A Reflection on Literary Realism: It’s Length and Breadth
- DOI
- 10.2991/hss-26.2016.78How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Literary, Anti-literary, Realism, Naturalism, Mimesis.
- Abstract
Becker might have been thinking of formalistic critics like Northrop Frye, for whom realism was in some fundamental sense anti-literary: “One of the most familiar and important features of literature,” Frye had declared in his famous Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, “is the absence of a controlling aim of descriptive accuracy” . Becker’s complaint also proved to be prophetic, though. In the succeeding decades, philosophers and critics both opposed to realism and simply uninterested in it continued to replicate, and indeed to reinforce, the attitude that he had characterized. In an influential essay from 1982, for instance, Jean-François Lyotard collapsed realism into a superficial conception of mimesis, loftily insisting that it “always stands somewhere between academicism and kitsch”; realism’s “only definition, he concluded, “is that it intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in that of art”.
- Copyright
- © 2016, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Hongli Wang PY - 2016/01 DA - 2016/01 TI - A Reflection on Literary Realism: It’s Length and Breadth BT - Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Humanities and Social Science PB - Atlantis Press SP - 462 EP - 466 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/hss-26.2016.78 DO - 10.2991/hss-26.2016.78 ID - Wang2016/01 ER -