Reading Capitalist Realism

Reading Capitalist Realism PDF Author: Leigh Claire La Berge
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609382633
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by economic globalization, neoliberalism, and financialization, writers and artists have addressed the problem of representing the economy with a new sense of political urgency. Anxieties over who controls capitalism have thus been translated into demands upon literature, art, and mass media to develop strategies of representation that can account for capitalism’s power. Reading Capitalist Realism presents some of the latest and most sophisticated approaches to the question of the relation between capitalism and narrative form, partly by questioning how the “realism” of austerity, privatization, and wealth protection relate to the realism of narrative and cultural production. Even as critics have sought to locate a new aesthetic mode that might consider and move beyond theorizations of the postmodern, this volume contends that narrative realism demands renewed scrutiny for its ability to represent capitalism’s latest scenes of enclosure and indebtedness. Ranging across fiction, nonfiction, television, and film, the essays collected here explore to what extent realism is equipped to comprehend and historicize our contemporary economic moment and what might be the influence or complicity of the literary in shaping the global politics of lowered expectations. Including essays on writers such as Mohsin Hamid, Lorrie Moore, Jess Walter, J. M. Coetzee, James Kelman, Ali Smith, Russell Banks, William Vollmann, and William Gibson, as well as examinations of Hollywood film productions and The Wire television series, Reading Capitalist Realism calls attention to a resurgence of realisms across narrative genres and questions realism’s ability to interrogate the crisis-driven logic of political and economic “common sense.”

Reading Capitalist Realism

Reading Capitalist Realism PDF Author: Leigh Claire La Berge
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609382633
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by economic globalization, neoliberalism, and financialization, writers and artists have addressed the problem of representing the economy with a new sense of political urgency. Anxieties over who controls capitalism have thus been translated into demands upon literature, art, and mass media to develop strategies of representation that can account for capitalism’s power. Reading Capitalist Realism presents some of the latest and most sophisticated approaches to the question of the relation between capitalism and narrative form, partly by questioning how the “realism” of austerity, privatization, and wealth protection relate to the realism of narrative and cultural production. Even as critics have sought to locate a new aesthetic mode that might consider and move beyond theorizations of the postmodern, this volume contends that narrative realism demands renewed scrutiny for its ability to represent capitalism’s latest scenes of enclosure and indebtedness. Ranging across fiction, nonfiction, television, and film, the essays collected here explore to what extent realism is equipped to comprehend and historicize our contemporary economic moment and what might be the influence or complicity of the literary in shaping the global politics of lowered expectations. Including essays on writers such as Mohsin Hamid, Lorrie Moore, Jess Walter, J. M. Coetzee, James Kelman, Ali Smith, Russell Banks, William Vollmann, and William Gibson, as well as examinations of Hollywood film productions and The Wire television series, Reading Capitalist Realism calls attention to a resurgence of realisms across narrative genres and questions realism’s ability to interrogate the crisis-driven logic of political and economic “common sense.”

Reading for Realism

Reading for Realism PDF Author: Nancy Glazener
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822318705
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Reading for Realism presents a new approach to U.S. literary history that is based on the analysis of dominant reading practices rather than on the production of texts. Nancy Glazener's focus is the realist novel, the most influential literary form of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--a form she contends was only made possible by changes in the expectations of readers about pleasure and literary value. By tracing readers' collaboration in the production of literary forms, Reading for Realism turns nineteenth-century controversies about the realist, romance, and sentimental novels into episodes in the history of readership. It also shows how works of fiction by Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others participated in the debates about literary classification and reading that, in turn, created and shaped their audiences. Combining reception theory with a materialist analysis of the social formations in which realist reading practices circulated, Glazener's study reveals the elitist underpinnings of literary realism. At the book's center is the Atlantic group of magazines, whose influence was part of the cultural machinery of the Northeastern urban bourgeoisie and crucial to the development of literary realism in America. Glazener shows how the promotion of realism by this group of publications also meant a consolidation of privilege--primarily in terms of class, gender, race, and region--for the audience it served. Thus American realism, so often portrayed as a quintessentially populist form, actually served to enforce existing structures of class and power.

Realism After Modernism

Realism After Modernism PDF Author: Devin Fore
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
The human figure made a spectacular return in visual art and literature in the 1920s. Following modernism's withdrawal, nonobjective painting gave way to realistic depictions of the body and experimental literary techniques were abandoned for novels with powerfully individuated characters. But the celebrated return of the human in the interwar years was not as straightforward as it may seem. In Realism after Modernism, Devin Fore challenges the widely accepted view that this period represented a return to traditional realist representation and its humanist postulates. Interwar realism, he argues, did not reinstate its nineteenth-century predecessor but invoked realism as a strategy of mimicry that anticipates postmodernist pastiche. Through close readings of a series of works by German artists and writers of the period, Fore investigates five artistic devices that were central to interwar realism. He analyzes Bauhaus polymath László Moholy-Nagy's use of linear perspective; three industrial novels riven by the conflict between the temporality of capital and that of labor; Brecht's socialist realist plays, which explore new dramaturgical principles for depicting a collective subject; a memoir by Carl Einstein that oscillates between recollection and self-erasure; and the idiom of physiognomy in the photomontages of John Heartfield. Fore's readings reveal that each of these "rehumanized" works in fact calls into question the very categories of the human upon which realist figuration is based. Paradoxically, even as the human seemed to make a triumphal return in the culture of the interwar period, the definition of the human and the integrity of the body were becoming more tenuous than ever before. Interwar realism did not hearken back to earlier artistic modes but posited new and unfamiliar syntaxes of aesthetic encounter, revealing the emergence of a human subject quite unlike anything that had come before.

Realism

Realism PDF Author: Damian Grant
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351631020
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 99

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Book Description
First published in 1970, this book provides an introduction to literary realism. After considering what realism is and its philosophical roots, it goes on to examine the emergence of the idea of realism in nineteenth-century France and its gradual spread across the wider republic of letters. This work will be of interest to those studying nineteenth-century European literature.

Socialist Realism

Socialist Realism PDF Author: Trisha Low
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566895596
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
When Trisha Low moves west, her journey is motivated by the need to arrive “somewhere better”—someplace utopian, like revolution; or safe, like home; or even clarifying, like identity. Instead, she faces the end of her relationships, a family whose values she has difficulty sharing, and America’s casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. In this book-length essay, the problem of how to account for one's life comes to the fore—sliding unpredictably between memory, speculation, self-criticism, and art criticism, Low seeks answers that she knows she won't find. Attempting to reconcile her desires with her radical politics, she asks: do our quests to fulfill our deepest wishes propel us forward, or keep us trapped in the rubble of our deteriorating world?

Reading and Realism

Reading and Realism PDF Author: International Reading Association Staff
Publisher: Newark, Del. : International Reading Association
ISBN: 9780598209429
Category : Reading Congresses
Languages : en
Pages : 898

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Book Description


Theories of Literary Realism

Theories of Literary Realism PDF Author: Dario Villanueva
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791433287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Realism has not only shaped important schools and periods in literary history, but has also been a fundamental constant of all literature, its first theoretical formulation being the principle of mimesis in Aristotle's Poetics. Realism can be considered by extension one of the main aspects of literary theory, the aims of which must be to define its concepts clearly and to neutralize the imprecision, polysemy, and ambiguity that often characterized the application of realism.

On Realism

On Realism PDF Author: J. P. Stern
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000357295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
First published in 1973, On Realism is a comprehensive introduction to the complex problem of literary realism. Written from both a critical and philosophical perspective, the book brings together the concrete study of literary cases and the conceptual analysis of the terms used in describing them. It uses examples drawn from a wide range of European literature and engages in philosophical discussion to argue for a richer and freer sense of the concept than was more commonly in favour at the time of writing. The book describes the literary forms of realism as an art of the 'middle distance' and sets out its character and value against alternatives and distortions - symbolism, naturalism, socialist realism, faits divers, and the literature of language consciousness. On Realism will appeal to those with an interest in literary history, the history of literary theory, and literature and philosophy.

The Portable American Realism Reader

The Portable American Realism Reader PDF Author: Various
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101127503
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 710

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Book Description
During the pivotal period of America's international emergence, between the Civil War and WWI, the aligned literary movements of Realism and Naturalism not only shaped the national literature of the age, but also left an indelible and far-reaching influence on twentieth-century American and world literature. Seeking to strip narrative from pious sentimentalities, and, according to William Dean Howells, to "paint life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation," Realism is best represented by this volume's masterly pieces by Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather among others. The joining of Realist methods with the theories of Marx, Darwin, and Spencer to reveal the larger forces (biological, evolutionary, historical) which move humankind, are exemplified here in the fiction of such writers as Jack London, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser.

Reading Realism in Stendhal

Reading Realism in Stendhal PDF Author: Ann Jefferson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521262747
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book poses the question: what happens when reading enters the realist process? and answers it by way of a critical study of Stendhal's writing. Ann Jefferson argues that a recognition of the role of reading in representation is particularly crucial to an understanding of Stendhal's realism, and her account includes substantial discussions of De l'Amour, Le Rouge et le Noir, the Vie de Henry Brulard and La Chartreuse de Parme. Her study also draws a number of illuminating parallels between Stendhal and aspects of modern critical theory, and uses them in order to reveal the high degree of sophistication and self-consciousness in Stendhal's writing, qualities which are attributed here to the intensity of his preoccupation with his readers. By focusing on the issue of reading in Stendhal this book not only proposes a reassessment of Stendhal's own work, but also opens up lines of enquiry on the critical problem that is realism.