Dallas Public Library

The antinomies of realism, Fredric Jameson

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

The antinomies of realism

bibliography

828484104

Fredric Jameson

"The Antinomies of Realism is a history of the nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives--what today's book reviewers dub "serious novels," which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past. Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism's emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history."--Publisher's description

The antinomies of realism: The twin sources of realism : the narrative impulse ; The twin sources of realism : affect, or, The body's present ; Zola, or, The codification of affect ; Tolstoy, or Distraction ; Pérez Galdós, or, The waning of protagonicity ; George Eliot and mauvaise foi ; Realism and the dissolution of genre ; The swollen third person, or, Realism after realism ; Coda : Kluge, or Realism after affect -- The logic of the material: The experiments of time : providence and realism -- War and representation -- The historical novel today, or, Is it still possible?