Hyperrealism

6 Key excerpts on "Hyperrealism"

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  How to Make Believe

  The Fictional Truths of the Representational Arts

  • J. Alexander Bareis, Lene Nordrum, J. Alexander Bareis, Lene Nordrum(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  But the term is useful in distinguishing between those forms which tend to efface their own textu-ality, their existence and discourse, and those which explicitly draw their attention to it. Realism offers itself as transparent. The rejection of the concept of a literary form which reflects the world, however, has led some post-Saussurean critical theorists to use the phrase ‘classic realism’ to designate literature which creates an effect or illusion of reality. This is not just another gratuitous piece of jargon. ‘Classic realism’ makes it possible to unite categories which have been divided by the empiricist assumption that the text re-flects the world. (Belsey [1980, 51]) The Concept of Literary Realism | 21 But if one needs to invent a new term to refer to such works as have been called simply realist, then the question does arise whether the concept of realism itself is not losing its usefulness as a critical instrument. Indeed, this kind of criticism in effect denies the existence of realist literature. If no literary work can be real-ist in the sense that it ‘truthfully/objectively represents reality’, then the con-cept of realism becomes a concept with a null extension and only an ideological function. 3 There are various ways to respond to ‘The rejection of the concept of a literary form which reflects the world’. An immediate and direct response was simply to reject the rejection and insist that literary realism is a form of truth-telling. Real-ist works of literature are interesting and valuable because they do tell the truth about human existence: War and Peace is interesting not only as an account of a particular campaign and of the manners and morals of a certain group of people in a certain place and time. It is great be-cause it has much to say about war and peace at other places and other times. The reality described in a great fiction stands metonymically for a larger reality, or for a whole, infi-nite class of realities.

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  The Contemporary British Novel Since 1980

  • James Acheson, S. Ross, James Acheson, S. Ross(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  PART I Realism and other -isms 1 Realism, Dreams and the Unconscious in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro Frederick M. Holmes A critical consensus has emerged about the themes, modes, narrative tech- niques and interrelationships of the five novels that Ishiguro has published to date. The first three - A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989) - have been cel- ebrated for their historically grounded realism, achieved through the limpid, masterfully controlled prose styles of their first-person narrators, all of whom depend upon memory as they look back over their troubled lives and times. Realism in fiction is a vexed concept, but it can be defined as the attempt to use linguistic and narrative conventions to create a fictional illu- sion of social and psychological reality that seems plausible to ordinary readers. Writers of realist fiction, David Lodge comments, assume that 'there is a common phenomenal world that may be reliably described by the methods of empirical history'; however, he adds that 'to the later writers in the [ realist] tradition what this world means is much more problematical'.1 In other words, although the novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies had a shared view of the nature of reality, those of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are generally aware that what constitutes reality is a matter for speculation and debate. Neither is contemporary realism usually premised on the belief that the language used to describe what Lodge calls the 'common phenomenal world' is a transparent medium that creates a perfect correspondence between its symbols and an objective reality exter- nal to it. On the contrary, most realists recognise that language does not so much mirror reality as use conventions to construct simulacra of what some readers can accept as reality.

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  The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism

  • Mary K. Holland(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  However ultimately unsatisfying, Morris’s concerted efforts to define “realism” across the radically changing notions about language and reality of the twentieth century, and her characterization of that fiction in terms of meticulously examined “reality effects,” helpfully elucidate four problems inherent to any such act of defining:

  1.How do we distinguish realism as a period from realism as a set of techniques, or aims, or a value system (Enlightenment or otherwise), deployed in any time period? How can the term be useful without such a distinction?

  2.Given the profound change in scientific descriptions of reality in the twentieth century, does any definition of realism have to consider what it means be “real”? How might it do so? 3.How might our uses of “realism” differentiate between realist ways of reading and realist texts?

  4.Is metafiction, or self-reflexivity, as became a prominent feature in postmodern fiction, actually an inherent quality of all fiction, including realism, or is it a quality or technique that can be understood as opposed to realist fiction?

  In its attention to technical and formal innovations that characterize contemporary realisms, this book aims to begin to address exactly such questions raised by Morris’s and other earlier examinations of “realism.”

  Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism

  Quite in opposition to Morris—and to other post-modernist critics who look back on realism as always-already linguistically, epistemologically, and ontologically savvy, and engaged in the kind of ideological unmasking more often associated with poststructural texts—Fredric Jameson conceives of realism as a mode of writing that can neither deliver nor uncover truth, and is always invested in maintaining the status quo: “the realistic novel has a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of social reality, on the resistance of bourgeois society to history and to change”; “realism . . . is a hybrid concept, in which an epistemological claim (for knowledge or truth) masquerades as an aesthetic ideal, with fatal consequences for both of these incommensurable dimensions. If it is social truth or knowledge we want from realism, we will soon find that what we get is ideology.”84

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  Towards a Semiotics of Ideology

  • Carlos Reis(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  It is also the case that this so-called critical Realism (although incapable, according to Lukacs, of describing the man of the future) has merit as an artistic tendency that, by raising all that is important (positive or negative) in the bourgeois life to a level of typical signification, in that way managed to present the meaning of that life and make it comprehensible. 10 None of what has been said prevents us from disagreeing with the negative terms in which Lukacs describes the artistic avant-gardes which are situated at the opposite extreme of realist literature . n 1.3. In another sphere, it is also possible to see how narrative reveals special aptitudes for fulfilling realist representation's aesthetic and socio-cultural designs: we are referring to the formulation, normally in prose, of narrative discourse. In this case, we are dealing with a problem that includes a number of collateral issues, from the question of literary genres (including the common confusion between narrative and prose) to the historical consolidation of a discursive formulation whose aesthetic pres-tige is more recent than that of verse. Whatever the case may be, we are concerned to approach this matter in terms of the domain of functionality, connecting it closely not only to narrative's basic characteristics 12 but also to its metonymic proclivity already commented upon: it is worthwhile to recall, in this regard, that Jakobson explicitly states that it is the predominance of the metonymic which rules and effectively defines Realism. On the basis of relationships Marxism and realism 127 of contiguity, the realist author elaborates métonymie digressions from the plot to the environment, and from the characters to the spatio-temporal setting.

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  Adventures in Realism

  • Matthew Beaumont(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Although specialist scholars have continued to explore its historic import-ance, realism has come to seem obvious and simple-minded to most intel-lectuals in the humanities. It is as if Roland Barthes’s brilliant critique, in the late 1960s, of what he called the “referential illusion,” and his concomitant attempts to decode the “reality effects” that literary texts evoke in order to certify their claims to verisimilitude, became a pretext not for rethinking realism in relation to poststructuralist insights about narrative convention so much as for not rethinking realism at all (Barthes 1989: 148). But it might equally be claimed that, at least in its philosophical implica-tions, realism is perpetually at issue. Realism in this inclusive sense can briefly be sketched as the assumption that it is possible, through the act of representation, in one semiotic code or another, to provide cognitive as well as imaginative access to a material, historical reality that, though irreducibly mediated by human consciousness, and of course by language, is nonetheless independent of it. This comprehensive definition of real-ism cannot ultimately be separated from its specific significance in liter-ature and other art forms. Aesthetic debates about realism are inevitably imbricated in philosophical debates. “To investigate realism in art is imme-diately to enter into philosophical territory,” Terry Lovell wrote in 1980, “– into questions of ontology and epistemology: of what exists in the world and how that world can be known” (Lovell 1980: 6). It is also to 2 MATTHEW BEAUMONT

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  Reading Between the Lines

  A Christian Guide to Literature

  • Gene Edward Veith Jr.(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Crossway

    (Publisher)

  If the social realists focused on society, sometimes at the expense of the individual, another branch of realists delved into the human mind to create a psychological realism. The rise of modern psychology encour aged the view that, as far as human beings are concerned, the mind is the locus of reality. That is, reality is mediated through a person’s con sciousness, which is shaped by early experiences and innate mythical pat terns as well as by the environment. Writers such as Henry James explored the infinitely subtle nuances of individual personalities. James Joyce invented the stream-of-consciousness novel, reproducing the inner life of his characters and relating them to primal myths and psychologi cal archetypes. In doing so, he pushed realism itself closer to fantasy.

  The best modern realistic novelists draw on both the outer and the inner realities. William Faulkner captured the people and places of the backwoods South in vivid detail, but he also plunged into the minds of the characters, reflecting the complexity of their thoughts and emo tions in the very style of his prose. Faulkner’s realism anatomized the social structure of the South while at the same time affirming the com plexity and the dignity of his characters. Faulkner is profoundly demo cratic in the respect he shows for ordinary people. His “white trash” share-croppers, black farm hands, and seedy aristocrats lack refinement, but he never belittles them. Instead, he reveals that ordi nary life contains material enough for the highest art.

  The same can be said for Hemingway and Steinbeck, the other great modern American realists. Hemingway’s style, nearly opposite to Faulkner’s, is spare, terse, and cut to the bone. Disdaining flowery descriptions and commentary by the narrator, Hemingway’s mastery of dialogue and point of view create the effect of immersing the reader in the world of the characters. Steinbeck was more interested in the social problems of the country, but he never neglected the individual, whom he set against the backdrop of a natural world evocatively described. Steinbeck often turned to the Bible to amplify his themes (consider his titles East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath), and, like Faulkner, operated with a strong moral sensibility.

  From a Christian point of view, realism can be a way of coming to grips with the world and the human condition. Christianity is not primarily subjective, but objective. That is, it is not simply a matter of mystical feelings experienced in the private sanctum of the self. Rather, Christianity is the revelation of a God who exists independently of the self, a God who created the external world, who became incarnate in that world, who acts in history, and who calls His people to become involved in society through concrete moral actions. Christians will therefore be drawn to literary realism, interpreting what they read the same way they interpret what they experience, in light of their faith. In this regard, it does not matter too much if the author of a realistic novel is a Christian or not. If the novel is truly realistic, if it reflects the world as it actually is, the Christian reader can notice the same patterns of creation, sin, and love evident everywhere in “real life.”

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