Realist Mode Research Articles

Of Gaines and Genre: Plotting the Racial Borders in Southern Louisiana

ABSTRACT: Three works of fiction by Ernest J. Gaines, each from a different phase of his career, can be classified as significant exercises in using genre norms and styles of emplotment to achieve effects that remain obscured by the very relationship to genre that the novels embody. Of Love and Dust (1967) and A Gathering of Old Men (1983) often appear to simultaneously embrace and hide the elements of genre fiction that determine their narrative moves and plot dynamics. A particular narrative tactic in the third example, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), shows how Gaines deploys what one might call "genre identity" in his fiction as a means to complicate a conventional pattern. The realist mode of the novel, building up a perspective on Louisiana history that encompasses both the subjective and the broader collective frameworks of African American memory, is suspended briefly to give space to a subordinate narrative in a Southern Gothic mode.

Representing Women in the Struggle for Socialism: Alexandra Kollontai and Lydia Chukovskaia as Alternatives to Socialist Realism

Mainstream Socialist Realism had a fundamentally gender stereotyping of women from the 1930s. By contrast, Alexandra Kollontai in the 1920s (The Love of Worker Bees) was socialist, feminist, and realist, but not Socialist Realist. She presented a critique of an emergent new hierarchy, and also challenged the re-inscription of patriarchal norms. Lydia Chukovskaya, writing immediately after the Great Terror, (Sofia Petrovna, written 1939-40) produced a text that started in a typical Socialist Realist mode only to reveal the brutality of Stalinist terror and subverted the Socialist Realist structure by positing the possibility that only horizontal solidarity of communities of the oppressed, rather than a top-down party led hierarchy, could provide wider ideas and awareness.

Media as Metaphor: Realism in Meiji Print Narratives and Visual Cultures

This article begins with the assumption that the specificity of metaphors used to discuss narration and mediation matter for understanding them. For instance, arguing for a paradigm shift in literature concomitant with the visual revolution of Meiji, critic Maeda Ai saw Mori Ōgai’s famed early work of realism “Dancing Girl” (Maihime) as translating the effects of the panorama hall into literature. By the end of his career, Mori Ōgai’s narrator of Wild Geese (Gan) compares his own storytelling to stereoscopy. These two different visual medial affordances suggest two different techniques. However, I argue that it is in a third visual medium (one that draws on the marketing of panorama and the visual techniques of stereography) that we may find a metaphor suggesting a continuity between these two modes of realism, between Ōgai’s early career and his later opus, between Maeda’s medial understanding and Ōgai’s own. This third metaphor for understanding Ōgai’s narration implies his mode of narration is never flat, always polyphonous, and advertising one aesthetic on the surface while providing another within. In the end, this view suggests a modernist realism that understood and expressed its own limitations and was, therefore, all the more realistic.

Sutton E. Griggs and Thomas R. Dixon: A Reconstruction Call and Response

Sutton E. Griggs and Thomas R. Dixon: A Reconstruction Call and Response

Empire, Infrastructural Violence, and the Speculative Turn

Abstract: This essay analyzes the function of speculative fiction in the ecosystem of literary attempts to understand the imbrication of infrastructure with racial and colonial violence. While the task of making infrastructural violence apprehensible may seem more suited to realism (the literary mode designed to make legible "what is"), I trace a largely unrecognized strand in Johan Galtung's original theorization of structural violence to argue for the importance of "what is not": the potential realizations of human flourishing that are foreclosed by empire's infrastructural violence—potential realizations that can only be grasped through an act of speculation. I make this argument through a reading of Toni Cade Bambara's 1980 novel The Salt Eaters , which begins in a mostly realist mode that captures empire's violent distortions of Black and Native lives through infrastructural violence before transitioning into a more overtly speculative mode towards the end of the novel. Bambara's formal enactment of the speculative turn, I argue, evokes the potential realizations of Black and Native life that have been foreclosed by empire's infrastructural violence and entrains readers to see the world not just as it is, or as it could be, but as it might have been and might yet be. I close the essay with a discussion of the broader speculative turn in anticolonial Black women's fiction, suggesting that both the rise of speculative elements in more realist novels and the efflorescence of Black speculative fiction can be seen as deploying the affordances of speculation to capture the realities of colonial infrastructural violence in the US.

A failing anthropology of colonial failure: following a driver's uniform found at Amani research station, Tanzania

AbstractThe remains of Amani, a century‐old scientific laboratory in Tanzania, are quintessential modern relics. When anthropologists turn to such infrastructures of, originally colonial, knowledge‐making, their own implication with the object of their study – and with its epistemological and political‐economic origins and order – becomes part of the ethnographic pursuit. This entanglement between researcher and research material should challenge familiar realist modes of ethnographic writing ‘about’ such places that elude the anthropologists’ own, compromised position within them. Matters are complicated further when the studied knowledge‐making sites already are broken, having failed their purpose – as in the case of the vestiges of an abandoned colonial institution. In this essay, I wonder how such ruins of knowledge‐making might transform the knowledge made by anthropologists working within them. Instead of just adding ‘reflexive’ confessions to realist accounts, could writing take part in the defeat that the scientific station's remains seem to embody – writing not ‘after/beyond’ but ‘going along with’ failure? Drawing on non‐representational ethnography, and poet‐anthropologist Hubert Fichte's embrace of epistemic defeat as anticolonial method, I trace my engagements with just one fragment of the scientific station – a driver's uniform. In doing so, I experiment with an object ethnography that ‘fails’ to detach author and object, or settle the question of failure, and instead foregrounds performativity, ambiguity, and mirth as starting points for an ethnography of, and in, our modern ruins.

The Making of Small Literature as World Literature: Taiwanese Writer Wu Ming-Yi

This paper investigates how the transformation of the Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi, from a peripheral writer to a world literature writer, takes place. It first defines the status of Wu as a world literature writer with a discussion of the international reception of Wu’s translated works. It then studies how Wu overcomes the four obstacles for small literature writers: literary destitution, backwardness, remoteness, and invisibility. While Wu appropriates foreign patrimonies to deal with the obstacle of literary destitution, he establishes a modern profile of himself as a writer on a par with internationally acclaimed writers to counter the problem of backwardness. This study examines the complex meanings of Wu’s magical realist mode of storytelling. It argues that the global currency of this consecrated mode helps Wu address the problem of remoteness. At the same time, the magical realist mode works to reflect Wu’s planetary vision and generates the literariness that is missing in many works of environmental world literature. In addition to the literary performance of the writer, the study discusses how Wu’s agents, publishers, and the Taiwanese government join efforts to tackle the problem of invisibility.

Realist and Historicist Modes of Critique in Critical Sociology

There are two distinct modes of critique operative in Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. Bourdieu sometimes engages in what I call the realist mode of critique. This is premised on the idea that naïve experience of the social world dissimulates real relations of domination, which critique then reveals. At other times, Bourdieu engages in what I call the historicist mode of critique, which denaturalizes the doxic experience of the social order by demonstrating its arbitrary character. Whereas realist critique claims that the social world really is other than it appears, historicist critique suggests that it could be otherwise. This tension between the two modes of critique is not unique to Bourdieu, but also present in the Polanyian literature and in the Western Marxist tradition. By distinguishing between the two modes of critique, my aim is to clarify an oft-implicit division that cuts across different critical traditions in the social sciences.

Middlebrow Culture and Mary Lavin’s Short Stories in The New Yorker

This essay, informed by scholarship on middlebrow culture, places Mary Lavin’s stories in the textual space of The New Yorker, reassessing the supposed ‘conservatism’ of her short fiction. Lavin’s literary fame has often been marred by her perceived conservative streaks – in terms of her literary sensibility and her gender politics. Lavin’s literary style is inclined to the realist mode, which appears to be old-fashioned in comparison with the experimentalist work of her modernist predecessors; moreover, her ideas of family and marriage largely adhere to established social mores, disconnecting her from the progressive feminist movement in the post-war years. This essay argues that both aspects of Lavin’s ‘conservatism’ should be radically reassessed by placing her stories in the context of The New Yorker and the magazine’s affiliation with middlebrow culture. Her seemingly conservative literary and gender views in fact register a critical attitude toward urban modernity and domestic ideals, which resonated with The New Yorker’s liberal, albeit complacent, middle-class readers. In particular, the essay reads Lavin’s island story ‘The Bridal Sheets’ as a critique of materialism; it also considers the symbolic currency of the widow figure in ‘In a Café’ vis-à-vis The New Yorker’s tepid gender politics in the mid-twentieth century.

Georg Lukács and the World Literature of Socialist Realism: A Case Study of Cold War Cultural Conflict

Georg Lukács and the World Literature of Socialist Realism:A Case Study of Cold War Cultural Conflict Nicole G. Burgoyne (bio) In this study of Georg Lukács (1885–1971), I will explore how Lukács was an agent of World Literature in the sense that his literary criticism informed political policy concerning the formation of an international canon of Socialist Realist literature. As the German-speaking community of Communists and Communist ideas became ever more fractured after World War Two and divided across the Iron Curtain, Lukács's writing was alternately published and promoted in either the East or the West Bloc according to the conceptions of world literature operative in each. Lukács is representative of the trans-national ties that persisted from an earlier imperial era, but also essential to understanding the struggle to claim the legacy of Marxism amidst the cultural conflicts of the Cold War. This article focuses on Lukács's German-language publications and their reception in East and West Germany in order to show that Lukács mediated not only literary publications written in several languages, but also the cultural and political contexts of the two Blocs. As examples of Lukács's Socialist Realist mode of reading, I have chosen two extremes, that is, authors at the periphery of what was generally deemed to be acceptable Socialist Realism. Within the context of the East Bloc's rejection of literary Modernism and insistence on the tenets of Socialist Realism, Lukács's continued engagement throughout the entirety of his career with Thomas Mann requires explication. Similarly, his outspoken support of [End Page 305] the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has been largely overlooked. These two authors are extremely different in their subject matter and social criticism and the fact that Lukács wrote approvingly of both shows the breadth of his conception of Socialist Realism in ways that were not acceptable to other prominent cultural critics within the East Bloc. By explicating Lukács's engagement with these authors I demonstrate that this key figure in defining the canon of Socialism Realism delineated a World Literature that included Thomas Mann and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, authors most frequently and reasonably claimed by the West Bloc. As I will demonstrate, Lukács argued for these authors' place in his canon of World Literature. Lukács is the philosopher and literary theorist most often ascribed the role of establishing the criteria of Socialist Realist literature in the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany). As Wolfgang Emmerich writes in his touchstone literary history of the GDR, Lukács held a monopoly in terms of defining the literary theory of Socialist Realism until 1956 (12).1 Lukacs's literary criticism created a set of prescriptive criteria according to which books that were officially published within the borders of the country were evaluated even after 1956. In East Germany an interlocking system of government offices and state-owned publishing houses enacted censorship through a licensing process that developed after the Soviet military authority ceded control when it officially withdrew after the Second World War. The GDR's censorship process entailed demanding changes of works in progress, refusing to print manuscripts outright (and sometimes suggesting they be destroyed), as well as confiscating published material that had not been approved by political authorities.2 Additionally, the national university system educated and credentialed all those who aspired to join the intellectual labor force that managed East Germany's cultural sphere, and here too the tenets of Socialist Realism were required doctrine and Lukács's ideas grounded this doctrine even after his name was no longer cited.3 In many ways then, Lukács might appear to embody the official criteria that constrained East German literature. Such a view of Georg Lukács's literary critical oeuvre suffers from a failure to contextualize it historically. Most importantly, Lukács's numerous outright reversals of opinion have been dismissed as political opportunism.4 Criticism of Lukács's support of Stalinism is well-founded, as is the understanding that Lukács often served as a mouthpiece of the Soviet [End Page 306] Communist Party. Beyond elaborating on the Party's official...

“Are the Wizards Still at Work?”: Response to “Rethinking Missionary Colonization in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions” by Chinelo Ezenwa

“Are the Wizards Still at Work?”Response to “Rethinking Missionary Colonization in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions” by Chinelo Ezenwa Jill Planche, Respondent Toward the end of Nervous Conditions, Nyasha angrily accuses her parents, crying out to Tambu, “They’ve done it to me,” but she adds, “It’s not their fault. They did it to them too” (200). The “doing of it” to which she refers is the generational, deliberate, and legislated abrogation of their lives; the colonial practice of stealing land and imposing missionary education that Chinelo Ezenwa identifies as “Holy and White” wizardry in her post-magical realist examination of Tambu’s and her Grandmother’s retelling of their histories, each challenging the colonial missionaries’ exclusionary narrative. Her article is timely, coming as it does shortly after the publication, thirty [End Page 230] years after Nervous Conditions, of Dangarembga’s third novel in the Tambu trilogy, the 2020 Booker Shortlisted This Mournable Body (2018). Ezenwa offers a useful critique through which to look at the transfiguration of the colonized native to elucidate the older Tambu’s embodiment in the reality of postcolonial, postwar Zimbabwe. Here, I omit the hyphens deliberately because, as Tambu’s story unfolds, it is clear that there is no “post” for a systematized, colonized world or self. If Nervous Conditions can be considered as a magical antirealist retelling of the “Holy and White Wizards’” narrative of negation, inculcated in the encounter of community and colonization, in This Mournable Body Tambu performs her self descending into a state of unreality, into a magical realist mode closer to Márquezan visions and transfigurations. Her fracturing, her disintegration, echoes the disillusionment of the postcolony after a brutal war of liberation, and is threaded with concerns of land use, colonial (here neocolonial) power, and split native captured in Ezenwa’s article. Despite her attempt to break away from the wizardry, Tambu finds the wizards are still in control in various roles, their superimposing of “civilized” or European ways embedded in the psychological self her body tries to shed in a hearkening back to Nervous Conditions. The major shift between the two novels is Dangarembga’s use of the second-person narrative voice, raising the question: is this intradiegetic voice Tambu talking to her self, or, is she drawing the reader into the story? In her notion of ‘giving account,’ Judith Butler posits, “‘I’ give an account to ‘you’ and ‘you’ call me to be ‘me,’” arguing that one can only tell an autobiography to an other, “an ‘I’ only in relation to a ‘you.’” Without the ‘you,’ she says, “my own story becomes impossible” (12). It is an idea that subverts the telling of the real (Ezenwa’s “porousness”), perhaps to shed the violently imposed subject of the younger Tambu. As she tries to escape the social world in which her identity has been instantiated, to find her unhu-the Shona concept of personhood she seeks at the end of The Book of Not, second in the trilogy-Tambu seeks a relational form of narrative toward self constitution, realizing she, the ‘I,’ cannot exist on her own apart from the conflicting frameworks that have formed her. In her hallucinations, paranoia, and sense of alienation, Tambu sees women as her threat: the family members who try to help her, her mother who sends messages and a bag of mealie meal through one of her cousins, and women in power such as her bosses, co-workers, landladies, and even the young students she briefly teaches. Symbolic of her state is the pair of European shoes sent to her by Nyasha that she calls Lady Dis, which she has to wear in her constant hunt for lodgings and jobs, and which each time turn her feet into bloated, blistered torments, their ill-fitting construction leading to greater physical and psychological degradation. She is recurringly tormented by her image in the mirror that turns into a purple hyena with whom she converses as she descends into nervous collapse. The climactic scene of the novel returns to the place of her childhood-the Homestead explored in Ezenwa’s article-with a fantastical reenactment of the earlier tensions of colonial dominance of land...

To the Truth, to the Light: Genericity and Historicity in Babylon Berlin

ABSTRACT Babylon Berlin (ARD/Sky, 2017–) depicts Germany’s Weimar Republic by way of complex genericity, drawing especially on the era’s internationally recognizable associations with film noir and the musical. While this reflects its position in a transnational “quality” television landscape, its generic frameworks also draw out ambiguous historical tensions difficult to capture in a realist mode and highlight unpredictable ambivalence across Weimar’s institutions and culture. This complicates Weimar myths that polarize its supposedly regressive politics and progressive culture and see it as a “doomed republic,” the subsequent Nazi period viewed in hindsight as having been inevitable. It also distances it from recorded history, inviting a symbolic reading in the context of contemporary global phenomena. Babylon Berlin thus demonstrates that although citing globally popular genres to depict national histories facilitates transnational television drama’s accessibility, it can also aid critical historical reflection.

The Best Asian Short Stories 2020 ed. by Zafar Anjum

Reviewed by: The Best Asian Short Stories 2020 ed. by Zafar Anjum Lopamudra Basu The Best Asian Short Stories 2020 Ed. Zafar Anjum Singapore. Kitaab. 2020. 245 pages. THE BEST ASIAN Short Stories 2020 is a volume showcasing the vitality and range of contemporary Asian writers. The volume is remarkable in offering both geographic breadth in representations of Asian lives as well as an impressive array of literary genres, styles, and voices. At the heart of this collection is the city of Singapore, the place of publication, a vibrant mix of varied Asian ethnic groups of Indian, Chinese, Malay, and other origins [End Page 71] producing a hybrid Asian sensibility, which erodes strict national affiliations but produces its own set of hierarchies based on the workings of global capital and invisible labor. The internal schisms of class and ethnicity are highlighted in the adoption narrative in Jasmine Adams’s “A Woman’s Place.” In Kelly Kaur’s “The Singapore Dream,” the allure and nostalgia for Singapore is evoked through the point of view of Desmond, who leaves Singapore to immigrate to Calgary, Canada, only to face the recession caused by a slump in oil prices. When his family returns to Singapore for a visit, his daughters decide to stay on in Singapore for better opportunities, making Desmond question his life choices. In Seema Punwani’s “Spin,” Singapore is represented through the perspective of an expat, who, in spite of his privilege as a corporate elite, remains disconnected from his family. We are offered a glimpse of the seamier side of Singaporean life in Phong Huynh’s “As Legal as We Are, ” where we see the protagonist, a very successful but insecure gay man from Chennai, wanting to climb the echelons of the gay social ladder while succumbing to the darker reality of his addictions. The precarious lives of undocumented migrants is evoked in Murali Kamma’s “The Route to Lucky Inn,” while Farah Guznavi depicts the grit and resiliency of Asian migrant workers from Sri Lanka and the Philippines who work as cleaning staff in luxury hotels in the Gulf states. Asian life radiates out into other cityscapes in this collection. We are offered a poetic evocation of the seaside in Mumbai in Sudeep Sen’s “Gold Squares on Muslin,” where a narrator is seeking a piece of muslin as a canvas to write and paint on. This story becomes an allegory of the creative process and its inevitable loneliness. In Areeba Nasir’s “Bench,” we are transported to a small town in Uttarakhand, India, where flash floods wash away villages, and where a mother is unable to come to terms with the loss of her beloved daughter in an accident until her husband brings home a young girl orphaned by the floods. In Moazzam Sheikh’s “Sunshine,” the theme of the primal fear of the loss of a child morphs into the more inevitable passing away of a childhood and the emptiness it leaves behind. The final story in the collection, “Dog at the End of the World,” by Jon Gresham, is a memoir of the pandemic in an island city narrated from the point of view of a dog. Although beginning in a realist mode, the story quickly changes to a vision of an apocalyptic end of civilization but still celebrates the devotion of the dog toward his mistress. The stories in the collection traverse a variety of genres and styles from the realist to the surrealist, from detective fiction to social satire. It is a celebration of Asian life, its heterogeneity, energy, and shared common bonds. In a world where literature is often classified by national boundaries, an attempt to break borders and depict Asian lives within the continent of Asia and in diasporic communities in North America, Australia, and Britain is a bold reimaging of the field of Asian literature. Lopamudra Basu University of Wisconsin–Stout Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion Imagery

This paper is concerned with the different forms of pleasure and identification activated in the consumption of dominant and subcultural print media. It centers on an analysis of the lesbian visual pleasures available in reading fashion articles in the new lesbian and gay lifestyle magazines. This consideration of the lesbian gaze is contrasted with the lesbian visual pleasures obtained from an against-the-grain reading of mainstream women’s fash- ion magazines. The rise of lesbian and gay lifestyle magazines fueled by the pink pound (the commercial potential of appealing to non-heterosexual consumers) has turned eroti- cized lesbian visual pleasure into the overt purpose of these magazine, rather than a clan- destine pleasure obtained through a transgressive reading of dominant cultural imagery. In contrast to the polysemic free-play of fashion fantasy through which readers derive lesbian pleasure in the consumption of mainstream magazines, responses to the fashion content in the lesbian magazine Diva suggest that readers in a subcultural con- text deploy a realist mode of reading that demands a monosemic positive iconography. To consider the different ways in which lesbians read mainstream and subcultural print media the author uses the concept of subcultural competency and suggests that the con- flict over Diva’s fashion spreads may be linked to changing patterns of identification and the use of dress for recognizability.

Realism, Initially

Abstract: This article argues that the pictorial initials that begin chapters within many Victorian novels participate in and theorize these novels' modes of realism. Initials' dual pictorial-alphabetic form enacts an experience of leaving behind their illustrative image for sequential, alphabetic reading, thereby constituting the paradoxical meaningfulness of superfluous details in these novels' story worlds. By intimating extradiegetic character connections, the initials in Charles Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop create a sense that its character network is horizonless. In Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters , initials suggest an unlimited granularity of pertinent intradiegetic detail.

Nominalist visualities and classical social theory: An examination of Durkheim and Weber

AbstractThis paper elucidates a range of the potentials and limitations of nominalist sensibilities in social theory through an examination of their presence in Durkheim and Weber. Nominalism, which emerged in early modern western thought, holds that only individual particular cases exist and that there are no universals or generalities beyond mentally or linguistically constructed concepts; it also introduced new conceptions of will and voluntarism. Nominalism was variously transposed into classical social theories including those of Durkheim and Weber. In our theoretical methodology, we assess tensions between nominalist and realist visualities and modes of reasoning in their works. We conclude by discussing assessments of nominalism, attending to its enduring critical contributions while also explicating a reflexive critique of nominalism as mimetic of chaotic and pathological forms of social organisation.

‘Nothing but Thought, Was It?’: Berkeley, Idealism and Woolf’s The Years

Abstract Although scholarship has noted that the ‘faded brown book’ mentioned in Woolf’s The Years – in which the world is ‘nothing but thought’ – is a probable reference to the eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley, the full extent of Woolf’s adoption of Berkeleian ideas has not been accounted for. In this essay I argue that Woolf’s use of specifically Berkeleian images – including a coin-like moon and mind-dependent trees – feeds into a larger narrative technique in The Years relating to semblance: the way things seem or appear to be. Although The Years is sometimes understood as a comparatively ‘realist’ work by critics, I show that even its most apparently ‘objective’ scenes retain a semblance of subjectivity, upon which Woolf’s idiosyncratic realist mode depends. Reading Woolf alongside Berkeley, I develop a case study in the ways in which literary aesthetics can take up, and also challenge, philosophical theories of knowledge.

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland

The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland

Risking Representation: Abstraction, Affect, and the Documentary Mode in Birgit Weyhe’sMadgermanes

Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes was reviewed primarily as an attempt to recuperate a forgotten aspect of GDR history, but it also can be understood as an experiment with graphic documentary. In Madgermanes Weyhe employs a complex visual style to recount the history of Mozambican labour migration to the GDR and to recall the troubled history of visual representations of Africa and Africans in Germany. Weyhe’s aesthetic strategy—which in part mimics documentary styles but also includes self-referential, affective, and abstract images—makes truth claims at the same time that it rejects conventional documentary forms. This approach can be viewed as an attempt to forge a visual language appropriate to the transnational dimensions of the historical period on display, a language that also probes the legacies of colonialism embedded in popular culture. Unbound by a realist mode, Madgermanes challenges the boundaries of conventional documentary and complicates the notion of documentary as a source of immediate access to lived experience.