Doris Lessing’s early essay “The Small Personal Voice” is often considered the fullest elaboration of her realist aesthetics. Prizing nineteenth-century realism (Tolstoy, Stendhal, Balzac) as “the highest form of prose writing,” she criticizes two dominant trends in contemporary fiction, namely Soviet realism and European modernism: novels about collective farms and five-year plans are “dreadful [and] lifeless,” while the writings of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, and Samuel Beckett...

Serialized in the first years of Japan’s modern Shôwa period (1926-1989), Hayashi Fumiko’s wildly popular Diary of a Vagabond ( Hôrôki) recounts, in playful turns both confessional and elusive, its author’s formation in the provincial mining communities of southern Japan and the booming Tokyo metropolis of the 1920s. A testimony of personal life events written in an accessible vernacular style identifiable as feminine in voice, Hayashi’s Diary adapts a narrative genre that had been deployed to...

Realism is a famously tricky term. In literary studies it can denote a genre, an (anti-)aesthetic, a narrative mode, a philosophical literary attitude, or any combination thereof. It can be a cohesive ideal impossible to achieve in modernity (Georg Lukács), a tension between two systems of temporality (Fredric Jameson), or an approach to the novel that is tied to the nineteenth century (Caroline Levine). [1] Among historians of the novel, Ian Watt’s definition of “formal realism” as “the premise...

Whether we accelerate the growth of a plant through time-lapse photography or show its form in forty-fold enlargement, in either case a geyser of new image-worlds hisses up at points in our existence where we would least have thought them possible. —Walter Benjamin, “News About Flowers” Realism doesn’t do what it says it does. Or at least that’s all that critics of realism today seem to agree upon. Whether we read realism in the old “suspicious” style, as an ideological smoke-screen, or follow...

From its inception, much of the discussion around the terms realism and modernism stems from the fact that both are responses to a historically shifting conception of the “real,” naming different procedures for representing it, with implicit and explicit claims as to their adequacy for doing so. This means that modernism can become either another iteration of what was called realism, or a renovation of it. As Joe Cleary puts it, in a special issue of MLQ on “Peripheral Realisms,” “modernism...

At the heart of the dichotomy between modernism and realism is the question of form. Modernist writers linked the upheavals of modernity to a crisis of representation—a sense that the established forms of representing the world and of artistic expression were no longer adequate. The modernist revolt was directed at various targets, with slight variations depending on genre. For narrative prose—as for painting—it was realist aesthetics—for poetry, it was romanticism. This essay considers the...