So I find that most people have a preference one way or the other with regard to what is common.
By which I mean not not posh, but what is often the case.
I, for example, am in large part drawn to literature because I want to understand more about what is common,
how people commonly live and have lived, what we have in common and so on.
That's not to say that I am drawn to the comprehensible.
The common is no easier to understand than the uncommon truth is often observed to be stranger than fiction.
And as the Russian formalised Vladimir Lawsky puts it all, it exists that we may regain a sense of the strangeness of everyday life.
But other people are more drawn to literature,
which deals with a statistically uncommon or with an extrapolation of or exaggeration of reality with romance,
catastrophe, utopia, dystopia, the alienated psyche, American Psycho.
So concerned with certain aspects of reality, but not at a surface level with commonality.
And perhaps it's because I am very interested in the comment that I was asked to give this lecture in this series.
Does that make me a realist? Was it realistic of me, in fact, to think that an introduction to realism could decently be made within 50 minutes?
But that's to take the term in a sense distinct to the many senses in which I'm going to be exploring it.
It's related to several of them, but it's colloquial, not academic.
And therefore I'm going to leave it here and turn instead to one of the senses with which I am concerned.
Do I have an overwhelming concern with the real? I think I do.
But what dynamite doing as a teacher of literature, I'm not for that matter or any of us doing.
If we really that bothered, we would be doing history or social science or natural sciences or engineering or indeed any of the
practical subjects which in Germany are studied in what are significantly called real shulgin real schools.
In fact, we wouldn't be in academia at all, but would be involved in action in manipulating things rather than words outside of the ivory tower.
That's us. And that, by the way, in what employers of that metaphor call the real world.
Or would we? That seems like a question for the philosophers so we can ask them.
Realism in philosophy is the doctrine that matter, as the object of perception has real independent existence and is neither reducible to,
on the one hand, a universal spirit or, on the other hand,
to a subjective perceiving agent realism in this sense and to the language in or around 1797, in a translation of Kant,
who thought that this self sufficient reality, the ding on the ish was intrinsically unknowable.
It was opposed to idealism, the belief that the world is constituted by idiots.
But just to complicate things in an earlier sense, realism had meant a belief in the real existence of universals as opposed to conceptualism,
which held that they existed solely in the mind and nominal ism which held that they were just names.
That is, the two realities denoted by realism were in turn, universals or what might otherwise be called ideas and physical reality realism.
In the second sense, which is our concern today, states that you are not just my dream, nor am I yours.
As an aesthetic term, it dates from slightly later the adjective realistic, representing things in a way that is accurate and true to life.
Eighteen twenty nine and the corresponding noun realism 1856,
when it appeared in John Ruskin Modern Painters in Aesthetics, it is aligned to this position.
Realist works of art suggest that the fictional worlds reality exists independently of the narrating voice,
and that description of that reality is possible and by extension,
that the equivalent is true of the actual world, which contains both the author and the work of literature being produced.
But it's not just that. In fact, realism is many things, and the term is being used in very different ways.
It doesn't help that it was never a coherent movement which constructed manifestos
for itself such that such as the Surrealists and the socialist realists.
It is a lone word from the French policeman, which acquired its aesthetic dimension in the first half of the 19th century.
Flaubert, in fact, hated the term and rejected it.
Yet, in part because it was never tied down to a single theory or type of art.
And in part because it engages with the contested subject of the real realism,
has has proved surprisingly promiscuous and durable lending itself in this century to qualifications.
This and the last century two qualifications by prefixes such as Hyper Photographic and Sur.
As a result, the term is polyvalent, according to some senses,
Wordsworth is more a bit more of a realist than Charles Dickens, according to other senses.
Henry James is more of a realist than George Eliot.
It can best be handled in relation to the various things which its various senses reject, oppose, or at least are not.
They are. Five of them are stylisation classicism and neo classicism romanticism.
Naturalism and interiority, this list is not exhaustive as you study realism further,
you might be on the lookout for other concepts to which realism can be opposed.
You will note that some of these precede realism. Those main periods in literary history, notably classicism,
neo classicism and romanticism naturalism overlaps with late 19th century realism a strongly interior which is to say psychological style of writing.
Largely Post states it being associated principally with modernism and stylisation, both pre and post states it.
And we should always be conscious of whether a sense in which we are using the term takes its definition from the past or the future.
In the case of the past, we should try and get a sense of the respects in which realism was revolutionary.
This will correct our image of it in the light of what came after and which rebelled against it.
Those of you who came here with any trace of condescension in your souls as to the worth of
realism are likely to be gauging it either by the standards of modernism or of postmodernism.
Yet we don't tend to judge romanticism harshly by the light of realism,
which is to say that I think it needs standing up for and that's one of the things I want to do.
So to take the first point stylisation this is to make an artistic representation of something conform to the rules of an artistic style.
The term post states the aesthetic application of realism coming from 1898, the same year as Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol,
in which, as it happens, Wilde for the first time starts to get real stylisation.
The concept came there for just in time for modernism with its emphatic styles.
The implication of this opposition is that realism is not or does not have a style which
into poses itself between the object and its representation with distorting effects,
making the art palpable.
As such, it is not irrelevant as the aesthetic sense of the term realism that the duck out each method of photography had been invented in 1839.
Altogether, since visual art is far more likely to be representational than sonic art, i.e. music,
realism with its orientation towards the physical reality beyond itself can far more aptly be discussed in terms of the visual and the auditory.
Hence, the PowerPoint here is one of the earliest light photographs.
And here are some other ways of representing a man. The icon looks more like a man than the South African carving.
But less like one than the photograph does. Here are some other attempts.
From the fifth century B.C. From a millennium later.
From the 18th century. From the 19th century.
And from the 20th century.
Now, all of these ones, which I've shown you since the election, very significant significantly from each other in terms of style,
but the depictions of men do all look more like men than do Christos Panopto crater or the South African man or than does committees, man.
But now let's think of which literary depictions are spatially and temporally correspondence to these men.
An oral poem in the Zulu language. A liturgical Greek meditation on Christ.
Sophocles is Ajax. I love sonnets by Lorenzo in Magnifico.
Tristram Shandy. David Copperfield.
Bulgakov, master in Marguerita. It's a low Covino cavalier in their system to the non-existent night.
What's striking here is that only in the case of David Copperfield is a relatively accurate depiction
of the visual aspect of a man matched in time and place by what is often classified as a realist text,
which is to highlight the fact that the time span of literary realism is far shorter than that of visual realism.
And even then, only a small proportion of even the visual art that the world has ever made has been realistic.
It's just that in the case of literature, the proportion is even smaller.
One of the things that characterises it is verisimilitude resemblance to the real.
And specifically to the experience of living. So as I mentioned, there is no style getting in the way art is hiding itself.
No imposed form such as that of the sonnet, the relative form of snow surrealist prose resembles life as most of us live it.
This attempt to resemble life as lived is what Walden bought in an article of 1968 called The Fat Denial or the Reality Effect.
So a world is constructed in which the reader has the impression that she or he might inhabit in in which things might have been other than they,
in fact, are had any one of an infinite number of variables being other than it in fact was,
and in which things have different levels of significance which may be variously experienced and interpreted.
Some details do not advance the plot or even its interpretation, but given that of solidity to the world,
which the characters inhabit a realist world, well, world is perhaps paraphrased while still the level of physical detail is not too great.
Otherwise we would enter the realm of hyper realism. When Gulliver sees a nurse giving suck in blood technique, the land of the big people.
I must confess. No object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast,
which I cannot tell what to compare it with so as to give the curious reader idea of its bulk shape and colour.
It stood prominent six feet and could not be less than 16 in circumference.
The nipple was about half the business of my head and the hue.
Both of that and the dog so varied with spots, pimples and freckles that nothing could appear more nauseous.
The variety of shoes and spots, pimples and freckles are all real,
but seeing them does not correspond to the reality effect, since our vision is not microscopic.
George Eliot has a moralised version of this in Middlemarch.
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrels heartbeat.
And we should die of that rule, which lies on the other side of silence.
As it is, most of us walk about well-watered with stupidity. It is part of the reality effect, therefore not to see all that is real.
Even George Eliot's narrator does not claim to be able to see at all the typical visual friends.
Sorry, the typical visual frame of the realists lens is middle distance.
But then there are features which pertain to the reality effect,
as we have learnt to receive it, which decisively depart from how life is often experienced.
There is often a degree of foreseeability of content, alterations of highs and lows in the lives of the lives of the characters.
The lives are strikingly interesting, and the ends of its characters is often known in a way that we largely do not know our own and well to.
Benyamin aptly pointed out that we seek in fiction the knowledge of death, which is denied to us in life.
Only the end can determine the meaning like a sentence, though this is particularly true in Benjamin's native German, where the verb comes at the end.
We therefore agree to call realist writing something which not is not only imperfectly reflective of the reality which it purports to describe.
Never mind extra fictional reality, but which departs from common features of experiencing life.
The second obsession, which I specified was to classicism.
Now this looks more plausibly like a man than this and was probably unlike the icon based on a real individual.
But it is nonetheless as much an ideal image as the icon.
However, much this sculpture looks like its model. It also represents an ideal of young manhood, as does this renaissance sculpture.
Whereas Lowenstern here is very clearly also an individual, as, in fact, is Tristram Shandy, although he does not occupy an otherwise realist text.
And as all David Copperfield Dr. Liftgate dude falling in 1921, the Czech structuralist woman,
Jacobsen argued in his essay on Realism in Art that the characteristic mode of realism is metonymy, as opposed to metaphor.
That is to say, rather than one thing standing for another. As in the symbolic mode, a thing is representative of the class of which it is part.
It is true that Joe Jude, the obscure, is concerned not just with a fictional individual called Jude fully,
but with the Jude follies of this world, those of an artisanal class who try and fail to break into the intellectual establishment.
But dude can only successfully represent that class if he himself is an apparently real individual.
And in his details, unlike any other member of it, the metonymy mode of a classical character will be less mediated.
He will more directly represent certain characteristics. He will not have a chest measurement.
I make reference to my former colleague at New College, Craig rein in his noughts week freshest test.
It was composed entirely of my nude factual questions, such as What is the size of Leopold Bloom's chest?
The answer is twenty nine point five inches after two months, continuous use of Sandy White,
Sandy Whiteley's pulley exerciser, about a less individual or less realist character, this question could not be asked.
Leopold Bloom is, amongst other things, an actual thing which can be measured by a tape measure.
One is reminded of the etymological roots of realism in race thing.
So does this man have a chest measurement no more than this one does,
and certainly not in the sense that this one does, at which point it's worth noting, as an aside,
that socialist realism, which was established by Stalin as the official art form of the Soviet Union in certain respects,
more resembles classicism than realism. The realism of also realism was opposed to excessive stylisation and to asceticism.
Art in the Soviet Union was most certainly not meant to be for art's sake.
It was for the revolution sake. In addition, the reality which was often depicted was not that of the apparent presence,
but the essential presence that is to say, the present in its revolutionary development,
which is to say the future which Marxist theory was thought able to predict with absolute certainty,
as Sheila Fitzpatrick comments in the socialist realist view of the world.
A dry half dug ditch signified a future canal full of loaded barges.
This is not to be confused with the realism advocated by the Hungarian Marxist lookouts,
whose ideas permitted the works of someone like Tolstoy to be part of the Soviet canon.
Not because Tolstoy wasn't a reactionary aristocrat, but because despite being a reactionary aristocrat,
he had sufficient artistic integrity to depict his late Czarist era, as it actually was.
That is a state of class struggle building up to revolution.
But what both location and so socialist realism did and what distinguishes the latter from classicism was that orientation towards the common people.
Give us some of style was in fact more popular amongst collective farm workers than the avant garde,
which it replaced, but they also took the common people seriously as an object of depiction.
Now it wasn't as though it was doing this for the first time.
Christianity orientated attitudes towards a carpenter son born in a stable who has fisherman for disciples have
never enforced the classical association between high blood and seriousness and low blood and comedy or farce.
And it's worth noting that in countries which never had a strong classicist influence, such as Russia, that association had hardly pertained.
It was the German critic Eric Oliver, in his legendary work written during the Second World War in Istanbul.
Nemesis doctor to the ActionScript and to oblation literature might my this reality represented in Western
literature who thoroughly explored realism departure from the classical doctrine of levels of representation.
This was a particularly important movement in France,
where the doctrine of levels of representation had been very strongly imposed at the end of the 16th century.
And with this taking of humble people seriously came taking seriously humdrum quotidian experience
and observed the fact that half the words which tonight denote common us all very uncommon.
Zola spoke up for this kind of realism, saying of the subject matter of the novel clue as to how banal a general purity deviant general speak,
the more banal and general it is, the more typical it is.
But it's worth remembering, though, that the typical can be hard to determine. What kind of average is it?
The mean, the median or the mode. If families have on average 2.4 children, does that mean that is how many a family in a realist novel should have?
And since improbable things do occur, otherwise they would exist, no such concept as the probable.
Surely they should not be excluded by realism.
George Eliot certainly felt this and took as the epigraph to book six of Daniel Towanda a quotation from Aristotle's poetics.
This, too, is probable, according to the saying of Pakistan.
It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen on the same grounds, she defended.
Bonds strikingly well timed death in Middlemarch and the floods at the end of the mill on the floss,
which definitely resolved the heroine's miserable situation. Truth is at least as strange as fiction, she argues.
One effect of representing the lower classes seriously is that the higher classes
who were able to hire or buy novels actually found out what life amongst them,
whether in the turnip fields of tests of the dead, the fields, the d'urbervilles,
the mill tonic slums of north and south, or the work houses of Oliver Twist was like.
In this sense, realism spilt the beans on life and revealed a country to itself.
This was a new function for art to undertake, and it's important not to underestimate its its importance or initial shock value.
One negative response was to claim that art was and should remain the sphere of the elevated and the inspiring.
A few years ago, I came to understand this kind of reaction better when I heard it voiced by a Russian friend of mine.
Now, it's not the case that Russian realism didn't spill the beans on the horrors of 19th century life in that country.
But it is my experience that Russians by and large have a more elevated concept of arts funk function than do West Europeans,
and that they therefore wish to see certain things excluded from representation, which we are more likely to accept.
This friend and I went to a modern play by a Russian at the Royal Court Theatre, set in the post-Soviet hellhole in the Urals.
A young man, the protagonist goes through a series of disasters and ends by being thrown out of a tower block window by a gang of bullies.
This, to me, was familiar territory gritty urban realism.
My friend, however, was shocked. She considered this kind of material inappropriate to be put on any stage, and in particular,
it has to be said in a foreign country involving her country in doing its dirty washing in public.
But what shocks changes over time? So do so, too, does the sense of what is real?
As Winston Brooks puts it, realism was a reaction against a number of things that were thought in the mid-19th century to be on real.
The targets of the unreal is therefore constantly changing,
and so not only in relation to changes in culture in general, but in response to forgoing literary history.
J.P. Stern pointed out that realism more than other modes of writing, is dependent on its literary antecedents.
The literary history of realism would have to be a sequential account of ever new areas of worldly experience becoming available to literature.
In addition, of course, the sense of the real varies between cultures.
The fact that for people with certain religious beliefs living in, for example,
Latin America spirits do intervene in the world has produced a narrative genre
which the less metaphysical West has designated in opposition to its own realism.
Magical that it does, after all, only purports to open up the reality effect two types of experience to which it had not previously been applied.
And so we can buy securities route back to the classical world of belts intervening in the lives of men,
from which this observation of about realism took its point of departure,
raising the possibility that one sense of what is realistic is liable to cling close to the narrator in place and time.
Will we know us? Obviously, our descendants be able in 500 years time to consider George Eliot's works as realistic to the same degree that we do now.
Or have we not, in fact, already started pulling away the term from Victorian high realists and awarding it to the
modernists on the grounds of perceived deficiencies in the Victorian education to the real?
Now, the romantics, this is the third opposition had already made several of the breaks away from neo classicism,
which realism continued, notably by taking the lower classes more seriously in art, as Wordsworth notably tried to do.
Indeed, Elliott praises Wordsworth for this and contrast him with Dickens for his accurate depiction of the working poor.
When Wordsworth sings to us the referee of poor season,
more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations.
And it's interesting that the donate the denotation of realist as someone who tells things as they are,
was first used by Coleridge in biographical Etruria in 1817.
But in other respects, realism was in was in revolt against romanticism, too.
This was particularly apparent again in France. What do Aunty's Journal say?
At least one of 1856 to seven contained explicitly A. Romantic and indeed a. poetic polemic.
The main reason for this was its assumption of the association between romanticism and subjectivity.
Whereas whereas Stendhal, for example, argued that the novel should be the equivalent of a mirror travelling along a highway.
And that reminds me to recommend to you MH Abraham's important work called the Mirror and the Lamp,
which uses its two title metaphors to explore memetic realism and romanticism, respectively, the distinction being between romanticism.
The writer is his or her own source of light, rather than relying on an independent light source in order to reflect the world.
But it was not just the fact of projected subjectivity that was objected to,
but the fact that such writing had a tendency to be idealistic as idealistic in its own different ways as neo classicism.
Yet, whereas the latter had clear rules, which marked its art of as distinct from reality,
the romantics in their own rebellion against these rules purported to be more
directly concerned with the real and were therefore potentially more misleading.
The same charge, of course, could be made against realism itself.
It's being misleading about the nature of the world that George Henry Louis, George Eliot's partner,
condemned as false ism, which he claimed was, rather than idealism, was the the chief antithesis of realism.
Eliot's own main statement of her conception of realism was made in 1856.
In her review for the Westminster review of Wilhelm Heine,
which von Reelz Networks used a distortion focus of one blogger to owner Deutsche Sosial
politic the natural history of the German people as a basis for the German social policy.
Otherwise normally known as the natural history of German life,
Elliott points out the extent of actual ignorance about the proletariat and the peasantry on the part
of many who theorise on these bodies with eloquence or who legislate for them without eloquence.
How little the real characteristics of the working classes are known to those who are outside them.
How little their natural history has been studied is sufficiently disclosed by our art, as well as by our political and social theories about.
In this instance, she means visual art.
What English artist even attempts to rival in truthfulness such studies of popular life as the pictures of tennis or the racket boys of Maurizio?
These a 17th century Flemish and Spanish painters, respectively, by contrast,
quote even one of the greatest painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while in his picture of the height the hirelings shackled,
he gives us a landscape of marvellous truthfulness,
placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not much more than the idyllic Swain's and damsels of our chimney ornaments.
She's referring to William Pullman Hunt's painting made just four years before the time of her writing.
In fact, it is a densely allegorical religious painting.
Essentially, this hired shepherd is not doing what he ought to be doing, i.e. looking after the sheep and no good will come of this.
Interestingly, in the case of Operatic Shepherd's, Eliot's makes allowances because they on an opera stage also obviously unreal
that they could not possibly mislead anyone as to the nature of peasants.
But the fact that Hunt's picture is a religious allegory is not for it's an excuse.
Since the visual style of the painting, if not, its content is sufficiently realistic as to potentially mislead us for our social novels.
They profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of their representations is a grave evil trollop.
Trollop narrators in the Justis Diamonds made a similar distinction with regard to intended effect.
A picture of surpassing godlike nobleness. A picture of a King Arthur amongst men may perhaps do much, but such pictures cannot do all.
When a picture is painted as intended to show what a man should be, it is true if painted to show what men are.
It is false. Elliot continues, No one who is seen much of actual ploughman thinks them jock,
and no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them marry the slow gays in which no sense of beauty beams, no humour.
Twinkles the slow utterance.
The heavy slouching walk reminds one rather that melancholy animal the camel down of the sturdy countryman with stockings,
red waistcoat and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peasant?
What we need is a real knowledge of the people with a thorough study of their habits,
their ideas, their motives, the degree in which they're influenced by local conditions,
their maxims and habits, the points of view from which they regard their religious teachers,
and the degree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines. The interaction of the various classes on each other.
And what are the tendencies in that position towards degeneration and towards development?
All highly scientific language. This has been done for us in one way by the sociologist who.
She could and would do it in another way with a greater concern for the individual and particular in her fiction writing career,
which she began in the very same year as that review of Real's book.
Now, since human minds have a tendency to embrace pleasant reality and turn away from unpleasant reality,
exhortations to face reality tend to concern only that part of reality, which is negative.
Hence, those modifying adjectives which are most frequently found with the term harsh reality, grim reality, stark reality.
Freud's reality conceit or reality principle 1911 contrasts with the lust princip or pleasure principle.
The age or libido is concerned with the latter, but it is controlled by the ego,
which takes what the Americans two decades later would start calling a reality
check and therefore works out the limits of the possible indulgence of the edge.
However, it's worth noting that a definition of realism in a post in opposition to false ism implies the wish to correct falsity,
and this will inflect any representation in its orientation towards this perceived error.
To take the analogy of social policy, positive discrimination corrects an injustice, but at the expense of accurate reflection of existence merits.
Elliott also uses against idealising fiction the same argument as one of those used against pornography that its consumption
distorts one's conception of what a partner can do or look like in a way which makes one dissatisfied with what one has or can have.
Quote, they were raised at one time, a school of art which delight to paint the human face as perfect in beauty.
And from that time to this, we are discontented unless every woman is too old for us as Venus or at least as a Madonna.
I do not know that we have gained much from this untrue portraiture, either in beauty or in art.
There may be made for us a pretty thing to look at, no doubt,
but we know that that pretty thing is not really envisaged as the mistress whom we serve.
With regards to the move from romantic fidelity to the self towards realist fidelity to reality of independent of one's self,
it's worth noting a shift in meaning of the word honest.
One of the words that is treated by William Empson in his book The Structure of Complex Words.
He points out that the words honest French on it is connected to honour.
That's that is it's connected to virtue gentility, reputation saving face, the honour that false that Shakespeare's Falstaff doesn't want to die for.
But that's only in English has this romance word come to mean telling the truth.
Interest this time it's still meant deserving and receiving social honour.
It also meant being a good fellow had a slightly raffish sense at the restoration, since it meant being true to oneself about one's own desires.
This meaning persisted through the romantic period as far as Jane Austen.
And then it switched to mean not cheating, not stealing, not lying,
not misrepresenting the world as what Eliot denounces as silly novels by lady novelists.
The truth has undergone a similar shift to have truth.
Used to mean fidelity to another and to oneself.
Around the year 1000, you apply to your truth or truth to someone in the 14th century treatment, a disposition to be sincere.
But the truth of a work of art for the realists consisted in what was distinguished by Bertrand Russell as semantic correspondent.
Truth to something beyond its perceiver. Even reality in 16 16 meant sincerity of character or purpose.
For Bertrand Russell, the other kind of truth was what he calls syntactic coherence, truth internally,
coherence to the individual who in determinately perceives and creates it as points, he said.
Man, neither merely makes normally encounters the world he lives in, and if his if he is an artist,
he can make visible the truth of what he perceives Slash creates through what Henry James calls the sacrament of execution.
According to him, anything which is not so executed shames the honour,
offered it and can be only spoke of as having ceased to be a thing of facts and yet not not yet become a thing of truth.
This, of course, is a kind of truce with which we are all here concerned,
and if we weren't, we would indeed be better off studying philosophy for abstract truth.
History for concrete truth and social science. A generalised truth.
But the mention of social science brings on the false opposition naturalism, which will naturally smirk there.
A French development of realism Whereas realism is a term borrowed by aesthetics from philosophy,
naturalism is followed by aesthetics from natural science and natural scientist is either Darwin Olusola,
and the juxtaposition is apt, since Darwin's works had a considerable influence on this movement, which extended roughly from the 1870s to the 1940s.
Its distinguishing method was a concern for the effects of heredity and environment,
nature and nurture on the individual and the relative insignificance of free will,
and it died because it was so closely aligned with certain scientific ideas which were themselves superseded, which had had their moment.
It was also, as in the works of Stendhal and Solar, associated with peculiarly painful and sordid aspects of human experience.
As such, it met with criticism on the part of English realists, including Elliott and James, who wish to make literature reflect the reality of AUD.
Sorry, whose wish to make literature reflect the reality of ordinary life, did not extend to its most distasteful, discomforting.
All the precious aspects in relation to naturalism that is truth and reality acquire something of the racy aspect that they have in the game.
Truth or dare and reality television.
So once 19th century Russian novelists entered the West European literary scene in French, German and English translations,
a comparative triangle was immediately distinguished between English, Russian and French novels.
The English and Russian tended to praise each other for that morality,
whereas the English tended to condemn the late 19th century French naturalist novel for its a. or immorality.
After all, the English realist project was explicitly moral in a way that the natural scientific project was not.
And so we returned to Elliott, who points out that her mode of realism helps men to improve themselves morally by showing
incremental improvement on the part of credible suffering individuals rather than inhuman virtue.
In the context of the novel Adam Bede, which contains Diner Maurice, one wonders about the extent to which she practised what she preached.
Quite apart from the fact that her very narrator oral intervention is a striking departure from the reality effect.
It is very easy to depict a hero, a man absolutely stainless.
At any rate, it is as easy to do. That is to tell of the man who is one our good in the next band who aspires greatly but fails in practise,
who sees the higher, but too often follows the lower course.
But for Elliot, the most important moral function of realism was the extension of one's sympathies through understanding the interiority of the other.
The greatest benefit we owe the artist where the painter, poet or novelist is the extension of our sympathies.
She could do this in part because she accorded her character's psychological interiority.
And now we're on to the fifth distinction of a kind that most of Dickens is characters do not possess.
In fact, D.H. Lawrence considered her a pioneer in this respect.
He said, You see, it was really George Eliot who started it all.
And how wild they all were with for doing it.
It was she who started putting all the action inside before you know it with fielding and the others, it just being outside.
Don't write like that, and then I say Lawrence can get away with it.
But after Eliot, there was James who moved more towards personal refraction and intensity of experience as the criterion of reality.
And after him, James and so often Woolf and Joyce, which takes us to a new modification of realism by the adjective psychological.
But what does this actually mean? Is it just another kind of objectivity fidelity to an external reality which high realism has
been unfaithful to just one which requires a process of introspection in order to be accessed?
Or does it imply that reality itself is subjective?
At which point I would issue and conclude with a warning don't let the terms, reality or realism be pulled out of meaningfulness.
Remember the modern philosophical sense of realism, a belief in reality, independently existence of the self?
And if you are not an idealist, a list or a conceptualist,
then you recognise that you can have varying levels of commitment to that reality to correspondence truth in your art,
as also varying degrees of commitment to the common and the typical.
Let's also accept that any literature worth dealing with deals with reality in some way.
If you confuse correspondence with coherence, truth, then all art is realist and the term becomes meaningless,
unreality by definition, does not exist and cannot be depicted by art.
It is therefore a complicated term, and I would advise you to have to hand all the relevant terms which you can use with greater precision.
My niece's verisimilitude? Common likely.
Typical quotidian. The on long.
And by doing so, you will be fulfilling your own commitment as literary critics rather than literary authors.