Social Realism Literature

8 Key excerpts on "Social Realism Literature"

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  Towards a Semiotics of Ideology

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

    (Publisher)

  Above all, what Socialist Realism represents is an historical example of literary representation's adaptation to the concrete historical demands of a particular period. In an era marked by politico-social events of great 130 Narrative and realist representation importance (the consolidation of the Soviet revolution and of Stalinism, the economic crisis of the 30's, the birth of the People's Front in France, the establishment of totalitarian regimes in Italy, Germany and Portugal, the political origins of the 2nd World War, etc., etc.) it is not surprising to find partial and ideologically proselytizing expositions of Realism; this is precisely the case with Jean Cassou when he states, in 1936: ... In art I cannot express all of reality and nobody can oblige me to express all of reality. I can only express that with which I feel a deep solidarity. 19 On to these models, to some extent justified by an era filled with tension, Socialist Realism further superimposed an orientation originating in a peculiar political situation: the radical and incontrovertible assertion of the literary work's social content, the systematic rejection of formalist deviations, the postulation of the writer as an engineer of souls engaged in propelling society towards Socialism, the shaping of positive heroes as irreproachable interpreters of Socialist ideals, the concentration of the writer's attention on the phenomena of his time as the initial stage of bringing into perspective the society and the man of the future. All this was dominated by two basic principles: that which defended a preem-inently didactic viewofthe functionsof artand that which saw realist repre-sentation (ideologically informed by Dialectical Materialism) as a process of representation concerned with the social truth of its contents, rather than with artistic verisimilitude or with the appropriateness of technico-literary procedures.

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  The Long Revolution

  • Raymond Williams(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Parthian Books

    (Publisher)

  7 Realism and the Contemporary Novel

  The centenary of ‘realism’ as an English critical term occurred but was not celebrated in 1956. Its history, in this hundred years, has been so vast, so complicated and so bitter that any celebration would in fact have turned into a brawl. Yet realism is not an object, to be identified, pinned down and appropriated. It is, rather, a way of describing certain methods and attitudes, and the descriptions, quite naturally, have varied, in the ordinary exchange and development of experience. Recently, I have been reconsidering these descriptions, as a possible way of defining and generalising certain personal observations on the methods and substance of contemporary fiction. I now propose to set down: first, the existing variations in ‘realism’ as a descriptive term; second, my own view of the ways in which the modern novel has developed; third, a possible new meaning of realism.

  There has, from the beginning, been a simple technical use of ‘realism’, to describe the precision and vividness of a rendering in art of some observed detail. In fact, as we shall see, this apparently simple use involves all the later complexities, but it seemed, initially, sufficiently accurate to distinguish one technique from others: realism as opposed to idealisation or caricature. But, also from the beginning, this technical sense was flanked by a reference to content: certain kinds of subject were seen as realism, again by contrast with different kinds. The most ordinary definition was in terms of an ordinary, contemporary, everyday reality, as opposed to traditionally heroic, romantic or legendary subjects. In the period since the Renaissance, the advocacy and support of this ‘ordinary, everyday, contemporary reality’ have been normally associated with the rising middle class, the bourgeoisie. Such material was called ‘domestic’ and ‘bourgeois’ before it was called ‘realistic’, and the connexions are clear. In literature the domestic drama and, above all, the novel, both developing in early eighteenth-century England with the rise of an independent middle class, have been the main vehicles of this new consciousness. Yet, when the ‘realist’ description arrived, a further development was taking place, both in content and in attitudes to it. A common adjective used with ‘realism’ was ‘startling’, and, within the mainstream of ‘ordinary, contemporary, everyday reality’ a particular current of attention to the unpleasant, the exposed, the sordid could be distinguished. Realism thus appeared as in part a revolt against the ordinary bourgeois view of the world; the realists were making a further selection of ordinary material which the majority of bourgeois artists preferred to ignore. Thus ‘realism’, as a watchword, passed over to the progressive and revolutionary movements.

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  Adventures in Realism

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

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: Reclaiming Realism Matthew Beaumont Realism is an issue not only for literature: it is a major political, philosophical and practical issue that must be handled and explained as such – as a mat-ter of general human interest. Bertolt Brecht In a useful collection of historical documents about realism in literature that he compiled almost half a century ago, George J. Becker complained that “the subject of realism is not especially congenial to the critics of our day” (Becker 1963: 3). He grumbled that one type of critic in par-ticular – not perhaps ideologically opposed to realism, like those that stra-tegically promoted the modernist movement – had nonetheless “become bored with it and finds that this subject, always rather obvious and simple-minded, need no longer engage the subtle mind of the literary scholar” (Becker 1963: 3). Becker might have been thinking of formal-istic critics like Northrop Frye, for whom realism was in some fundamental sense anti-literary: “One of the most familiar and important features of literature,” Frye had declared in his famous Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, “is the absence of a controlling aim of descriptive accuracy” (Frye 1990: 75). Becker’s complaint also proved to be prophetic, though. In the succeeding decades, philosophers and critics both opposed to real-ism and simply uninterested in it continued to replicate, and indeed to reinforce, the attitude that he had characterized. In an influential essay from 1982, for instance, Jean-François Lyotard collapsed realism into a superficial conception of mimesis, loftily insisting that it “always stands somewhere between academicism and kitsch”; realism’s “only definition,” he concluded, “is that it intends to avoid the question of reality implic-ated in that of art” (Lyotard 1984: 75).

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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)

  And Strindberg’s interest in the individual psyche remains a bedrock of much compelling acting—acting generally asso-ciated with some version of realism—whether or not a particular script calls for it explicitly. Pam Morris offers “a useful way of understanding part of the artis-tic impulse behind realism: a complex, ambivalent responsiveness towards, rather than repulsion from, the tangible stuff of reality. Real-ism is committed to the material actuality we share as embodied crea-tures.”17 That material actuality, of course, is hardly identical across cultural space. Since writers and readers vary in their social situation, “what is seen as ‘reality’ depends on the social position of the per-ceiver.”18 Both Zola and Strindberg are right. Literary realism is not a mirror but a synecdoche, as Brian Richardson observes—a shorthand for the social world.19 Literary representation is never identical to its object.20 These arguments refer to realist novels, but the insights are equally valuable regarding plays, especially since the realities encoun- 6 I N T R O D U C T I O N tered in the theatre are not just textual and may resonate visually even when rankling verbally, or vice versa. In this way, more or less realistic theatre productions may precisely, in Brecht’s words, “unmasking the prevailing view of things” in the eyes of spectators who don’t totally share, or who share uneasily, the “view of those who are in power.” Morris repeatedly makes clear that “the form of realism is neces-sarily protean, but the commitment of the genre to historical particu-larity is non-negotiable.”21 The sometimes bad rap that realism gets in theatre is largely the result of its being misrecognized as not being protean.22 This point yields two additional insights.

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  Realism: Aesthetics, Experiments, Politics

  • Jens Elze(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  It is also fundamentally about defamiliarization (an often forgotten element of realism that Caroline Levine will also return to in the present volume): about introducing practices, people, relations, and objects into our perception of reality that have previously eluded it. Realism, then, is not only an epistemological mode or style—alternatively marked by empiricism or synthesis, narration or description, by pseudoethnographic observation or totalization—but also works with changing political and even ontological assumptions about the contours of reality, confirming George Levine’s claim that “realism exists as a process, responsive to the changing nature of reality.” 37 The style and the 6 REALISM politics of realism, then, may differ dramatically with what is counted in a work as vital for a particular vision of reality: from global relations of capital to the life of social classes and cultural groups to psychological states and physical sensations, a realist prism can range all the way to molecules, affects, and viruses—in its history turning (for better or worse) from the dialectics of historical materialism to the contingencies of “new materialisms.” Realism between Dialectics and Assemblage Drawing heavily on Rancière, Pam Morris in her book Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism further complicates realism, via her epithet “worldly.” For Morris, “worldly” denotes a plethora of previously unacknowledged social relations and lifeworlds, but also very crucially the material reliance of realist stories and characters on a world of things, matters, and the ecologies that connect them.

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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)

  One can falsify realist descriptions by looking and seeing if they correspond to reality: Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fan-tastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. (Woolf 1966, 106) The Concept of Literary Realism | 27 So, if one opens up the concept of reality as it occurs in the criterion ‘providing a truthful/objective representation of some aspect of reality’, this criterion can-not be used to distinguish between the modes of writing that literary critics have been identifying as realism and modernism. The concept of realism has then lost its usefulness as a critical concept. The attack on literary realism by post-modernist critics was part and parcel of a wider attack on humanism. An unanalysed concept of realism with its ap-parent conceptual link to reference and truth provided an easy target for critics who wanted to undermine humanist values. And the response to post-modernist critics was not really a defence of realism, but, in Gerald Graff’s (1979, 193) words, “a realist defence of humanism”. And in this struggle the concept of realism was itself a casualty. When the concept of realism is put under pressure, as it was by Lukács and post-modernist critics, it breaks, and it breaks at a very important point. A concept of realism which licences the con-clusion that modernism leads to the destruction of literature, that only naïve readers can find any satisfaction in realist literary works, or that realist novels are not really realist, or that, contrary to all empirical evidence, realism is dead, is simply useless as a critical tool. The effect of the debate between post-modernist critics and the defenders of realism was to derail any fruitful discussion of realism for thirty years.

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  Reading Between the Lines

  A Christian Guide to Literature

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

    (Publisher)

  We read about a character, and we suddenly real ize that we know someone like that. The setting calls to mind places we have been and things we have seen. We recognize our own experiences in the problems and struggles of the characters. We are usually so immersed in our environment and in our thoughts that we lack the per spective we need to truly think about our lives. While reading a book, we are distanced from the fictional lives of the characters, enabling us to see our own condition, mirrored in the plot, more clearly. Realistic novels have a social dimension as well. Fiction can open our eyes to cultural pressures and social evils. A nation that had toler ated slavery was jolted by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dickens’s novels mobilized the British public to abolish the work houses and to pass child labor laws. More recently, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities has dissected with a satirical scalpel the urban culture of New York City, with its social hierarchies, tangled racial rela tions, Wall Street materialism, and skewed legal system. Realistic fiction forces people to recognize and reflect upon what is before their eyes, and as such it can have a powerful moral impact. (We need Christian novelists to awake the public to the evils of abortion, sexual depravity, materialism, and other symptoms of contemporary moral decadence.) Realistic literature operates by “defamiliarizing” experience. 5 It is often said that familiarity breeds contempt; it is probably more accu rate to say that familiarity breeds blindness. When we become used to something, we stop noticing it. Driving a car for the first time was exhilarating; after awhile, the complexities of driving become auto matic and routine. I remember moving to an apartment which had a magnificent view. From the balcony one could see for miles—the city, farmland and forests, a mountain in the distance. At first, I would stare out at the beauty. After awhile, I became used to it

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  European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism

  A Reader in Aesthetic Practice

  • Martin Travers(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  For Realism embraces the plenitude of life, the greatest as well as the smallest: it includes the Columbus, who bestows upon the world yet a new world, and the water fowl, whose entire universe is his pond. Realism draws the noblest thoughts, the deepest feelings into its ambit, and the meditations of a Goethe on the joys and sorrow of his Gretchen are the stuff of which it is made. For all that is actual Realism does not want to focus on the mere world of the senses, and nothing but this; it wants least of all the purely palpable, but it does want the true. It excludes nothing, other than lies, the artificial, the nebulous, and the atrophied -four qualities with which we might describe an entire [preceding] literary epoch. Realism 93 7 'These melancholy shades of life' Charles Dickens: Preface to Oliver Twist (1841) Charles Dickens (1812-70) was never self-consciously a 'Realist'; but his novels, such as Oliver Twist (1838), Dombey and Son (1848) and Hard Times (1854), engage with some of the major themes of Realist literature: the impact of urbanization upon the poor and disadvantaged; the emergence of a criminal class among the same; the ubiquity of commercialism and the profit motive, and its dissolving effects upon family and friendship. Like the Realists, Dickens felt compelled to defend the probity of his endeavours against accusations of impropriety and salaciousness, arguing, as he does here, in his Preface to Oliver Twist, that morality is only effective if it is shown to triumph in the most abject of circumstances. The greater part of this Tale was originally published in a magazine [Bentley's]. When I completed it, and put it forth in its present form three years ago, I fully expected it would be objected to on some very high moral grounds in some very high moral quarters. The result did not fail to prove the justice of my anticipations. I embrace the present opportunity of saying a few words in explanation of my aim and object in its production.

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