Aesthetic Realism Research Articles

“Objectification” as a Cycle-Forming Constant in the Motley Tales of Prince V. F. Odoevsky

Motley Tales (1833) is one of the completed cycles by V. F. Odoevsky. The writer wished to create a number of cycles, but did not complete a significant number. The article substantiates the importance of viewing Motley Tales as an aesthetically integrated whole due to the order of their arrangement, and common themes and motifs, and despite their “motley” nature. The author discusses the diversity of subject matter in fairy tales, but focuses on only one motif — that of “objectification”. It is important for the entire corpus of work by Odoevsky. The author substantiates the cyclical nature of this motif in the Motley Tales. The term “objectification” is understood in the article in accordance with the concept put forth by M. M. Bakhtin. This scientist called “objectification” of various transformations of a person into an object, or the reduction of a person to an object. The “objectification” motif will be vital for F. M. Dostoevsky, and will already emerge in N. V. Gogol’s work, but even before that — in V. F. Odoevsky’s Motley Tales. “Objectification” is immediately mentioned in the prefaces by the publisher and the writer. Subsequently, this motif manifests itself in all the fairy tales, whose characters are either inclined to objectify others, or are themselves subjected to objectification. Sometimes they do not notice it or even find pleasure in it, yet at other times they recognize their position with horror. The motif of revival is also present in the cycle: a person throws the death veil off his soul, while objects proclaim their humanity. On the whole, however, the deadness of the world in Motley Tales remains unresolved. Inert captivity fetters objects and people who are increasingly more immersed in everyday life. At the same time, the bleak state of the ethically tense world of characters is overcome in its own way in the cycle’s aesthetic reality. Awareness of materiality, its humorous play upon it, conviction in the inexhaustibility of the eternal poetry of being, open up a scintillating opportunity for the resurrection of “living life.”

How to be an aesthetic realist

AbstractThis paper develops a form of realism about aesthetics that is stronger than typical versions of aesthetic realism. As I conceive of it, aesthetic realism is the view that there are some response‐independent aesthetic facts. This kind of realism is unpopular in aesthetics and is often viewed as a non‐starter. Against this pessimism, I argue that the prospects for this realist approach are more favorable than commonly supposed. I offer some reasons to prefer my brand of aesthetic realism to competing realist and anti‐realist positions. I also defend this aesthetic realism against what I call the ‘overly objective worry’ and correct misconceptions about what realism's commitment to response‐independence involves.

The Place of Socialism in African Art

The Place of Socialism in African Art

On the realist aesthetics of digital de‐aging in contemporary Hollywood cinema

This essay examines digital de‐aging—a process of making actors appear younger on‐screen than they actually are that has taken a firm hold in contemporary Hollywood cinema—as a controversial filmmaking tool that raises fundamental questions about cinematic realism in the digital age. Since Hollywood’s visual effects are similar to the image manipulation that can be achieved with deepfake software, digital de‐aging is framed as a complex creative process that supports the actors’ craft in order to distinguish it from the image manipulation and misinformation that has come to characterize the post‐truth era. I will discuss the affordances and limitations of Hollywood’s “youthification” technology in terms of the shifting ontologies that characterize the transition from the photographic to the digital image, situate digital de‐aging within larger debates about synthespians and the realistic portrayal of digitally created human beings, and argue that de‐aging in films such as Gemini Man (Ang Lee, 2019) and The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) reconfigures linear temporalities and ultimately reshapes the concepts of time and memory by which we structure our life trajectories.

Поэтика эксперимента: неоконченная повесть М. Горького «Сон»

The article raises the question of Gorky as the Creator of a new aesthetic reality. The author shows his desire to overcome the spiritual and creative crisis of the early 1920s, which arose as a result of the tragic events of the First world war and the Russian revolution, and to update his creative method by including elements of modernist art: symbolism, impressionism, and the avant-garde. As an example, the author analyzes Gorky’s little — known unfinished novel “The Dream” (1923), it is shown that the writer widely used the key principle of modernist art-estrangement in its poetics. With this technique, the writer managed to create a text in which dream and reality, reality and illusion were artfully mixed and almost indistinguishable. The technique of detachment also helped Gorky to penetrate deeply into the spiritual world of his heroine and show the depicted reality through the eyes of a naive teenage girl.

In the Peasant's Place: Social Problems and Narrative Practice in Turgenev's Notes from a Hunter

This article is concerned with the aesthetic and social tensions of the countryside in Ivan Turgenev's Notes from a Hunter (Zapiski okhotnika, 1847–52) as a site where two temporalities–history and immediacy–collide, producing shifts in narrative perspective and descriptive style. Behind these technical changes lie greater intellectual developments, refracting the nationalist discourses of the 1840s and the complex demands they produced for literature. Envisioned as what I call “the place of the peasant,” the countryside represents an ideal that combines aesthetic, social, and nationalist elements, accommodating the “here‐and‐now” as well as the socio‐historical structures that make it readable. Here, identity is contiguous with the environment, transparent to a sensitive observer, and supportive of a descriptive style that favors details in and of themselves. Building on scholarship that treats Notes from a Hunter as a laboratory for new narrative forms, I interpret social themes behind a search for a narrative perspective that modulates authorial distance, the emergence of character from type, and an increasingly selective descriptive style. Approaching the question of social tensions in Notes from a Hunter from a literary‐historical perspective, I also reconsider such topics as the ironization of gentry ignorance. On my account, at stake in the formulation of a new realist aesthetics in Notes from a Hunter is an essentialization of literature as a discourse closely associated with a mystique of peasant life and, by extension, a valorization of “the concrete” as a bulwark against history, otherness, self‐confrontation, and preceding literary styles. Through analyses of several stories of Notes from a Hunter against the background of theories of nationalism and histories of description and narration, I posit mutually illuminating connections between social and literary forms, from visions of character as socially displaced and narrative perspective as socially stable to Russian realism itself as a movement dependent on an ambiguous contrast with a peasant other.

‘This spasm upon canvas’: George Eliot, Gustave Courbet and Realist Aesthetics

Abstract This article offers sustained consideration for the first time of George Eliot’s entanglement with mid-nineteenth-century French art. Taking realism’s transnational nature as its point of origin, this essay probes Eliot’s claim in Adam Bede (1859) for seventeenth-century genre painting as the most conspicuous visual precedent to define, embody and vindicate her aesthetic choices – at just the moment when Gustave Courbet makes realism scandalous in the Salons of the Second Empire. Questioning Eliot’s deliberate disavowal of influence, I trace the modes of transmission through which Courbet’s art was exported to and circulated within Britain during the 1850s; while London’s official art world was unreceptive to French art in the nineteenth century, a different picture emerges if we consider the visibility afforded by independent galleries and the periodical press, and if we take account of these diverse reading, viewing and citational practices. I then offer close readings of works by Eliot and Courbet to suggest that both evidence a discomfort with representation as the primary methodology of realism, and consider the consequences for the ideological, epistemological and affective energies of realist aesthetics. Reading Eliot alongside Courbet reveals her radicalism, but this only becomes clear when we place her realism within the orbit of a broader European tradition and understand her aesthetics as a form of praxis.

Nähe und Distanz: Eine grundlegende Dichotomie in der österreichischen Literatur der Moderne ed. by Vahidin Preljević and Clemens Ruthner

Reviewed by: Nähe und Distanz: Eine grundlegende Dichotomie in der österreichischen Literatur der Moderne ed. by Vahidin Preljević and Clemens Ruthner Raymond L. Burt Vahidin Preljević and Clemens Ruthner, eds., Nähe und Distanz: Eine grundlegende Dichotomie in der österreichischen Literatur der Moderne. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2020. 117 pp. Vahidin Preljević and Clemens Ruthner's Nähe und Distanz forms the second volume of the series Identifizierungen/Identifications: Poetics of the Self and the Other and is an expansion of the themes introduced in Preljević's monogram, Perzeptionsereignisse: Zur literarischen Wahrnehmungspoetik in Wien um 1900, which constituted volume 1 of the series. The eleven essays in this collection were the products of a 2012 conference in Sarajevo that took as its postulate [End Page 144] that the title dichotomy, Nähe und Distanz (and I will use the German to signify their status in this work as terminus technicus), serve as "grundlegendes, ästhetisches, wahrnehmungstheoretisches, sozialgeschichtliches und kulturelles Phänomen" (7) in the Austrian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To that end, this collection offers the reader insights on Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Gustav Meyrink, Arthur Schnitzler, Ödön von Horvath, Anton Kuh, Robert Musil, and others. The first three essays focus on Hofmannsthal by showing the dynamics of the aesthetic Distanz and its function in Austrian modernism. Vahidin Preljević opens his essay with the assertion that only from aesthetic distance can the nearness of the experience of reality occur. He sees this interplay of Distanz and Nähe as particularly evident in the beginnings of Austrian modernism. Preljević deftly interprets a historical encounter between Stefan George and the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal as an illustration of two divergent views of Distanz. For George, aesthetics is absolutely separated from real life. Hofmannsthal, on the other hand, has an inner Distanz that paradoxically makes possible a Nähe to life. Expanding on this theme, Vikica Matić makes a well-supported case that Hofmannsthal, as a representative of Jung Wien, used aesthetic Distanz to restore a connection to the world by replacing a chaotic, ugly reality with an aesthetic reality (beauty), as illustrated by Hofmannsthal's Das Märchen der 672. Nacht. Matic shows that the Distanz is an expression of an identity crisis encompassed in the complex relationship between an aesthetic existence and a human one and ultimately leads to destruction. Daniela Strigl chooses another text she terms as a "Schlüsseltext der literarischen Moderne" and applies Distanz and Nähe as narrative perception techniques in her detailed interpretation of Hofmannsthal's Die Reitergeschichte. The emotionless Distanz of the narrator is sharply contrasted with the narrative zoom to the individual gaze, which leads to the "gefährliche Nähe." The next two essays only peripherally intersect with the theme of Distanz and Nähe, perhaps since the narratives examined offer no clear separation between reality and dream. Irma Duraković conducts an excellent study of Beer-Hofmann's Der Tod Georgs in which the transition between dream and reality can be perceived by neither the protagonist nor the readers. Nevertheless, her analysis of the symbols and patterns of the narrative, beginning with the window imagery, provides a framework for a deeper [End Page 145] understanding of this novel. Similarly, Naser Šečerović's essay on Gustav Meyrink's Der Golem uses the framework of the dream narrative to approach this literarily unconventional work. A change of direction occurs with Clemens Ruthner's essay "Umgangs-Formen," in which he formulates his central thesis on the problematics of literary representations of the foreigner. After a brief informative survey on the subject, Ruthner introduces and discusses four works by relatively unknown authors depicting Bosnian and Herzegovinian figures in shedding light on the colonial constructions of foreignness in the context of the Habsburg Empire. Distanz and Nähe in these essays have been associated with various conceptual pairings; aesthetic subjectivity/ugly objectivity, dream/reality, and familiar/foreign. Two essays on works by Schnitzler introduce two additional sets. Almir Bašović's treatment of Reigen as a dehumanized pattern of (corporal) distance-nearness-distance in each scene serves as evidence of determinism over free will. Wielding or rather welding...

The Aesthetic of Our Times: A New Phenomenology

The ‘aesthetic’ — an adjective that has become a noun- broadly expresses aesthetic reality whose general ‘units’ are specific value properties of objects = aesthetic values as phenomena of consciousness. The paper aims to fi x and analyze the state of today’s aesthetic reality compared to the known attributes of the classical aesthetic picture of the world. The author argues that the aesthetic has preserved its sensory foundation and universal (all-inclusive) for a sensual world character recognized in classical aesthetics. And today’s aesthetic implements this potential universalism of aesthetic origin more fully spreading to certain object spheres and phenomena. Until recently, they used to be non-aesthetic or even perceived as anti-aesthetic (proteism of today’s aesthetic). The paper further traces the growing differences of present-day esthetic from classical ideas of aesthetics and aesthetic tastes. Classical aesthetic consciousness thought of aesthetic reality discretely and reduced it to rigidly fixed, by objects and meaning, and normatively enshrined ‘fundamental’ values (beautiful, sublime, tragic and comic). The proteistic aesthetic of our times is increasingly manifesting itself as a continuum: continuity of aesthetic meanings smoothly transitioning into each other and encompassing (staining) the entire sensual world. Traditional (terminal) values acquire (thanks to novel contexts and substance) a new meaning. Sometimes, in their classical form, they are pushed to the periphery or even get eliminated (as is happening to the tragic in postmodernism). On the bright side, there emerge novel, different from traditional, aesthetic values/meanings that have not been particularized yet. The paper provides variants of these new and non-defined values brought to life both by aesthetics of new objects and by the new value stance of subjects. In particular, the author finds these novel values in artifacts of Boris Mikhailov, Pavel Otdel’nov and Gunther von Hagens.

Раннеромантическая эстетическая теория и художественная практика Бенжамена Констана

The article reconstructs the aesthetics of B. Constant, one of the key figures of the early stage of the formation of French romanticism, the author of one of its first manifestos. The author reveals his aesthetic credo associated with liberalism in his views on society and art, the idea of the self-value of art, its artistic perfection, an increased interest in the national and historical origins of artistic creativity, the local uniqueness, and the character of a romantic hero — sen- sitive, sincere, and at the same time egocentric. It is shown that the vector of Constant’s aesthetic search as one of the creators and theorists of the romantic genres of drama, novel, and novella is directed to the future. He was at the origin of a new direction of French literature — psychological confessional prose. Constant, with his emphasis on the disharmony of the inner world of individuals, deep contrasts between enthusiasm and melancholy, on the one hand, and the sharpened attention to the influence of society on all aspects of human life, including artistic creativity, on the other, not only influenced the next generation of French romantics, but also received a response in Russia in relation to the phenomenon of the “extra person”. His aesthetic theory and artistic practice largely anticipated the tendencies of critical realism in nineteenth-century art and aesthetics.

L’excès de réel – caricature et réalisme dans quelques nouvelles de Maupassant

Par son excès mimétique, la caricature peut sembler difficilement compatible avec l'esthétique réaliste, qui cherche à donner une image fidèle au réel. Pourtant l'ironiste Maupassant a souvent recours au portrait caricatural afin de mettre en relief le caractère excessif du personnage. En établissant des liens fermes entre le portrait du personnage et le déroulement de l’histoire, qui illustrera les conséquences négatives de cet excès, Maupassant expose le danger qu’il y a à dévier d'un comportement mesuré. Le réalisme réside ainsi dans la cohérence entre le portrait caricatural du personnage et ses actes. Il dérive aussi de l'application d'un schéma rationnel mis en place pour déprécier le personnage caricaturé, dont l'excès, souvent sous forme de passion, provoque une appréhension erronée du réel objectif. L'impossibilité d'appliquer un tel cadre normatif, comme dans le genre fantastique, pourrait indiquer la nécessité d'abandonner partiellement l’esthétique réaliste pour embrasser d'autres formes de composition.

Adalet Ağaoğlu’nun Öykülerinde Anlatı Temposu

Narrative pace is the fundamental determiner of temporal transitions in a literary text; it governs the continuity and rhythm of certain facts or events illustrated in the text. A literary text acquires its fictional integrity and compositional patterns through myriad flows and accelerations that accompany the narrative pace, thereby revealing intellectual and ideological representations through compositional maneuvers. Thus, the narrative pace is a fictional tool that mediates between narrative aesthetics and ideology. The narrative pace offers a domain extension and transitional space to the literary text through ideology-laden syntactic repetitions and textual momentum. The narrative pace can further be articulated through leitmotifs, which becomes a descriptive strategy that signifies the fictional velocity and acceleration of a literary text. Adalet Ağaoğlu was an important literary personality in Turkish literature. She established a fictional connection between the literary and aesthetic realities of the narrative and its ideological ground. In her stories, the narrative pace manifests this link and reveals the associations between narrative aesthetics and ideology. This study examines Adalet Ağaoğlu’s fiction from the perspective of narrative pace, attending specifically to the relationships between aesthetics and ideology. 

Poems by V. Bryusov “Native Language” and G. Tukai “Tugan Tel”


 In literary criticism, structural and semantic correspondences are established between the author and the reader as elements of aesthetic reality. As a result, another text appears before us, different from the original one. With each new reading, a new edition of the text will appear. In this regard, the question of determining the subjective and objective factors of the reception process becomes important. The tasks set determined the need to refer to a comparative analysis of the poems of Russian and Tatar poets, during which the regularities of the functioning of new meanings emerging in interliterary dialogues are considered. Comparative, hermeneutic and receptive methods of analysis were used in solving the set tasks. As a result of the study, the similarities and differences between the works of V. Bryusov and G. Tukai, dedicated to the topic of the native language, were established, and the peculiarities of perception of the additions of foreign literature by bilingual readers were also identified. The results obtained are significant in the study of the role of the reader as a subject of interliterary dialogues.

Poems by V. Bryusov “Native Language” and G. Tukai “Tugan Tel”

In literary criticism, structural and semantic correspondences are established between the author and the reader as elements of aesthetic reality. As a result, another text appears before us, different from the original one. With each new reading, a new edition of the text will appear. In this regard, the question of determining the subjective and objective factors of the reception process becomes important. The tasks set determined the need to refer to a comparative analysis of the poems of Russian and Tatar poets, during which the regularities of the functioning of new meanings emerging in interliterary dialogues are considered. Comparative, hermeneutic and receptive methods of analysis were used in solving the set tasks. As a result of the study, the similarities and differences between the works of V. Bryusov and G. Tukai, dedicated to the topic of the native language, were established, and the peculiarities of perception of the additions of foreign literature by bilingual readers were also identified. The results obtained are significant in the study of the role of the reader as a subject of interliterary dialogues.

Un percorso didattico sul “Rigoletto” di Verdi: «La donna è mobile» e la voce come fantasma

This didactic unit, designed for first two years of secondary school, briefly contextualizes figure of Giuseppe Verdi within history of 19th-century Italian melodrama. It then moves on to illustrate dramaturgy of Rigoletto, which clearly reflects in social and aesthetic reality of its time, explaining why Verdi was so fond of this subject, and defended it strenuously - and in end successfully - from axe of censorship. The course focuses on listening didactics applied to «La donna e mobile», with aim of helping learners understand structure and meaning of libretto, music and its peculiar use in drama. «La donna e mobile», a tavern song and, at same time, song most deeply rooted in drama that has ever been conceived, is heard three times in course of opera, each time in a slightly different musical version, and always for dramatic purposes. The third occurrence ushers in one of most effective, and upsetting, catastrophes in tragic theater of all time: a catastrophe entirely rooted in sound and singing - that is, in sense of hearing which prevails over sense of sight. The lesson we learn from «La Donna e mobile» is that in opera it is musical text that has the last word rather than verbal and visual text.

Translingual text within a meaning-generating context of Russian literature

In this article, the translingual text in the aspect of its interconnection with the meaning-generating context of classical Russian literature is analyzed. The literary translingualism is defined as the phenomenon of writers who create texts in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one. This is an urgent problem for modern literary criticism, requiring an interdisciplinary approach to its study. Within the framework of translingualism theory, as the text is comprehended not only as a product of speech activity subjected to structural preparation. It turns into a zone of cross-pollination with multiple meanings, becomes a representative of cultures in their contamination, mutual repulsion, symbiosis, submission, adaptation. Intercultural communication within the literary text also affects the level of the intertext: the intertextual paradigm elements of various complexity (from selected intexts, unmodified reminiscences to expanded propositions) in a translingual text are often subject to the process of so-called intertextual acculturation, in which the intext is filled with ethnospecific linguistic and literary content. The material for the study is the literary cycle Dreams of the Damned (Sny okayannykh) by the modern Kazakhstan writer A. Zhaksylykov. Some of the intertextual echoes of the cycle with canonical texts of classical Russian literature (works by Pushkin, Yesenin, Dostoevsky, etc.) are analyzed in order to trace the adaptation process of its key motives (the motive of flight from people, the motive of wandering, the motive of the desert, the motive of the black man, etc.) to the Kazakh linguocultural and aesthetic reality. Using methods such as comparative analysis, linguopoetic commenting, intertextual analysis, the conclusion is made that an appeal to the literary works of the acquired language for a translingual author is necessary: they constitute his cognitive base, but at the same time undergo certain linguo-specific transformations, the result of which is generation of new images of the world.

Two approaches to the analysis of spatial and temporal organizations of a literary work (M.M. Bakhtin and V.M. Zhirmunsky)

This article examines two methodologies for analyzing a literary work. The first one was developed by M.M. Bakhtin on the basis of a broad aesthetic and philosophical approach; the second one was developed by V.M. Zhirmunsky on the basis of a more specific formal and poetological approach. These methodologies were applied by both researchers to A.S. Pushkin’s poems in the 1920s. It is argued that Bakhtin’s methodology was worked out in opposition to the main provisions of Zhirmunsky, who was close to the position of Russian formalism, also taking into account L.V. Shcherba’s achievements in the field of the linguistic analysis of a poetic text. This article describes the fundamental differences in the methodological conceptions of the philosopher and the literary critic concerning the nature of verbal creativity and understanding of the spatial and temporal organization of a literary work. The comparison of two analyses of Pushkin’s poem “For the Shores of Distant Homeland…”, shows that Zhirmunsky reduces the spatial and temporal aspects of a work of art to the compositional arrangement of verbal and sound material, since he considers verbal creativity as a linguistic phenomenon, while Bakhtin refers to the space and time of aesthetic reality, drawing a distinction between the composition and the architectonics of the literary work. It appears that the philosopher perceives the work as a field of dialogue between various subjects of consciousness (the author, the characters, the reader), while the literary critic proceeds from the author’s primacy as creator of a system of artistic techniques, giving the reader a position of passive perception. It is concluded that both methods of analysis complement each other organically, Zhirmunsky analyzing the verbal-compositional dimensions of a literary work and Bakhtin its objective-architectonic dimension.

“Take the Mask Off”

On March 10, 1895, a young woman named Maud Clark wrote a letter to writer, performer, and activist Paul Laurence Dunbar in which she told him to “take the mask off.” This article takes this phrase as its analytical point of departure, seeking to reconceptualise, retheorise, and reinvestigate Dunbar’s biography through Clark’s words and the symbol of the mask. Repositioning Dunbar’s biography within the political, aesthetic, and psychological realities of his world, the article takes the symbol of Paul Laurence Dunbar in new directions, recognising the limitations of traditional biography and instead working toward a new and multifarious understanding of the man and his many masks.

Los trasplantados o el realismo viajero de Alberto Blest Gana

Este articulo se propone exponer y discutir los valores que adquiere la estetica del realismo en Los trasplantados (1904), novela tardia de Alberto Blest Gana. Para ello se describe someramente el primer desplazamiento de esta estetica, su encarnacion como novela nacional en un texto como Martin Rivas (1862), escrito y publicado en Chile y para los chilenos. Los trasplantados es una novela escrita y publicada en Paris tras mas de treinta anos de ausencia por parte de su autor; el uso que hace del realismo, si bien formalmente se parece al de la novela nacional, adquiere un sentido completamente distinto. La particularizacion de las mismas practicas que en Martin Rivas definia a sujetos pretendidamente aristocraticos, la oligarquia chilena, aqui sirve para mostrar a los rastacueros, sujetos degradados en relacion con la aristocracia europea. Se discuten brevemente esos hallazgos.

Gabriel García Márquez, History and the Labyrinth of Literature

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel centered on Simón Bolívar, The General in His Labyrinth (El general en su laberinto, 1989) provoked mixed reactions from the literary critics. Some of them praised another masterpiece, whereas the others accused the Colombian author of creating a disrespectful portrait one of Latin America’s most important historical and symbolic figures The novel combines historical data and fiction in order to humanize the character of the Liberator and to destroy his nearly mythological image while at the same time examining the implications of previous literary discourse on the contemporary Latin American novel. Moreover García Márquez finds an original means of establishing a profound relationship between the magical realist aesthetics he used in One Hundred Years of Solitude and this particular form of pseudo-historical narrative that succeeds in expressing the humanity of its protagonist.