Neorealism: Between Innovation and Continuation
Thomas Claviez/Maria Moss (eds.)
Neorealism - Between Innovation and Continuation
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The emergence of the literary phenomenon labeled “Neo-Realism” has initiated a debate that entails more than just a problem of labeling. Thus one faction of commentators holds that a realistic mode of representation has in fact never left us and is now taken up again by both authors and the market. The reason for this, so the argument goes, is that literary history has reached another stage of exhaustion, which the demise of experimental postmodernism attests to. Others, however, point out that the era of postmodernity has left indelible traces even upon those works which seem to return to realistic strategies of writing, and that a simple “return” to older forms is both inconceivable and reductionist. A closer look reveals that what is at stake in this controversy extends toward areas other than the purely aesthetic: the political, the epistemological, and the anthropological. In their wide variety of approaches—from poststructuralism to anthropology, from post-histoire to psychoanalysis—these contributions attest to the wide range of possibilities that this new genre (if it still can be termed thus) opens up and comprises not only on an aesthetic, but also on an analytical level.
Contents:
THOMAS CLAVIEZ
Introduction: Neo-Realism and How to “Make It New”
GÜNTER LEYPOLDT
Recent Realist Fiction and the Idea of Writing “After Postmodernism”
CHRISTOF DECKER
Faces in the Mirror: Raymond Carver and the Intricacies of Looking
PHILLIP E. WEGNER
October 3, 1951 to September 11, 2001: Periodizing the Cold War in Don De Lillo’s Underworld
MARTIN WEINREICH
“Into the Void”: The Hyperrealism of Simulation in Bret
MARIA MOSS
The Search of Sanctuary: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News
SUSANNE ROHR
“The Tyranny of the Probable” - Crackpot Realism and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections