European Realism Research Articles

THE TRAGEDY OF A.S. PUSHKIN “BORIS GODUNOV” AND RUSSIAN LITERATURE OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE XIX CEN

For a long time it was believed that Pushkin in the tragedy “Boris Godunov” made the people the main hero and creative force of history. In reality, there is another hero in it, invisible, who is the supreme arbiter, directs the action in the direction he needs and does it unexpectedly, unpredictably, realizing himself through the unconscious actions and actions of people. The actions of the heroes taking part in this movement do not achieve the results they expected. Pushkin returns to tragedy the truth of the Divine ideal, the Divine will standing above man and humanity, lost during the Renaissance. In Pushkin’s dialogue between a person and the world, a third Person appears, this dialogue invisibly corrects and guides. Thus, Pushkin’s realism began to acquire a sober religious fundamental principle, at the core of which the future Tolstoy, the future Dostoevsky, the future Ostrovsky already lay. The “formula” of this realism did not fit into the “formula” of Western European realism, which placed emphasis on a free, self-sufficient, sovereign person.

Gaskell in China: A History of Translation and Critical Reception

Abstract This essay traces chronologically Elizabeth Gaskell’s reception in mainland China from 1916 to the present day. It focuses on the ways in which Chinese translations and studies of Gaskell are governed by China’s changing socio-political and cultural concerns. The translation of Gaskell was motivated by cultural reasons in Republican China and by political ones in Maoist China. In the former period, Gaskell’s work was considered useful for the creation of a new, modern Chinese literature, while in the latter period, it was seen as conducive to China’s socialist revolution and education. In the post-Mao era, cultural and commercial considerations have come to dominate Gaskell translation. Serious Chinese Gaskell scholarship emerged as part of the critical effort to reaffirm the historical significance of nineteenth-century European realism in the late 1970s. Since then, Chinese criticism of Gaskell has developed from an initial period dominated by Marxist critical approaches through a formative period marked by feminist approaches to a flourishing period featuring diverse critical approaches. The study of Chinese Gaskell would contribute to the global awareness of foreign Gaskells.

Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political by Eli Park Sorensen

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political by Eli Park Sorensen Ashwin Bajaj SORENSEN, ELI PARK. Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political. New York: Routledge, 2021. 204 pp. $160.00 hardback; $48.95 paperback; $48.95 e-book. Eli Park Sorensen opens his new book, Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political (2021), with the damning assessment that postcolonial studies emerged at an historical moment in which the "specifically political" in much of the West had become "anachronistic, irrelevant, dangerous, [and] politically incorrect" (4). As he elaborates in the book's first chapter, the enfeebled political horizon surrounding the rise of postcolonial literary studies—which, in Sorensen's view, the field has not vigorously challenged—meant that the radical political ambitions of a genre such as literary realism were either ignored in toto or dismissed as literary mouthpieces for a reified and politically defunct nationalism. Within the field, the failure of the political aspirations of nationalism led invariably to the conclusion that realism too was a thoroughly compromised genre. At best, this twin disillusionment with nationalism and realism was dispelled by postcolonial studies by recourse to "textual strategies of dismantling, subverting, disconnecting, and deconstructing" (7) and an avowal of tropes of plurality, hybridity, parody, carnival, and pastiche. Sorensen attributes the field's "anti-realist" impulse to its tendency to conflate the critique of representation with what Neil Lazarus calls postcolonialism's "struggle against representation itself." Lazarus's formulation signals how the critique of both colonialist (mis-)representation and the nationalist evasion of internal difference gradually devolved within the field into a blanket suspicion of any kind of representational practice, be it political or literary. As the latest counter-point to this field-wide equation of radical politics with anti-realism, Sorensen's book argues that postcolonial studies had actually failed to appreciate the political nuance of realist literature and even goes as far as to suggest that this deep-seated trend has inadvertently ensured the field's "exclusion of an engagement with the specifically political" (15). In his attempt to rescue literary realism from its marginalization within postcolonial studies, Sorensen traces its political impulse back to Lukács's account of the form's heyday [End Page 122] in nineteenth-century Europe amidst the revolutions of 1848. Chapter Three affirms the genre's significance by returning to the Hungarian Marxist's contentious though oft-cited theorizations and suggests that, for Lukács, realism is "a literary style that appears in those moments during which the political is at stake in a very fundamental sense, [and] when the discourse of the national has not yet been fully consolidated" (109). The return to Lukács rests on a complex move made in the preceding chapter wherein Sorensen invokes Foucault's concept of "historico-political discourse" to explicate the key elements which for him constitute the political stakes of the genre. For Sorensen, Foucault's coinage mobilizes both Carl Schmitt's concept of the specifically political, based on the absolute distinction between friend and enemy, as well as Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined community. The historico-political discourse serves to establish "a direct connection between force and truth, and...interprets force as a way of articulating a one-sided notion of truth, or a correction of the enemy's alleged falsifications of history" (63). According to Sorensen's reading of Foucault, the historico-political discourse enjoins us to think terms such as "I" or "we" as "perspectival voice[s]" not as neutral or reified but as open-ended and always-already in a process of being defined (63). Foucault's coinage is relevant since Sorensen proposes that the realist novel is able to put the historico-political discourse into literary practice. As a result, this literary form finds particularly fertile ground in worlds whose "ontological coordinates have not yet been fixed" (117). In this sense, Sorensen's study could be read as a contrastive parallel to Fredric Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism (2013) insofar as the latter claims that classical European realism is often said to have "a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of [bourgeois] social reality" (5). However, if we are...

Gadda: interpreti a confronto ed. by Federica G. Pedriali

Reviewed by: Gadda: interpreti a confronto ed. by Federica G. Pedriali Luca Mazzocchi Gadda: interpreti a confronto. Ed. by Federica G. Pedriali. (Quaderni della Rassegna, 178) Florence: Cesati. 2020. 257 pp. €30. ISBN 978-88-7667-868-4. This volume is a collection of eleven essays by established Gadda scholars. Born from a sense of unease about issues that still arise in rereading Gadda today, the book addresses the following questions: now that the process of his canonization is complete, who is Gadda? And what does Gadda offer to us, in the face of his impressively large body of work, disarranged and rearranged within multiple contexts? In tackling these questions, the collection rejects the image of Gadda as an 'unexportable' classic of Italian literature, and this intention is evident in the decision to assemble contributions in four languages by scholars from all over Europe (two essays are in English, one is in German and one in French; the remainder are in Italian). In the opening essay, Federica G. Pedriali points to a crucial paradox: although he is 'notorious for having compromised the integrity of practically all his texts, thus also appearing to have sacrificed, or lost, or never really had […] a clear authorial intention' (p. 13), Gadda is 'not at all vanishing in, or vanquished by his texts' (ibid.). What we witness, Pedriali notes, 'is, rather, an authorship with authority, and exploiting the gravity of thought to precipitate, literally, the ultimate continuity of the discontinuous book: the one maximising gaps, to stop all gaps' (ibid.). These preliminary considerations are followed by two comparative studies. In the first, by Federico Bertoni ('Il romanzo moltiplicato: Gadda nel Novecento'), Gadda's work resonates with Svevo, Proust, Musil, Woolf, and Joyce, modernist writers sharing a notion of reality as irreducible to any explanatory attempt by literature. In the following essay ('La lingua del sì e quelle del no'), Gabriele Frasca dwells on the affinity between Gadda, Nabokov, and Beckett, with particular regard to their search for a 'post-traumatic language' (p. 68), and lays emphasis on the continuity between their works and that of Joyce. Taking into account several non-narrative writings where Gadda deals with the nature and meaning of art and literature, Giuseppe Stellardi ("'In nome di quale poetica"? L'antipoetica di Gadda') brings into focus the impossibility for Gadda of articulating a poetics, and understands this impossibility, along the lines that emerge in the essay by Bertoni, as a consequence of Gadda's gradual realization of the irreducibility of reality to a literary rationalization. As Giuseppe Bonifacino explains in 'Dalla polarità alla deformazione: il realismo "noumenico" di Gadda', Gadda has a polar notion of reality, meaning that reality works, for him, as a polarity of semblance and noumenon. As the polar and secret reverse of the semblance, [End Page 145] as the altera facies of the phenomenon, the noumenon is yet one with it. Gadda's realism can therefore be defined as 'noumenal', inasmuch as it essentially disfigures and deforms reality as it appears to us. Literature can know things only in denying their form, and the only truth that it can access is in the representation itself: Gadda's noumenal realism does not look for 'una verità riposta oltre la forma: bensì giacente tutta e sola in quella relazione oppositiva che produce la rappresentazione in quanto conflitto deformatore' (p. 120); in other words, 'la conoscenza avviene nella rappresentazione' (ibid.). Reflecting on what appears to be the end of the critical primacy of some interpretative paradigms provided by Gianfranco Contini, Cristina Savettieri ('Il senso di Gadda per il romanzo') calls for the necessity of resetting the image of Gadda that has long dominated the critical scenery by embracing a full understanding of Gadda as a narrator, a novelist in all respects. Moving along this path, Alberto Godioli ('"Un romantico preso a calci dal destino": Gadda and the Nineteenth Century Novel') recognizes 'Gadda's debts' (p. 138) to the classics of nineteenth-century European realism, from Stendhal, Balzac, and Dickens, to Dostoevsky and Flaubert, 'with particular attention to how Gadda builds on such models in order to achieve his own, modernist take on both sides of the polarity—a ludicrous...

Middlemarch in Melbourne

Abstract Although it is noted in bibliographies and databases, the serialization of Middlemarch in the Australasian newspaper of Melbourne in 1872–73 has received little critical attention. This article makes a preliminary effort to redress this knowledge gap using a global media history approach anchored by a southern-hemispherical perspective, permitting this canonical British novel to be recontextualized within the flows of transnational circulation. So doing decenters Eurocentric forms of thinking about imperial literary culture and realist aesthetics. Unexpectedly, as a fragmented colonial newspaper serial, Middlemarch—a provincial novel at the center of modern scholarship about European realism and totality—generates a new cultural field in which to theorize global reception history, transimperial culture, and the dialectic between realism and its remediation in, and between, print forms.

Middlemarch in Melbourne

Abstract Although it is noted in bibliographies and databases, the serialization of Middlemarch in the Australasian newspaper of Melbourne in 1872–73 has received little critical attention. This article makes a preliminary effort to redress this knowledge gap using a global media history approach anchored by a southern-hemispherical perspective, permitting this canonical British novel to be recontextualized within the flows of transnational circulation. So doing decenters Eurocentric forms of thinking about imperial literary culture and realist aesthetics. Unexpectedly, as a fragmented colonial newspaper serial, Middlemarch—a provincial novel at the center of modern scholarship about European realism and totality—generates a new cultural field in which to theorize global reception history, transimperial culture, and the dialectic between realism and its remediation in, and between, print forms.

The Narratology of Observation: Studies in a Technique of European Literary Realism.By Martin Wagner. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019. ix + 183 pages + 13 b/w illustrations. $102.99 / €89,95 hardcover or e-book

The Narratology of Observation: Studies in a Technique of European Literary Realism.<i>By Martin Wagner. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019. ix + 183 pages + 13 b/w illustrations. $102.99 / €89,95 hardcover or e-book</i>

Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution, by Ian Duncan

Reviewed by: Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution by Ian Duncan Philipp Erchinger (bio) Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution, by Ian Duncan; pp. xiii + 290. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019, $35.00, £30.00. Anthropology, as Ian Duncan's impressive Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution confirms, has returned to literary scholarship. But it has discarded the guise of the universalist science of man that was one of the unfinished projects of Enlightenment thought. Instead, studies of the human now often work from the premise that their subject is not only infinitely diverse, but also deeply involved with a world of nonhuman life and matter that forms an integral part of its existence, sustaining and surpassing that existence at the same time. As Duncan outlines in his introduction, this modern approach to anthropology took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a materialist and evolutionist "natural history of man" began to complicate the older notion that human life is divided between a physical body and an "immortal soul." As a result, the figure of man came to inhabit a confusing borderland crisscrossed by multiple fault lines: between "nature and history, individual and species, human life and biological life, or life as such" (2). As various emergent disciplines laid claim to the exploration of that borderland, Duncan argues, the nature of human being became an urgent problem, unsettling the very sciences that increasingly sought to use it as their secular ground. Duncan's key argument is that the realist novel, which evolved alongside the natural history of man, is itself a form of anthropology: rather than simply staging or exhibiting [End Page 290] the questionable figure of the human, it actively participated in its investigation. Duncan pursues this claim through five chapters that range widely across the "classical era of European realism, circa 1750–1880," covering philosophical, scientific, and fictional prose from Germany, Britain, and France (1). The first two chapters establish an analogy between the loose, open, variable form of the novel and the indeterminate nature of human life, which was perceived as equally capable of assuming "all forms and functions" (9). Thus viewed, the very formlessness of novel writing enabled it to compose the "universal discourse" that the philosophy of human nature was unable to supply (2). Indeed, the study of human life, like its subject, was fractured from its inception, as Duncan explains. One broadly empiricist school, represented by a line that stretches from Johann Gottfried Herder to Charles Darwin, described human history as inseparably caught up in the evolution of organic life. By contrast, a rival tradition ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau through Immanuel Kant to Friedrich Nietzsche argued that humans develop through works and arts that separate them from their natural state. In both cases, the underlying question was how natural philosophers were supposed to conceive of the relation between the organic life that humans involuntarily undergo and the historical life that they consciously lead. In the Romantic Bildungsroman, as we learn in chapter 2, this relation between organic and historical development reoccurs in the form of an unresolved conflict between the growth of a human individual and the life of the species of which it partakes. Concentrating mainly on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–96) and Germaine de Staël's Corinne, or Italy (1807), Duncan shows how these novels try to mediate the "formation of species being" through narratives of personal progress (57). In doing so, Duncan argues, they repeatedly draw attention to the difference, or even open a rift, between individual and human history. In Corinne, the ruinous disintegration of these two dimensions of human life is specifically meant to expose the "exclusion of women" from the universal category of Enlightenment "man" (57). One of the greatest merits of Duncan's study is that it vividly and thoughtfully illustrates how the nature of the human increasingly was overtaken and transformed by the very life in which nineteenth-century science, from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire to Charles Lyell and Darwin, found it to be embedded. For example, in Walter Scott's Count...

New Problems of Realism in Martín Rivas

Abstract This article discusses a central feature in the poetics of Martín Rivas (1862): its realism. It describes the way in which the particularisation of experience and the breakdown of the old theory of the levels of discourse – two main components of realism – are embodied in the novel. Like its models in French realism, Martín Rivas focuses on the unique experiences of singular subjects. This particularisation, however, rarely acquires an interclass dimension, as it did in French forms. The “ideas of realism” are misplaced in Martín Rivas. The novel represents times, spaces, and people in the dramatically reduced frame of the times, spaces, and people of the oligarchy. It signifies a return to the same old rule that European realism had broken from. Blest Gana’s realism could be considered, therefore, as an example of the Chilean modo de ser aristocrático [aristocratic way of being], that is, a set of cultural operations which allow the oligarchy to live their privileges as natural, far from the bourgeois ethos. This insight can be a point of departure for an international discussion as we think about how these transformations might enter into dialogue with similar phenomena in other parts of the world.

Martin Wagner. The Narratology of Observation. Studies in a Technique of European Literary Realism. Paradigms: Literature and the Human Sciences

Martin Wagner. <i>The Narratology of Observation</i>. <i>Studies in a Technique of European Literary Realism</i>. Paradigms: Literature and the Human Sciences

European New Legal Realism: Towards a Basic Science of Law

This chapter outline the position of European New Legal Realism (ENLR) and compares it to variations of American Legal Realism (ALR), new and old. We argue that the fundamental difference between the ENLR and ALR is its turn – or return – to epistemology. Europe legal realism has been – and, in our view, is – largely concerned with devising the foundations of a scientific study of law, one that can make law intelligible on scientific grounds. It is in search of the premises of law as a basic science – and a science on par with all other forms of academic endeavour, including the natural sciences. To make this argument, we first outlines the intellectual roadmap of our position before turning to questions of the epistemology of legal science. We draw on the unique insights offered by a combination of Weberian interpretive sociology of law and Scandinavian realism as propounded by Alf Ross. We draw out their strikingly congenial conceptions of legal validity as a genuinely empirical object of study, and how it differs from American legal realism and its reliance on pragmatism. Against this background, in part IV, we then link these precursors of European legal realism to the program for a rigorous science of law laid out by Pierre Bourdieu with a view to the particular challenges of studying law. We argue that to make law intelligible as an object of legal realist inquiry, one needs to devise an approach that, at one and the same time, takes seriously both the production of law and those precise – yet changing – social conditions, which makes that production possible.

Realism and Dialectic: The Speculative Turn and the History of the Nineteenth-Century European Novel

AbstractA narrative impulse and a scenic impulse: as Fredric Jameson persuasively argues in The Antinomies of Realism, the history of literary realism has been shaped by the dialectic between these two competing drives, each identified by a specific temporality. Yet realism's dialectic between a narrative and a scenic impulse omits something crucial if we are to understand European realist narrative, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. This article reassesses Jameson's dialectical view of realism in light of the speculative turn in the history of the European novel in 1860s Russian and 1880s French narrative. I will query Jameson's dialectic of realism and subsume it under a larger dialectical framework encompassing a further, temporally neuter impulse. This is the speculative impulse, which will help us reconsider some of the most important developments of nineteenth-century European realism.

"The Changing World of Satyajit Ray: Reflections on Anthropology and History"

The visionary Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) is India's most famous director. His visual style fused the aesthetics of European realism with evocative symbolic realism, which was based on classic Indian iconography, the aesthetic and narrative principles of rasa, the energies of shakti and shakta, the principles of dharma, and the practice of darsha dena/darsha lena, all of which he incorporated in a self-reflective way as the means of observing and recording the human condition in a rapidly changing world. This unique amalgam of self-expression expanded over four decades that cover three periods of Bengali history, offering a fictional ethnography of a nation in transition from agricultural, feudal societies to a capitalist economy. His films show the emotional impact of the social, economic, and political changes, on the personal lives of his characters. They expand from the Indian declaration of Independence (1947) and the period of industrialization and secularization of the 1950s and 1960s, to the rise of nationalism and Marxism in the 1970s, followed by the rapid transformation of India in the 1980s. Ray's films reflect upon the changes in the conscious collective of the society and the time they were produced, while offering a historical record of this transformation of his imagined India, the ‘India’ that I got to know while watching his films; an ‘India’ that I can relate to. The paper highlights an affinity between Ray's method of film-making with ethnography and amateur anthropology. For this, it returns to the notion of the charismatic auteur as a narrator of his time, working within the liminal space in-between fiction and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, culture and history respectively, in order to reflect upon the complementary relationship between the charismatic auteur and the role of the amateur anthropologist in an ever-changing world.

Spectres of a petrostate: critical irrealism and social contradiction in Ondjaki’s Os Transparentes

ABSTRACT Critical realism has a long pedigree in Marxist literary criticism. Most fully developed as an aesthetic theory by Georg Lukács, it was conceptually limited by a narrow understanding of realism and the suggestion that only realist art could be critical of social reality. In an attempt to revise the rigidity and dogmatism of Lukács’ theory, Michael Löwy proposed the category of ‘critical irrealism’, which emphasised the fact that there were many non-realist works of art that contained powerful critiques of the social order. More recently, the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) have taken up Löwy’s arguments to work out the implications of critical irrealism for world-systems analysis and Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development. This paper seeks to critically evaluate the WReC’s theorisation of critical irrealism through a reading of Angolan author Ondjaki’s Os Transparentes. Recently published in English translation as Transparent City (2018), Ondjaki’s novel is centred on a protagonist who is in the process of becoming transparent. As the novel’s most salient non-realist features become a means of launching a trenchant social critique against the institutionalised corruption and industrial malpractice of Angola’s ‘petroleum dictatorship’, it seems as if the text corroborates the WReC’s conception of irrealist aesthetics as the determinate formal register of (semi-)peripherality in the capitalist world-system. However, as a category with its conceptual foundations rooted in the tradition of western European literary realism and modernism, is the relevance of critical irrealism for African literature inherently limited? Might not the persistence of oral traditions and non-European epistemologies within texts like Os Transparentes render irrealism obsolete as an analytical category for literature produced under non-European social conditions? Opening with a re-reading of the concept of critical irrealism, this paper argues that the reformulation of Marxist concepts in African contexts is a productive if not vexed theoretical exercise.

„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.

Probing the limits of languaging: material ecology and thing agency in Yu Jian’s poetry

This paper introduces the concept of material ecology and explains the pedagogical approach that is embedded in the notion of environmental awareness by applying these methods to examples from contemporary art production and Yu Jian‘s thing poetry. Material ecology is a method of cultural analysis that opens up new perspectives on the relationship between human and nonhuman agents, ecosystems in particular, and on a planetary level. This new outlook is meant to engender a consensual set of environmental values that can transcend national borders. As a concept, environmental awareness applies to efforts by official or unofficial agents to change behavioral patterns that can harm the environment. This is done by demonstrating the consequences of said actions. The two approaches are at the core of the quest for a global polity that can support and integrate different communities in their various endeavors to implement rules and incentives for sustainable ways of living based on environmental justice. These must be widely agreed upon in order to commit all social levels, be it individuals, local communities, or transnational stakeholders. Since cultural representations fulfill a seminal role in changing world-views, I will discuss a selection of Chinese literary and art-works which serve as examples of this new perspective on things in material ecology. Highlighting the transformation of landscapes through globalized, unsustainable patterns of urbanization, agri-industrial production, electric power generation, resource extraction and waste disposal, the paper will first explore how nonhuman agency needs to be reimagined, perceived, researched and taught as well as aesthetically represented and narrated in the wake of this transition. In a second step, it will introduce Kunming poet Yu Jian’s thing poetry. I will argue that the poet aims at the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility that can overcome the modern world’s obsession with facades, masks, and surfaces in general—be they composed of words or images. Subverting the regimes of data and information acquisition by means of a kind of haptic epistemology, Yu Jian’s creative bricolage of Anglo-American nature writing, European modernist realism, Chinese Taoist animism, and traditional shanshui, or landscape art does not only promote environmental awareness, but moreover transcends linguistic and visual modes of communication. Hence, his poetry brings to the fore humanity’s material embeddedness and protests against the materialist annihilation of nonhuman worlds and things.

Visionärer Realismus

Abstract This contribution situates Gérard de Nerval’s visionary prose and his reports from the Parisian nightlife in a different history of European realism, one that begins around 1800 with the programmatic linking of ‘idealistic’ and ‘realistic’ positions in philosophy and literature and which can been shown, for example, by looking at texts and (linguistic) images from Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Gustave Courbet.

Pornografia no fim do século: os romances de Alfredo Gallis

Abstract: This study examines the marginalized space of this subliterary genre and contextualizes Gallis’ fin-de-siècle writing in view of the hyper-moral indicatives of the bourgeois milieu, placing it in relation to the controversial relationship of European Realism to contemporary moral norms. Maria Helena Santana reviews the topics of Gallis’ work, such as homosexuality, virginity, adultery, prostitution, eroticism through the ages, hyper-sexualized women, promiscuity and decadence. She concludes that the popularity of these works, which were intensely read for over three decades, was due not to the author’s literary talent but to the lack of competition, and constituted at that time a new commercial literary genre.

One Hundred Years of Egyptian Realism

The early twentieth century witnessed the birth of an Egyptian novel that was an offspring of European realism and a constituent of the project of “modernizing” the country and the region. Yet by the middle of the century, the majority of Egyptian writers were veering away from realism in search of more subjective as well as more indigenous or even hybrid narrative forms. The seventies, however, mandated another generic shift. As the impoverishing effects of global capital development and the government's neoliberal policies became preponderant, Egyptian writers reoriented their writings to address the socioeconomic conditions and search for means of resistance. I argue that this constitutes a return to realism in spite of the novels' diverse and unconventional forms. The essay ends with a comparison of two novels published at the start of the twenty-first century, one ostensibly realist, The Yacoubian Building, and one in a radically nonconventional form, An Interval for Bewilderment, and argues that other criteria besides narrative form should decide which of the two is realism and which a semblance of the genre and an obfuscation of reality.

Late Style, between Theodor Adorno and Mulk Raj Anand

This essay positions the figure and thought of T.W. Adorno in relation to Mulk Raj Anand, and the latter’s foundational contributions to the modern Indian novel in English. In Adorno’s musical writings, “late style” features as a methodological premise, or an expository mode that removes the work from conventional norms of evaluation (including periodization, biography and context). Late style is directed especially toward canonized works that seem to lack current artistic or social relevance, despite their culturally privileged standing. The essay approaches Adorno and Anand, accordingly: Their affiliations with European modernism and postcolonial realism, respectively, are read in late style, or, as largely obsoleted formations of the previous century. Focussing on Anand’s historical fiction, Across the Black Waters (1936), my essay recuperates the novel’s vision of a single if internally differentiated twentieth-century: By imagining the Great War as world-historical crisis, Anand’s novel stages the spaces of continental Europe and an emergent postcolonial nation, together, as the map of an intertwined yet unequal modernity. Today, the obsolescence of Anand’s world-view features as an apposite image for global forces of commodification, rapid cultural aging, and loss of context. Anand’s style attests less to its origins in colonial realism than to the possibilities of a contemporary aesthetic of disintegration — or what Adorno hails as an enactment of the “loss of content” that now inheres in our very understanding of social reality.