Kitchen Sink Realism

5 Key excerpts on "Kitchen Sink Realism"

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  Kitchen Sink Realisms

  Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre

  • Dorothy Chansky(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University Of Iowa Press

    (Publisher)

  1 INTRODUCTION REALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS “Kitchen Sink Realism” can polarize theatre workers and audi-ences. It is used by critics, ticket buyers, acting teachers, directors, and designers to denote plays trafficking in the domestic everyday, reveling in the use of household objects, often depicting people of limited fi-nancial means, and frequently featuring intense showdowns that favor psychologically credible acting, rather than, say, abstract, consciously poetic, or athletically physical styles. Some love its grittiness, literal- minded representational practices, and emotional intensity. Designers can have a field day with brand-names, vintage clothing, and working appliances; actors can invoke their deepest affective memories. Others roll their eyes at its mimetic naiveté. Playwright John Guare went so far as to title a 1996 anthology of his early plays The War against the Kitchen Sink .1 Coined to describe a new kind of post–World War II British real-ism, “kitchen sink” was also known as “angry theatre” or “committed theatre.” John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) enjoyed pride of place in the repertoire. In that strategically rebellious work “the well- furnished elegance of the middle-class stage gave place to kitchens and attics, with all their sordid paraphernalia of cooking stoves and ironing boards and beds.”2 The notion of an ironing board or a stove as sordid (ignoble, vile, squalid, wretchedly poor, run-down) strains credulity, unless one imagines realism as a genre delimited by drawing room conventions or policed by the privileged critic. That Arthur Miller considered Look Back in Anger the only modern British play worth seeing suggests that Kitchen Sink Realism was long overdue, at least in England. American plays had been depicting food preparation, ironing, the hovels of the destitute and the criminal, working-class homes, small-town families around the dinner table, and farm kitchens since the end of the nine-teenth century.

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  The Intersection of Class and Space in British Postwar Writing

  Kitchen Sink Aesthetics

  • Simon Lee(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  It is perhaps most appropriate to consider Kitchen Sink Realism as a refinement of prior realisms rather than as a retort, a correction, or a break. Texts of the movement tend to expose the limits of aesthetic realism by taking an active turn toward the political. It is, of course, too reductive to suggest that prior realisms centered on aesthetics in such a way that they reduced texts to a state of purely institutional or academic interest. The chief characteristics associated with realism—a shift away from the sensational toward something like documentary-style objectivity—are characteristics that parallel the development of the modern novel. Yet, the texts of the kitchen sink era do seem to view such realisms skeptically. Arguably, these texts are elevated and cerebral, but written with a working-class audience in mind rather than a more academic readership or as texts that simply feature working-class characters. Whereas realist novels of the past aimed for maximal narrative objectivity, Kitchen Sink Realism’s politicization of the aesthetic mode grants the text a more subversive mien.

  The growth of realism is generally read as a response to dominant romantic tropes. However, the evolution of the mode implies a continued effort to recalibrate aesthetic and political imperatives by merging form with function. While the early British Romantics such as William Wordsworth sought to democratize representation through the use of vernacular and a heightened focus on the ordinary, the Victorian period can be seen as an elaboration rather than a break. It was more the propensity for detailed storytelling seen in the popularity of serialized fiction and the dramatic monologue—rather than a concerted effort to dethrone the Romantic tradition—that helped define realist fiction. Since both the Romantics and the Victorians saw literary texts as didactic and utilitarian, any aesthetic progress between the two is best read as a desire to improve the social function of imaginative writing. Therefore, the social novel’s dedication to realism can be read as an evolution of the Romantics’ celebration of the ordinary, and Kitchen Sink Realism can be viewed as a further evolution of this same thought.

  As Mucignat indicates, spatial representation in realist novels was used more to serve the plot which held primacy. In Kitchen Sink Realism, spatial details and descriptions surpass narrative function, moving closer to Barthes’s notion of superfluous. This is due, in part, to the fact that a number of the key kitchen sink texts were conceived as vignettes—short pieces that, by design, would necessitate discreet, regular mentions of setting and environment. But it is likely also because kitchen sink texts are of their moment—they do not project into the past or the future, emphasizing instead their world as experienced in the contextual present. The result is a steady, rhythmic pattern of environmental detail. So, it is possible to consider how kitchen sink’s heightened emphasis on spatial representation acts in a manner similar to Barthes’s superfluous—a feature designed to bring about the reality effect through self-referentiality. That is to say, representations of space and place in kitchen sink texts surpass mere formalities; instead, they signal the important role of environmental details as part of the movement’s aesthetic program. By moving away from the idea that depicted space is little more than a stage for the story, the effect is that characters engage with spaces more readily—space shifts from a formal feature to an active, functional component of the realist technique. Such a development can be understood as part of the evolutionary process of realism, to naturalism, to social realism, and, eventually, to Kitchen Sink Realism.

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  Working-Class Literature(s)

  • (Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Stockholm University Press

    (Publisher)

  Much of the work produced during this time is deeply testimonial with writers such as Sillitoe and Delaney re-creating the worlds in which they themselves were raised, lend-ing the texts heightened legitimacy and speaking more directly to a working-class audience familiar with such environments. While nonfction texts like George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Richard Hoggart’s seminal The Uses of Literacy (1957) rely on the same kind of ethos central to the testimonio and the “Angry” text, both reveal a degree of sepia-tinged nostal-gia more commonly associated with conventional representation. The texts of the Kitchen Sink Realism movement largely sidestep nostalgia by presenting lived experience and the struggles unique to working-class people in a notably matter-of-fact way. Given this, the period in which Britain moved from postwar austerity to postwar af fuence marks perhaps the most defned and forceful example of a unifed proletarian literature to date. Having said that, the kitchen sink era and the approaches its writers favored are not without their inconsistencies. As a relatively brief moment in cultural history, combined with the youthful an-tagonism of the movement, the period reads as electrifed but with frayed wiring. It would be a stretch to suggest that Kitchen Sink Realism offered a cohesive philosophy as (aside from Declaration — a 1957 collection of essays penned by prominent fgures of the 176 Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives movement) no singular manifesto or galvanized approach can be identifed. Furthermore, despite the genuine class-based chal-lenges faced by several of the movement’s key fgures, some were quick to distance themselves from their origins while keeping working-class culture central to their narratives.

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  Realisms in Contemporary Culture

  Theories, Politics, and Medial Configurations

  • Dorothee Birke, Stella Butter, Dorothee Birke, Stella Butter(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  1–15, p. 2. 28 Yvonne Roberts, “Free yourself from kitchen-sink drama”, in: The Guardian , 24 March, 2005, Features, p. 3. 29 Jane Rogers, “Women’s fiction has plenty of scope”, in: The Guardian , 24 March, 2005, Features, p. 4. 30 Parker, “‘The Proper Stuff of Fiction’”, p. 14. Realism, Women Writers and the Contemporary British Novel 61 Parker’s argument politicizes the domestic, then, and reminds us that since the birth of the novel, its focus has often been on the material lives of women. Traditional frameworks of fiction – the realist novel being the chief one – are not, as Duncker argues, fit only for destruction; the realist novel, including within it a focus on the domestic, can be not only entertainment, but can also serve political goals. There are stories to be told about economic injustice, marriage and work for women in the twenty-first century, and they can be told within realism. Critics have supported this: Beate Neumeier, for instance, felt that [m]any of the so-called realist texts by women break with conventional patterns of signification in favour of a presentation of the suppressed in patriarchal discourse, while most of the so-called experimental women’s writing is firmly tied to aspects of realism. 31 Most notably, Penny Boumelha has argued that, although classic realism was seen as suspect, owing largely to the fact that the only two endings for female characters were marriage and death, it can act as powerful feminist tool. 32 As Seaboyer states, realism is, then, neither a conservative nor a safe choice of genre, since while realism has traditionally sought to provide an intelligible description of contingent reality, it has also […] served as a vehicle for radical investigations of the urgent dilemmas surrounding rapid change […] it observes but it also critiques.

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  Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies

  • Michele Fazio, Christie Launius, Tim Strangleman, Michele Fazio, Christie Launius, Tim Strangleman(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  14 Like Lefebvre, Harvey (2006) considers how the environment analogizes manifestations of capital, and the use of aesthetic grit amplifies such distinctions. Harvey picks up where Lefebvre left off, developing the link between urbanism and capitalism to uncover differential spaces of contention. Whereas Lefebvre posited space as the result of a dialectical triad, Harvey develops this concept further by adding three more categories to merge with perceived, conceived, and representational space, resulting in a nine-way matrix. By complicating his original approach, Harvey offers a more nuanced way of conceiving of Lefebvre’s slippery ‘lived space’ category—the immaterial component of space structured upon social interactions and negotiations.

  15 The British New Wave is the cinematic counterpart to the literature and theater production of the kitchen sink movement. Many of the novels and films of the period were transformed into screenplays by the original writers, teaming up with directors like Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson. Room at the Top (1959), Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), and A Taste of Honey (1961) all balanced aesthetic interests with social and ethically minded intent.

  16 As discussed prior, and well outlined in work by Higson (1996) and Lay (2002), kitchen sink texts built on documentary motifs as well as the use of taboo subject matter. However, I would argue that kitchen sink texts amplify the use of space and setting to place working-class characters into stark relief for close analysis.

  17 Whereas the kitchen sink movement was arguably more political than commercial, Coronation Street

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