| Kommentar |
What is realism, what, possibly, is its historical trajectory? What are the aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of realism, its functions of social critique, its ties to class? How about realist fiction today? Roughly speaking, these are the key questions this seminar sets out to explore. We will be beginning with exploring in detail a seminal literary work from the ‘heyday’ of literary realism, Middlemarch by Victorian novelist George Eliot (alternatively, dependent on seminar participants’ preference: Adam Bede). Moving into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will study George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), recent (Scottish) working-class fiction (title to be confirmed in the first week of term), and finally, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) or NW (2012).
In the concomitant Lektürekurs, the focus will be on reading, discussing, and feeding back into the seminar recent theoretical reflections on realism, in particular Terry Eagleton’s The Real Thing. Reflections on a Literary Form (2024; please obtain your own copy) and Anna Kornbluh’s The Order of Forms. Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (2019).
Please note that only additional short texts (both short Victorian fiction and theory) will be provided via Moodle. All novels are available as paperbacks. |
