New Realisms

Question 1

New Realisms
The “unreal” world

Answer 1

• World conceptually apprehended through language.
  
  • Language refers to language; nothing outside the text.
• The world is more and more mediated by images from the media.
  
  • Comes through screens and seems experienced to be placed back on a screen.
• The world is “networked”
  
  • Nothing lies by itself but it is intricately interconnected.
    
    • Connectivity is potentially endless
• 19th-century realism also rose from a networked world (easier to follow than now)
• Nothing is immediately self-evident and available to simple observation.

Question 2

New Realisms
The unreliable observer

Answer 2

• Subjects are conditioned by “their” own prejudices, desires, interests - by their unconscious.
• Subjectivity is variable, contingent, “historical”, determined by context.
• Observation creates the conditions in which something is observed and modifies the outcome of observation.
• Literary result —> “unreliable narrator”
• Resulting from these complications of reality + interpreter/observer
  - Contemporary realisms are not (always) like classical realism.
  - Classical realism assumed a consensus about reality (available, decipherable, transmissible)
  - Contemporary realism : more “modest”, contingent, provisional, partial
• Try to make some sense (not all sense for all readers)

Question 3

New Realisms
Situated realism

Answer 3

Determined by cultural/racial/ethnic specificity (minority literatures)

Question 4

New Realisms
Minimalist realism

Answer 4

CHARACTERISTICS
- Presents a reality that feels incomplete (something crucial is missing)
- Importance of gaps, silences, elisions.
- Terse style (simple, concise)
- Attention to “blue-collar “ life (working class, whites, the poor, the marginalized)
- Occasionally called “dirty realism” / “K-Mart realism” for its vulgar settings.
- Pessimistic, somber, deterministic (characters overpowered by their milieus)
- Flat affect and deadened tone.

INFLUENCES : Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Tom Spanbauer

AUTHORS
- Chuck Palahniuk
“Fight Club”
“Choke”
“Haunted”
“Doomed”
“Adjustment Day”

Question 5

New Realisms
Hyper-realism

Answer 5

CHARACTERISTICS
- Describes reality in intricate detail.
- Often amplifies to the extreme the banal or subliminal.
- Reality is packed with meaning and interconnections.
- Experience is inexhaustible.
- Virtuous styles: precise, incisive, exxtremely analytical.
- Often humorous or characterized by a mixture of humor and absurdity.

AUTHORS
- Don DeLillo
“The Names”
“White Noise”
“Libra”
“Mao II”
“Underworld”
“Cosmopolis”
- Nicholson Baker
“The Mezzanine”
“Room Temperature”
“Vox”
“A House of Holes”
“Baseless: My Search….”

Question 6

New Realisms
(Neo-) classical realism

Answer 6

CHARACTERISTICS
- Realism as if nothing had happened between the late 19th century and the present
- Deliberate links with nineteenth-century realism.
- A modern “novel of manners”
- explores status, class, individual desire against conventions, changing social fortunes, rise and fall of characters in the world.
- Frequent middle- and upper-middle-class focus.

AUTHORS
- Tom Wolfe
“The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”
“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”
“The Right Stuff”
“The Bonfire of the Vanities”

• Joyce Carol Oates
  ” Garden of Earthy Delights”
  “them”
  “Wonderland”
  “Blonde”
  “The Sacrifice”
• Jonathan Franzen
  “Strong Motion”
  “The Corrections”
  “Freedom”
  “Purity”
  “Crossroads”

Question 7

New Realisms
Generation X realism

Answer 7

CHARACTERISTICS
- Characters: anomic, alienated, disoriented, unambitious.
- Narratives: often desultory, open-ended, loose.
- Perceptive towards popular culture - part of the intimate fabric of everyday life.
- Attention to the world of commodities.
- all part of ther sense of the self: forms of self-creation and self-understanding
- Writing: precise, strives after ineffable affect.
- Often veers towards auto-fiction

AUTHORS
- Brett Easton Ellis
“Less than Zero”
“American Psycho”
“Glamorama”
“Luna Park”
“The Shards”

• David Eggers
  “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”
  “ What is the What”
  “The Circle”
  “The Every”
• Elizabeth Wurtzel
  “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”
  “Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women”
  “More, Now, Again : A Memoir of Addiction”