Module description
Realism, it appears, is back: memoir, documentary, reality tv, social media’s autoethnographies of the intimate and quotidian, all forms of what David Shields has called our contemporary ‘reality hunger,’ a broad cultural tropism towards ‘the lure and blur of the real.’ In the academy, new canons of contemporary, ethnic and world realist fiction are emerging to view, while scholars across disciplines have begun calling for a turn from depth hermeneutics to more chastened practices of close description and surface reading. In light of such realignments, this course revisits realism’s long twentieth-century history. We will examine a range of realist texts, including works of socialist and postcolonial realism, and seek to understand realism’s polemic imbrication in the formation of modernism, postmodernism and magical realism, in the mid-century elevation of literature departments and the professionalization of critics, and in the sub-field formation of Romantic, Americanist, Modernist and Postcolonial studies. We will gauge the geopolitics of debates over the value of realism, and ask how the imperial ambitions of France, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States shaped the distribution of mimetic and anti-mimetic writing around the world.
Assessment details
Presentation (15%), 3000-word essay (85%)
Teaching pattern
One two-hour seminar weekly