Realism (Literature)

Reading Erich Auerbach’s highly influential Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, it quite quickly becomes evident that Auerbach is not seeking to supply us with a universal recipe for realism in literature, if such a recipe even exists. As Edward Said writes in the introduction to Mimesis ”Auerbach offers no system, no shortcut to what he puts before us as a history of the representation of reality in Western literature” (Said xxxii). Rather, we embark on an intriguing ride through Western literature across thousands of years, in order to understand just how closely style and history are related. Through focusing on, and analysing passages of texts written by various writers throughout time, Auerbach expands into connecting the text with its historical environment. Focusing on the 13th chapter of Mimesis, ”The Weary Prince”, in which Auerbach discusses Shakespeare, I will use the ”gravedigger scene” form Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, to test and analyse Auerbach’s views on realism in Mimesis.

This article surveys new forms of drama, performance, and spectatorship created by artists making use of the real-time microblogging website Twitter—as either a forum for performance in itself, or way to extend the boundaries of a more conventionally theatrical performance. He goes on to describe the ways in which social media “are making playwrights, performers, and spectators of us all,” and proposes a new category, "virtual realism," to describe accurate representations of aspects of life that are already virtual.

Tüm sanat dalları gibi edebiyat da çağın gerçeklikle kurduğu ilişki doğrultusunda yenilenir, gelişir. Özellikle yirminci yüzyılda hızlı bir değişime giren dünya ve günlük hayat yabancılaşma, tekinsizlik gibi yeni bireysel gerçeklikleri doğururken, sanat da buna kayıtsız kalamamış, yeni akımlar ve eğilimler geliştirmiştir. Bu değişime koşut olarak gelişen Sürrealizm, Dadaizm gibi geleneksel karşıtı türlerden bahsederken, okuyucunun değişimi geri planda kalmıştır. Bu makale Yıldız Ecevit'in yeni edebiyatın çoğulculuk özelliğini vurgulayarak beş farklı yöntemle okuduğu Orhan Pamuk'u Okumak adlı yapıtından faydalanarak, okurdaki değişimin izini sürecektir. Kuşkusuz okurdaki değişim eleştirinin de değişimi, bir bakıma eleştiri yöntemlerinin çöküşü demektir.

Middlemarch, in contrast to Adam Bede, represents the accomplishment of two apparently irreconcilable tasks. George Eliot succeeded in creating both a realistic novel about contemporary conditions and a Victorian romance. In her monograph The Triptych and the Cross Felicia Bonaparte is concerned with-to quote the book's subtitle-"the central mythos of George Eliot's Imagination." 1 Yet, as F. Bonaparte herself is well aware, George Eliot shows throughout her work a predilection for concrete historical settings and a keen interest in all that impinges on historical and societal reality. In unraveling this paradox, Bonaparte rejects the general line in Eliot criticism when she contends that Eliot is first and foremost a poet, that is, a writer who sees the world in essentially poetic terms even though her chosen literary medium belongs formally to the domain of prose fiction. 2 This paper will focus on Bonaparte's claims in relation to a comparative study of some of the mythical and historical references found in Adam Bede and Middlemarch A brief review of Northrop Frye's definition of "myth" will serve to provide a "history." In terms of popular usage-but only in such terms-myth and history are antithetical concepts: The Battle of Hastings really took place, Jupiter's rape of Europe did not. On a philosophical level myth and history present two ways of looking at and interpreting the same object, the succession of phenomena in time. In the historical view such phenomena compose a series of unrepeatable events, which is

The historical novel is one of the most popular and critically significant genres of postcolonial writing, but, to date, almost no systematic scholarship is dedicated to it. This essay proposes theoretical and critical parameters for exploring this genre. It begins with the observation that plausibility is a key principle articulated by many postcolonial writers and explores how framing novels in these terms, as a kind of realism, requires readers to negotiate heterogeneous structures of reference—and, in particular, to read imaginary characters as abstractions of historical phenomena. The second half of the paper explores the theoretical implications of this ontological heterogeneity, suggesting how the genre’s conventions are inflected by normative patterns of gender, race, and temporality. Overall, I propose that it is possible to read the postcolonial historical novel as a kind of allegory, and I offer the term allegorical realism to describe this paradoxical mixing of conceptual and affective knowledge.

Este artículo investiga los modos mediante los cuales la experiencia, definida al modo de Walter Benjamin, es transmitida en la narración autobiográfica Memorias de un emigrante. (Imágenes y confidencias) (1957), del escritor chileno-árabe Benedicto Chuaqui Ketlún. Se analizan independientemente las dos partes del texto, y en ambas se identifica una estrategia representacional de cuño realista, la particularización. A propósito de la segunda parte, Imágenes y confidencias, se concluye que la experiencia pierde autoridad en la misma medida en que su autor, exitoso comerciante, pierde contacto con el mundo material que lo sustenta. En cuanto a la primera, Memorias de un emigrante, afirmamos que la transmisión de la experiencia del "allá entonces" de Siria pierde su autoridad en tanto la particularización, obligada a referirse a un mundo ausente, termina intentando un realismo sin materia. Si toda experiencia es inactual (Oyarzún), entonces el fracaso de Chuaqui es parte de la historia de la literatura considerada justamente como una historia de esos fracasos. pAlABrAs clAVe: migrancia, realismo, literatura chileno-árabe, memoria.

Literary historians have long debated the extent to which the Modernist novel broke with conventions established in the nineteenth century. One of the most hotly debated matters is the existence of an “inward turn,” a rupture with the external orientation Realist and Naturalist novel in favor of greater psychological complexity and depth—that has been found in of the early years of Modernism by critics like Humphrey (1954: 8), Bradbury (1995 [1976]), and Sultan (1987) and in the late nineteenth century by critics like Levitt (2006) and Lewis (2007). One of the most common presuppositions about the purported “inward turn”—seldom tested—is that the linguistic innovations of the Modernist period aided in the portrayal of the mental states of characters from a more systematic perspective. This article reviews the debates over differences between Realist and Modernist techniques of thought representation, and uses quantitative techniques to assess the extent to which there was linguistic and stylistic innovation in the representation of thought in the French novel before and during the “inward turn” of the 1910s and 1920s. By tracing the use of reporting clauses and mental verbs (e.g. “she thought” and “he said to himself”) in a large sample of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century French novels, I estimate the prevalence of several key markers of represented thought in a range of French novels, authors, and decades between 1800 and 1929. I conclude that these common reporting clauses and mental verbs appeared in a wide variety of texts, particularly in the French novels of the 1830s, 1910s, and 1920s, alongside other “free” techniques like free indirect discourse which are more often studied. There is, thus, very little evidence that “free” forms like free indirect discourse displaced marked forms. Indeed, the French Modernist “inward turn” included a continuation of the supposedly more “primitive” forms of thought representation associated with the Realist novel: the 1910s and 1920s saw an increase in markers of represented thought that were frequently used in the nineteenth-century French novel.

Cierto “retorno de lo real” a la ficción argentina del presente parece marcar el pulso en las discusiones de la crítica literaria de los últimos años. Un arte “informe” –en sintonía con las transformaciones de una ciudad que prolifera en un vértigo horizontal y vertical incontenible– desafía los abordajes tradicionales y exige nuevas herramientas para explorar el vínculo entre la literatura y su “otro”, lo “real”. En este sentido, la lectura contrastada de dos poéticas –la de Fabián Casas y la de Martín Rejtman– revela una tensión sintomática de la literatura contemporánea y permite esbozar un mapa provisorio de los “nuevos” realismos, el recorrido de una figura y no una serie cerrada.

Procurando um início de resposta perante as dificuldades de classificação do “reality-show”, o presente trabalho argumenta que, não obstante, a sua multiplicidade constitutiva, a sua diversidade de formatos e a sua natureza fluida e evasiva, é possível delimitar os seus contornos gerais do “reality-show” enquanto género televisivo. Como primeiro passo dessa tarefa, sublinha-se, neste artigo, um conjunto de influências e factores de ascendência fundamentais que contribuíram decisivamente para moldar aquilo que entendemos na contemporaneidade por programas televisivos de realidade, nomeadamente, os movimentos artísticos do Realismo e do Naturalismo, a estética documental, o jornalismo sensacionalista, e o desenvolvimento da televisão enquanto indústria.

This paper examines the poetics of Realism through the genre of the sketch of manners as this genre is described in theory in the manifestos of Realism and used in practice by two major writers of the 19th century, Flaubert and Dostoevsky. The paper briefly examines the postulates of Realism as these appear in Les français peints par eux-mêmes [The French portrayed by the French], published in 1840 by Curmer, in Paris, together with Baudelaire's doctrine of Beauty which is taken as an elaboration on the poetics of the physiological sketch and feuilleton. With these tools, the paper examines the literary procédé of the two major Realists of the European canon. Based on a brief examination of three novels -Bouvard and Pécuchet, Madame Bovary and The Adolescent -this analysis seeks to uncover how the sketch of manners is transformed to become the vehicle for the representation of the desire of the age, which is will to power understood as self-overcoming and constituted as alienation of the self. Dostoevsky, who thought highly of Flaubert as a writer, with a more pronounced, deliberate artistic gesture than Flaubert's, puts alienation centre-stage in a new space -the space of the unconscious. In this space, Dostoevsky does not capture "living beings…and their luminous explosion in space," as Flaubert did. Dostoevsky's portraits of the time are, like Constantin Guys' sketches, impressionistic 'daubs' in black crayons, alluding to a shadowy world of the unknown which underlies all appearances. This is the world of repressed desire which is the actual domain of alienation.

Dans la littérature européenne, il y a toute une lignée de la «folie» ambigüe, parfois lucide, censée de révéler la vérité, de faire justice, de corriger le réel. C'est la «folie» de Hamlet, du pirandellien Enrico IV, d'Alonso Quijano auto-proclamé Don Quichotte. Sous le masque, de tels héros agissent afin d'améliorer l'ordre moral du monde, et d'en tirer au jour une vérité essentielle, jalousement cachée ou malheureusement oubliée. Motif littéraire aux origines beaucoup plus anciennes que le Baroque qui l'a consacré, el gran teatro del mundo croise ainsi l'auto-fiction du fou, le plus lucide y compris, tel qu'en témoignent l'oeuvre de Shakespeare, de Cervantes, de Pirandello, et jusqu'à un certain point, de I.L. Caragiale. Chez ce dernier, il y a  tout un monde à l’envers, qui, à quelques exceptions près, reste comme tel après la fin du texte; l'anarchie d'une fête des fous s'y installe à la longue. Les personnages de I.L. Caragiale défient, presque tous, soit moralement «le raisonnable», soit pathologiquement «la rationalité». Le comique y découle non seulement «du mécanique plaqué sur le vivant», mais aussi d'un soupçon de folie «plaquée» sur la raison. Notre approche est donc une relecture de la dramaturgie de I.L. Caragiale, dans la perspective d'une archéologie de l'imaginaire, plus précisément d'une (arché)typologie de la folie comme dérapage ou (prémisse de) réparation, telle que l'a déjà consacrée une longue histoire des mentalités européennes.
Mots-clés: «monde à l’envers», «nef des fous» (stultifera navis), (dé)raisonnable, el gran teatro del mundo, I.L. Caragiale, Michel Foucault, Năpasta [Le Malheur], D'ale carnavalului [Du carnaval], O scrisoare pierdută [Une lettre perdue].

This work aimed to analyze the relationship between art and politics, based on the aesthetic conception of the triumph of realism, originally indicated by Friedrich Engels. For this, the theoretical categories came from a letter in which this author, presenting a literary criticism of a work by Margaret Harkness, made suggestive comments about the specificity of aesthetic legality and how the writer can proceed to understand the autonomy of arts. It was made a reflexive examination of artistic conceptions of idealistic and naturalistic nature, to shows their limits in the face of aesthetic realism. In this sense, the article was started by an allegory on the relation between aesthetic elements and the ideological and political determinations that make up these artistic conceptions, in order to demonstrate, in an imaginary way, these implications. In the second moment, we sought to correlate, from more solid theoretical and methodological principles, the presuppositions of literary criticism related to the triumph of realism. In these analyses, the French writers Émile Zola and Honoré de Balzac appears like exemplars of great distinction in the treatment of the aesthetic reflection and its relation to the artist's political conception.

This paper will address two moments in cinematic history: a shot that occurs in Robert Wiene's avant-garde production of THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI (1920) and the attempt by the main protagonist in Antonioni's BLOW-UP (1966) to discern a phantom figure in a blurry section of a photograph. Both are examples of what I term ,visual indeterminacy', where images resist easy or deny immediate interpretation. Visual indeterminacy is in fact quite a common perceptual phenomenon. Although not very widely studied in science it has been recognized for centuries by visual artists and writers. I will discuss the phenomena of visual indeterminacy, its perceptual basis, and its wider implications for our understanding of how we see the world. In particular, I will note the impact of indeterminacy on our notion of the ,real' by looking at the work of the artist Gerhard Richter, whose images veer between the mechanically and expressionistically abstract to the photographic. Richter's declaration that works of art should defy easy interpretation will be considered in relation a wider modernist preoccupation with indeterminate meaning.

El presente trabajo intentará dar un primer acercamiento a la noción del límite en el novelato “La ilusión monarca” de Marcelo Cohen, incluido en El fin de lo mismo. El análisis partirá del presupuesto de que el límite es transversal al texto en su totalidad.
La representación de esa realidad se encuentra “cercada”, es decir, no es posible ver más allá de la cárcel. Esta realidad se estructura en base a tres perspectivas respecto del sujeto: el ámbito en que se mueve, al lugar en donde se proyecta y en su subjetividad.
De este modo, en el entramado textual nos encontramos con elementos resemantizados por la particular mirada de los personajes y del mismo protagonista, Sergio: cárcel, mar, horizonte y boyas. Elementos que se traducen en libertad, posibilidad, locura y muerte y se combinan en el texto logrando una construcción particular de un sujeto que está obligado a convivir con lo imposible.

Palabras clave: representación – realidad – límite – sujeto

This article reads Kafka’s 1912 short story “Das Urteil” against—and potentially, as a response to—Gustav Freytag’s bestselling saga of German mercantilism and middle-class advancement, the 1855 novel Soll und Haben. Placing these two texts in juxtaposition to one another (and in contrast to related intertexts by James Joyce and Max Brod) in the context of Kafka’s well-known practices of pastiche, the article shows how Kafka’s story structurally inverts particular aspects of Freytag’s novel, upsetting the expectations and roles that Freytag’s popular bourgeois Bildungsroman assumes or tendentiously seeks to naturalize. Kafka’s story thus not only intervenes in the infamously racialized (not to say racist) hierarchies of Soll und Haben’s universe, but also destabilizes the identificatory, edifying, and inculcating practices of reading that Freytag’s novel, as a paradigmatic text of German realism, implicitly demands.

Der Umgang mit der Sprache ist von zentraler Bedeutung in Theodor Fontanes Berliner Alltagsgeschichte Irrungen, Wirrungen. Das zeigt sich schon daran, dass die Personen des Romans in höherem Maße durch ihre Sprache als durch ihr äußeres Erscheinungsbild charakterisiert werden: Lenes »Unredensartlichkeit« (124) 1 ist ein weit wichtigeres Kennzeichen als ihr »aschblonde[s] Haar« (15), und auch Käthe von Sellenthin bleibt dem Leser vor allem dank ihres »Talent[s] für die Plauderei« (147) in Erinnerung -ihre Beschreibung als »[w]undervolle Flachsblondine mit Vergißmeinnicht-Augen« (55) tritt demgegenüber in den Hintergrund. 2 Es kann daher nicht verwundern, dass die Sprache der Figuren und ihre Funktion im Verweisungsgeflecht des Romans in der Forschung auf verbreitetes Interesse gestoßen sind. 3 Eine Figur hat in diesem Zusammenhang jedoch kaum Beachtung gefunden; die Frage, wie es um Botho von Rienäckers Verhältnis zu und seinen Umgang mit Sprache bestellt ist, ist bisher nur beiläufig behandelt worden. Das ist umso erstaunlicher, wenn man bedenkt, dass gerade die Beziehung zwischen Botho und Lene nicht nur durch den gesellschaftlichen, sondern auch durch den korrespondierenden sprachlichen Gegensatz gekennzeichnet ist: Der Stil der Klubs und Salons, wo man »die Kunst des gefälligen Nichtssagens mit einer wahren Meisterschaft« (134) beherrscht »[u]nd ja […] gerade so viel [gilt] wie nein « (28), trifft hier auf den Stolz, »alles grad heraus zu sagen und keine Flausen zu machen und nichts zu vergrößern und nichts zu verkleinern« (152). Weil aber Botho von Rienäcker kein typischer Vertreter seines Standes ist, sondern, wie in manchem, auch in sprachlicher Hinsicht »seinen eignen Weg geht« (56), lässt sich diese Beziehung unter sprachlichem Gesichtspunkt nicht sinnvoll analysieren, solange Bothos ganz spezifischer Umgang mit Sprache nicht untersucht worden ist.

Im ersten Teil eines Gesprächs, das der Schattenblick mit Ingar Solty, einem der beiden Organisatoren der Tagung "Richtige Literatur im Falschen?", die vom 19. bis 21. Mai im Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus in Berlin stattfand, führen konnte, standen die Entstehung dieser Veranstaltung und ihrer Vorläuferin im vergangenen Jahr, aber auch einige der Fragen, die an diesen drei Tagen von Autoren und Autorinnen, Literatur-und Kulturwissenschaftlern unter Mitwirkung weiterer Interessierter diskutiert wurden. Im zweiten Teil geht es nun, noch etwas allgemeiner gefaßt, um die auf der Tagung aufeinandertreffenden verschiedenen Theorieansätze, den Sicherheitsdiskurs der Linken, die Transformationsdebatte sowie die gegenwärtige Renaissance des Revolutionsbegriffs.

The article reconstructs Jacques Rancière’s reading of Madame Bovary. Gustav Flaubert is presented by the French philosopher as a writer with a profound understanding of the contradictions
of literature caught up with ‘the aesthetic regime of art’. Rancière claims that Flaubert approaches his subjects in a spirit of radical equality. He brushes aside the hierarchies of genres and styles of the belles lettres tradition and in their stead introduces the concept of ‘absolute style’, treated as the one and only vehicle of literary distinction. He builds the plot with great care, but also halts its progress by bursts of heccéités, impersonal sensations released from the chains of individualization and objectifi cation. Flaubert insists that he believes only in ‘art for art’s sake’, and yet the poetics
of his work is deeply egalitarian. These paradoxes, Rancière explains, are rooted in a new regime of the art of writing called littérature. By blurring blurs the distinction between the realm of poetry and the sphere of prosaic life littérature establishes its identity as a blend of literature, democracy and politics.

O objetivo desta apresentação é discutir brevemente as principais personagens masculinas de A Normalista e de Bom-Crioulo, romances do escritor naturalista cearense Adolfo Caminha. Meu objetivo principal é mostrar que essas personagens se caracterizam de maneira negativa e moralmente decadente. A hipótese do trabalho é que tal decadência não resulta somente dos padrões estéticos característicos da literatura realista-naturalista, mas também reflete a oposição ideológica de Adolfo Caminha ao regime imperial brasileiro. Como sabemos, o governo imperial brasileiro foi substituido pelo regime republicano em 15 de novembro de 1889. Aqui por

The translation of Anthony Neilson's two-act in-yer-face play The Wonderful World of Dissocia into Turkish brings forth various struggles for the translator. Translation of plays has a hesitant nature; the missions of translating a literary text and translating a text written for the stage overlap each other. The translator aims to be loyal to the original "literary" text but in the case of a text that is primarily written for the stage, the responsibility of conveying the message of each sentence, by referring to the target culture if needs be, becomes a dominant one. The linguistic and textual features of above named in-yer-face play, the comic allegoric elements it includes, and the linguistic and symbolic conflict between the two acts lead the translator to a different translation experience. Yet also, the contemporary and daily usage of language, as well as the poetic cues that are constructed with a vocalic conformity make the translation process a challenging one. The aim of this article is to comment upon the difficulties, challenges and the authentic experience that the translation of this contemporary play brings forth.

The article studies the Finnish realistic novel at the end of the last millennium and its way to build a critical construction of social reality after the neoliberal turn. It describes different types of commitment and takes two novels as examples: the Finnish-Swedish author Kjell Westö’s Drakarna över Helsingfors (1996, Kites Above Helsinki), which depicts the emergence of late-capitalist consumerism and its effects on identity and the self, and Mari Mörö’s Kiltin yön lahjat (1998, Good-Night Gifts), in which the neoliberal market economy has naturalised as an essential part of family life, having an effect on both the children and the adults.


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The contents of the whole book:

Foreword 7
Leena Kirstinä, Introduction 9

Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Allegories of our World. Strange Encounters with Leena Krohn 24

Mika Hallila, The Unbearable Darkness of Being Subject in Asko Sahlberg’s Fiction 41

Päivi Koivisto, The Author as Protagonist: Autobiographical Narrative in Finland 55

Kristina Malmio, Phoenix-Marvel Girl in the Age of fin de siècle. Popular Culture as a Vehicle to Postmodernism in Diva by Finland-Swedish Author, Monika Fagerholm 72

Mari Hatavara, History After or Against the Fact? Finnish Postmodern Historical Fiction 96

Outi Oja, From Autofictive Poetry to the New Romanticism
The Guises of Finnish Poetry in the 1990s and 2000s 112

Päivi Heikkilä-Halttunen, Idyllic Childhood, Jagged Youth. Finnish Books for Children and Young People Meet the World 136

Jussi Ojajärvi, Capitalism in the Family. On Realistic Involvement after the Neoliberal Turn 152

Markku Lehtimäki, Shadows of the Past. Sofi Oksanen’s Purge and Its Intertextual Space 175"

"Zaczęłam była trzeci tom Nad Niemnem -zwierzała się Orzeszkowa Leopoldowi Meyetowi w liście z 10 maja 1887 r. -ale jak na złość w tej chwili całkiem niepotrzebnie wlazła mi w głowę nowela i z taką natarczywością napastowała, że napisać ją musiałam. Pisałam całe dwa tygodnie bardzo pilnie. Rzecz jest dość duża (prawie jak Romanowa), nosi nazwę W zimowy wieczór, stanowi obraz z chłopskiego życia [...]" 1 .

Modernity, philosophical, literary and political, is rightly thought to have effected a sort of Copernican revolution, putting the subject at the centre of its considerations. And the figure of Marcel Proust is often taken as emblematic of this re-centring in literature, making the narrative subject itself its 'subject' (in the pre-modern sense), and A la recherche du temps perdu as a monument to literary modernist navel-gazing solipsism. No sooner however, did Modernity give birth to the omnivorous 'subject' than was this subject, in its relation to its Other, the object, rendered problematic, opening a crisis that is far from closed. Whether this crisis manifests itself in the economic and literary consequences of the capitalist mode of object-production (resulting from the ascendancy of the liberal bourgeois 'subject-centred' regime) and the advent of mass democratic man, in the psychoanalytic troubling of the superego's quietude through the shocks of involuntary memory provoked by certain objects, or in the phenomenological discovery of intentionality and thus of a subject defined by its relation more to the objects it constitutes than to itself, Proust, as the heir of the Balzacian 'positivistic' realism which seemed at first sight so typical of Modernity's unproblematic relation to objects, is in fact an endlessly fascinating and fruitful site of these crises, and objects in the Recherche are revelatory of class distinction and alienation, sexual perversion,

"The Brothers' Keepers is a collaborative work written by John H. Paddison and Charles D. Orvik. Based on the book's tone, theme, and literary intention, this work will prove to be a significant contribution to contemporary literature.

As a novel dealing with the saga of one family, the work closely analyzes an ongoing cultural myth of small Midwest American towns and families-that is, the idea and ideal of family values that have come to symbolize that geographic region. The story takes place in the Northeastern part of North Dakota, in the fictional town of Farmington, during and after the Great Depression. The storyline develops around the neglect and then abandonment of five young boys-the Lambson brothers-by their alcoholic mother and their drifter father, and indeed by society in general. Having been exhaustively researched, the novel details in a sensitive yet realistic way the brothers' development under very adverse physical and social conditions and the five boys' eventual outcome. The brothers' hardships form a strong, familial bond between them-the only definition of family that they can construct from their aberrant circumstances.

Events of the story are structured so as to extract meaning from the youngsters' trials. The broader narrative, though, becomes an attempt to understand how a society that traditionally has always placed so much emphasis on family and family values, at least seemingly so, can condone such treatment of the five youngsters. The narrative voice is sensitive yet forceful in adding understanding of their tribulations, thus bringing light to two social ills that plague America today-child neglect and child abuse. In a larger sense, this probing of social responsibility is relevant to today's society, where children increasingly becoming the victims of abuse and neglect.
"

In Beauport, Kate Colby poses the question of whether the fictions that orient our daily lives are necessarily less real, natural and true than the more visceral, complex and historically subtle world revealed by experimental poetry. Colby provocatively revisits and re-evaluates the bourgeois spheres of domesticity, tourism and memorabilia, often dismissed in vanguardist circles for suggesting inauthenticity, ignorance and conservatism. Although never directly referencing Williams, Olson or the Language poets by name, numerous passages in Beauport make it clear that Colby wishes to chime in on their conversation about poetry and realism. As a guide to her investigation, poet enlists the aid of Henry Davis Sleeper, an antiquarian who rose to prominence with the life-long construction of “Beauport” in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a castle he used to house and display his immense collection of bric-à-brac. With a luxurious arrangement of decorative floral shapes as its cover image, Colby’s Beauport hazards the idea that the clichéd designs common to consumer culture and antiquarianism can promote intimacies of a deeper and more genuine kind than those traditionally fostered by experimental poets, affinities which the latter, driven by a desire to enlighten and mobilize their audience, have snootily left untapped. With its exploration of the unthinking stasis that consumer products promote and antiquities materialize, the question Colby’s book wishes to ask us is: what if, instead of waking us up, poetry’s goal was to lull us to sleep?

In ”En grænse for transgression? Jakob Ejersbos Nordkraft” Mikkel Jensen offers a reading of one of most popular Danish novels since 2000 focusing on how this debut relates itself to discussions of transgression. Portraying a drug-using environment, this novel inscribes itself in a tradition of interpreting drugs as having a psychedelic potential of expanding the mind, a notion which is shown to be discarded in this novel as a quixotic ideal. Transgression is also investigated as a trope in human development and focusing on the character Steso, the article argues that transgression is celebrated in its guise as self-transgression in terms of self-development.

Come scrittore realista-naturalista, Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) realizza, all'interno della propria opera letteraria, affreschi di grande valore icastico della realtà sociale portoghese della seconda metà dell'Ottocento. Un elemento che caratterizzava in modo esemplare il divario tra le classi abbienti e quelle disagiate, nel XIX secolo era, certamente, l'alimentazione. Anzitutto, per una evidente questione economica: il proletariato, urbano o rurale, non aveva la possibilità, se non in modo estremamente sporadico, di portare sulla propria tavola carne, dolci, pesce nel caso di territori non costieri e, in generale, piatti elaborati in ricette complesse che presupponessero la commistione di ingredienti numerosi e costosi; nelle case borghesi e aristocratiche, al contrario, la presenza di tali alimenti non era soltanto disponibile, ma costituiva la norma quotidiana. In secondo luogo, la differenza di abitudini in campo alimentare era data dallo status sociale: anche nelle case ricche, ove, in linea teorica, vi sarebbe stata la possibilità di sottoporre la stessa dieta a tutti gli abitanti, i servi consumavano cibi più semplici e poveri di quelli riservati ai padroni.

The realist novel seeks to depict the world as it really is. It deliberately wants to stand in “contrast to the normative childlikeness of the epic’’ (Lukács, 1971). How do realists then justify their own work? Are realist novelists and painters not artists? Émile Zola’s His Masterpiece ( L'Oeuvre) is where I shall turn to investigate the place of the artist in realism as it is conceptualized by realism. The artist standing at the center of this novel, painter Claude Lantier, feels within himself an unshakable desire to fulfill his grandiose artistic vision of realism, but the deterministic nature of reality will not allow him to actually bring it into being. In Claude Lantier’s tragic narrative one finds the inevitable end of the realist artist who has no choice but to see his visions trampled by modernism.