VERSIONS OF REALISM
2015-2016
Michael Jones
MODULE OUTLINE
In the long, ongoing period of cultural modernity, realism has become the most obdurate,
ubiquitous, malleable, and persistent of artistic modes. Variously understood as a period,
genre, style, or movement, as both reflection of nature and function of technology, as
wildly revolutionary and deeply conservative, realism tends to be everywhere, in part,
because we are not sure what it is exactly. This diffuseness around the term's use, however,
is belied by the ease with which the term is used to designate works of art. In one of its
most famous guises, realism plays the part of the antecedent (Oedipal) other that
modernism seeks to destroy, or at least displace. And yet, this understanding of realism
(and modernism) fails to register both the survival of realist concerns and textual
manoeuvres in modernist texts and the way in which realist forms themselves (if we are
even able to pin them down as such) already articulate many or most of modernism's
ideological and aesthetic claims. This module will explore theories and histories of realism
and will attempt to apprehend realism's elusiveness through a series of rubrics: the type,
the document, the literal, totality, reflection, revolution, transparency, impersonality,
populism, prescience, contingency, necessity, irruption and mourning.
ASSESSMENT MODE
This module is assessed by a 5000-word essay.
Please check Sussex Direct for up-to-date details of assessment modes and deadlines.
CORE THEORETICAL TEXT (please purchase)
Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013)
WEEK 1: Introductions
Fredric Jameson, ‘The Twin Sources of Realism: The Narrative Impulse’ and ‘The Twin
Sources of Realism: Affect, or the Body’s Present’ in F. Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism
(London: Verso, 2013)
WEEK 2: Realism and the Victorian Novel I
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin, 2003)
(Please be sure to purchase the Penguin Classics edition)
Further reading:
Rachel Bowlby, ‘Introduction: Two interventions on realism’, Textual Practice, 25:3, 395-436
WEEK 3: Realism and the Victorian Novel II
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Fredric Jameson, ‘George Eliot and Mauvaise Foi’ in F. Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism
WEEK 4: Realism and Naturalism
Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin, trans. Robin Buss (London: Penguin, 2004)
(Please be sure to purchase the Penguin Classics edition)
Further reading:
Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (essay variously collected - any edition)
Fredric Jameson, ‘Zola, or, the Codification of Affect’ in F. Jameson, The Antinomies of
Realism
WEEK 5: Realism and Modernism I - The Image, The Ordinary
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(Please purchase a Penguin Modern Classics edition; you may have to buy this secondhand)
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (extract)
Further reading:
André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema? Volume I. d.
and trans Hugh Gray. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p.9-16
Caroline Blinder (ed.), New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: New Perspectives
on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Susan Sontag, ‘America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly’ in S. Sontag, On Photography
(London: Penguin, 1979)
WEEK 6: Realism and Modernism II - Representation
Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (London: Penguin, 1966)
Mark Godfrey, ‘Barnett Newman’s Stations and the Memory of the Holocaust’, October 108
(2004): 35–50 (available online through Sussex Library)
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’ in W. Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007)
Georg Lukács, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’ in G. Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary
Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (Monmouth: Merlin Press, 2006)
Further reading:
Bryan Cheyette, Muriel Spark (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 2000)
Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism
WEEK 7: Realism and Cinema I
John Cassavetes (dir.), Minnie and Moskowitz (Hollywood Pictures, 1971)
Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Acinema’, trans. Paisley N. Livingston, Wide Angle 2, 3 (1978),
53-59
Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Something like: “Communication ... without Communication”’
and ‘Speech Snapshot’ in J-F. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1993)
EASTER BREAK
WEEK 8: Realism and Cinema II
Michelangelo Antonioni (dir.), The Passenger (Sony Pictures, 1975)
Vittorio De Sica (dir.), Umberto D. (Argent Films/Nouveaux, 1952)
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Beyond the Movement-Image’ in G. Deleuze Cinema 2: The Time-Image,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), p.1-24
WEEK 9: Reality, History and Appearance
Don DeLillo, Libra (London: Penguin, 2011)
Fredric Jameson, ‘The Historical Novel Today, or, Is it Still Possible?’ in F. Jameson, The
Antinomies of Realism
Further reading:
Peter Boxall, ‘Becoming historical: Libra’ in P. Boxall, Don DeLillo: The possibility of fiction
(Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006)
Don DeLillo, “The Power of History”, The New York Times, 7 September 1997
<https://www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html> [accessed 27 November
2015]
WEEK 10: Realism and Ecology
Don DeLillo, Libra
Don DeLillo, ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’ in D. DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
(London: Picador, 2011)
China Mieville, ‘Three Moments of an Explosion’ in C. Mieville, Three Moments of an
Explosion: Stories (London: Pan Macmillan, 2015)
Timothy Morton, ‘The Age of Asymmetry’ in T. Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and
Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
(available online through Sussex Library)
WEEK 11: Spaces and Bodies
Sofia Coppola (dir.), The Bling Ring (Studiocanal, 2013)
Sofia Coppola (dir.), Lost in Translation (Focus Features, 2003)
Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, ‘1: Aporetic dispossession, or the trouble with
dispossession’, ’15: Enacting another vulnerability: On owing and owning’, ’16: Transborder affective foreclosures and state racism’, ’21: Spaces of appearance, politics of
exposure’ in J. Butler and A. Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013) (available online through Sussex Library)
Further reading:
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004)
WEEK 12: Conclusions
GENERAL READING AND USEFUL SECONDARY SOURCES
Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Zone
Books, 2008)
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1953)
Barthes, Roland, ‘The Reality Effect’ in R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (University
of California Press, 1992)
Bazin, Andre, What is Cinema? Volumes I and II, ed. and trans Hugh Gray. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967, 1971)
Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (CUP,
2009)
Blinder, Caroline (ed.), New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: New Perspectives on Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Boxall, Peter, Don DeLillo: The possibility of fiction (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006)
!
—Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: CUP, 2013)
"
— ‘Is This Really Realism?’ in P. Boxall, The Value of the Novel (CUP, 2015)
Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Verso, 2004)
Butler, Judith and Athanasiou, Athena, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2013)
Cheyette, Bryan, Muriel Spark (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 2000)
Cohen, Josh, Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (Continuum, 2003)
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, trans.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)
"
— Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 2000)
Ellmann, Maud, The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud
(Cambridge: CUP, 2010)
Flaxman, Gregory (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000)
Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 1996)
Frow, John, Character & Person (Oxford: OUP, 2014)
Heise, Ursula, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (OUP, 2008)
Jameson, Fredric, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013)
Kaufman, Eleanor and Heller, Kevin Jon (eds.), Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and
Culture (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)
Lukács, Georg, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (Monmouth: Merlin
Press, 2006)
"
— The Theory of the Novel (London: The Merlin Press, 2003)
— Writer and Critic (London: The Merlin Press, 1970)
Lyotard, Jean-François, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993)
McCarthy, Tom, ‘Writing Machines: On Realism and the Real’, London Review of Books, Vol. 36 No. 24, 18
December 2014, pp.21-22
< http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/tom-mccarthy/writing-machines>
Moretti, Franco, The Novel, Volumes I-II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)
Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013)
Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995)
"
"
— ‘Divergences: Modernism, Postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard’, Critical Quarterly 33, 3 (1991),
1-18
Ranciere, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics, Gabriel Rockhill, trans. (London: Continuum, 2004)
Smith, Zadie, ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ in Z. Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (London:
Penguin, 2011)
Sontag, Susan, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979)