realism • = “A mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or ‘reflecting’ faithfully an actual way of life. The term refers, sometimes confusingly, both to a literary method based on detailed accuracy of description (i.e. verisimilitude) and to a more general attitude that rejects idealization, escapism, and other extravagant qualities of romance in favour of recognizing soberly the actual problems of life.” (Chris Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms) realist vs. modernist textuality (Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 1996)
realist type of text modernist type of text
• “declarative” (cf. Barthes, • “interrogative” (cf. Barthes, “readerly/lisible”): there is a fixed, “writerly/scriptible”): requires predetermined meaning (put there reader’s participation in filling in the by author/author’s intention) that gaps (missing info, lack of the reader is to discover knowledge – ellipses, vacancies • Its conventions: illusionism; a made explicit) narrative leading to closure; • experiments with fictional world representation of an intelligible characterized by fragmentariness, history; a hierarchy of voices relativity, skepticism, subjectivity • Illusionism = illusion of reality • if illusionist, “it also tends to employ achieved by mimesis, detailed, exact, devices to undermine the illusion, to “objective” descriptions, insight into draw attention to its own textuality” character, psychological processes the dismantling of realist conventions – language skepticism “There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water’, there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them. But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken, irreparably, it seems… The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each proclaiming ‘I mean what I mean!’ The dictionary that used to stand beside the Bible and the works of Shakespeare above the fireplace, where in pious Roman homes the household gods were kept, has become just one code book among many… There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts. The bottom has dropped out.” (J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 2004) Modernism – formal characteristics (Childs, Modernism, 20) • focus on the city • championing / fear of technology • technical experimentation allied with radical stylistic innovation • suspicion of language as a medium for comprehending/explaining the world • attack on 19th c. pieties, e.g. empiricism, rationalism, positivism • systematic, persistent attempts to multiply and disturb modes of representation / to redistribute the domain of the sensible (Rancière) Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie, 1911-12 The picture's metaphorizing of its subject, as I see it - and I want to call that subject simply the process of representation... happens in its microstructure: the metaphor, the shifting, is in the relation of procedures to purposes, of describing to totalizing, of "abstract" to "illusionism." The metaphor, if I can put it this way, is in the obscurity not of consciousness or inwardness, but of what is most outward and on the surface in "Ma Jolie" - what are most matters of fact or practice about it. Modernism's metaphors are always directed essentially (tragically) to technique; because only technique seems to offer a ground, or a refuge, in a merely material world. I did say "seems to.“ (T. J. Clark 1999, 179) The idea of the modern: cultural contexts and origins • 1895: X-rays, discovery of radioactivity • 1900: quantum theory of energy • 1900: Freud, Traumdeutung • 1905: Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity “We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot – is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace… Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.” (Futurist Manifesto) the idea of the (post)modern: precursors modernity’s crises of belief • starting point of Modernism = crisis of belief that pervades 20th-c. western culture: loss of faith; experience of fragmentation and disintegration; shattering of cultural symbols and shared norms. At the centre of this crisis: new technologies of science, epistemology of logical positivism, the relativism of functionalist thought. • responses: utopianism / emancipatory drive cultural pessimism: “things fall apart, the Centre cannot hold” (W.B. Yeats) / Entzauberung (Heidegger) Karl Marx (1815-1883) • “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, however, to change it.” (1848) • Theory of surplus value, inherent class conflict; capitalism’s insatiable desires/drives; permanent revolution; continuous creation/renewal vision of organic society eroded – CONFLICT seen as basis of life in industrialized West. Capitalism thrives on disturbance, uncertainty, progress; market economy recognizes Communist Manifesto (1848) no extraneous privileges Das Kapital I-III (1867-1894) Marx’s legacy - Marxism • “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face … the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.” (Communist Manifesto) Modernist art: changing society can only be effected through shock tactics of avant-garde modernist aesthetics. Disruptive forms, techniques of alienation take the place of the naturalized forms of realist representation (cf. Russian avant-gardes; Brecht) Marxist criticism: purpose if interpretation = to penetrate to text’s “political unconscious” (=ideological interpretations inherent in language/narrative under guise of transparent representations of “reality”, through “strategies of containment” – e.g., symbolism), to its historical / social contradictions (Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1982) Charles Darwin (1809-1882) • driving force of evolution/history: natural selection / survival of the fittest (NOT rational thought/spiritual belief)
• humans: part of the animal world –
evolving nature takes part of teleological vision of sense of history
• levelling effect: liberation from
ideologically-underpinned archaic rule by clergy/aristocracy — new The Origin of Species by Means of division: strong vs. weak Natural Selection, 1859 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) • theory of divided mind: ego embattled between primitive id (~subconscious) and socialized superego • return of the repressed; sense of unease in culture dominance of id psychosis; dominance of superego neurosis Traumdeutung (1900); The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901); Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919-20); Das Unbehagen in Kultur Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) • “God is dead” • the revaluation of all values: challenging the foundations of teleological systems / metaphysical thought, radical questioning of all constricting social/aesthetic hegemonies • “nihilism”: (a) active – sign of increased power of spirit; (b) passive – decline/recession of power of spirit • theory of Dionysian principle (~tragic myth, disruption, sensuality, intuition, generative chaos): engendered preoccupation with myth • emphasis on relativity, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) interpretation, uncertainty Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a language turn/deconstruction • Language skepticism Philosophy of the Future (1886) Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (1892) the crises of modernity: language skepticism (I) • “It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things – metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.” (Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinn”, 1873)
• “Language is not an object or a tool; it merely is its use. Language
is language usage.” (Fritz Mauther, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 1903) • “The boundaries of my language are the boundaries of my world.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922)
• the subject is inscribed in language, is a function of
language (Derrida) the crises of modernity: language skepticism At first I grew by degrees incapable of discussing a loftier or more general subject in terms of which everyone, fluently and without hesitation, is wont to avail himself. I experienced an inexplicable distaste for so much as uttering the words spirit, soul, or body... This was not motivated by any form of personal deference … but because the abstract terms of which the tongue must avail itself as a matter of course in order to voice a judgment - these terms crumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungi. Thus, one day, while reprimanding my four-year- old daughter for a childish lie … and demonstrating to her the necessity of always being truthful, the ideas streaming into my mind suddenly took on such iridescent colouring, so flowed over into one another, that I reeled off the sentence as best I could, as if suddenly overcome by illness. Now and then at night the image of this Crassus is in my brain, like a splinter round which everything festers, throbs, and boils. It is then that I feel as though I myself were about to ferment, to effervesce, to foam and to sparkle. And the whole thing is a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking in a medium more immediate, more liquid, more glowing than words. It, too, forms whirlpools, but of a sort that do not seem to lead, as the whirlpools of language, into the abyss, but into myself and into the deepest womb of peace. (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “The Letter of Lord Chandos”, 1902)