones, it is a feature of all art works. The same holds true for the formula ‘imitation of nature’ which contains, however, an aesthetic imperative: that writers and artists limit themselves to the description of what is ‘probable’ and do not challenge the existent social and moral order. The emergence of the theory of realism in the 19th century is the result of fundamental social and epistemological changes, manifested above all in the breakdown of the strict feudal order and the formation of bourgeois society with its positivist ideology. After a transitional period which challenges the aesthetics of imitation and redefines the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘poetic truth’, the realists develop an aesthetic programme which clearly sets itself off from romantic idealism and demands the truthful representation of reality through the method of observation, objectivity and contemporaneity. The new conception of reality is instilled also by a growing social consciousness: but it is this aspect of bourgeois realism which most clearly reveals its limitations and which has since been attacked by the more radical aesthetic theorists of the 20th century.

"Jean de Meung," Antifeminism, and "Bourgeois Realism"

Previous articleNext article No Access"Jean de Meung," Antifeminism, and "Bourgeois Realism"Lionel J. FriedmanLionel J. Friedman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 57, Number 1Aug., 1959 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/389290 Views: 6Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1959 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Mary Frances Brown Critique and Complicity: Metapoetical Reflections on the Gendered Figures of Body and Text in the Roman de la Rose, Exemplaria 21, no.22 (Jul 2013): 129–159.https://doi.org/10.1179/175330709X406384 Eva Martin Away from Self-Authorship: Multiplying the "Author" in Jean de Meun's "Roman de la Rose", Modern Philology 96, no.11 (Oct 2015): 1–15.https://doi.org/10.1086/492712