Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Humanities and Social Science

A Reflection on Literary Realism: It’s Length and Breadth

Authors
Hongli Wang
Corresponding Author
Hongli Wang
Available Online January 2016.
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/).

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Volume Title
Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Humanities and Social Science
Series
Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research
Publication Date
January 2016
ISBN
978-94-6252-159-9
ISSN
2352-5398
DOI
10.2991/hss-26.2016.78How to use a DOI?
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  -