Hyperrealism
Hyperrealism in literature refers to a style of writing that aims to depict reality with an extreme level of detail and accuracy, often blurring the line between reality and fiction. It emphasizes precise descriptions and meticulous attention to everyday life, creating a sense of heightened reality for the reader. Hyperrealist literature often explores the complexities and nuances of human experience in a vivid and lifelike manner.
7 Key excerpts on "Hyperrealism"
eBook - ePub- Monika Fludernik(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Realism, Illusionism and Metafiction Narrative realism Realism In Ian Watt’s influential study The Rise of the Novel (1957), realism is presented as an essential defining feature of novels. Watt does not refer here to the nineteenth-century literary movement known as Realism, characterized by Sir Paul Harvey (editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 1932) as concentrating on ‘truth to the observed facts of life (especially when they are gloomy)’. This literary movement goes back to a manifesto of 1857 by Champfleury (Jules Husson 1821–89), ‘Le Réalisme’. As we are all aware, it was a forerunner of naturalism (Zola, Gissing, Hauptmann) and originated in the desire of writers to distance themselves from romantic idealism, melodrama and a starry-eyed lack of concern for contemporary economic and social issues. The works of Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert provide early examples of realism, but it is primarily the Goncourt brothers in France, Theodor Storm and Wilhelm Raabe in Germany, and the English novelists George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Moore and Arnold Bennett who are classed as literary realists. Ian watt In Watt’s work, by contrast, the term realism is used in connection with matters of style and narrative technique to refer to characteristic features of the novel when it emerged as a genre in the early eighteenth century (between Defoe and Fielding). These characteristics set the novel apart from the romances of the seventeenth century and the tales of court intrigue modelled on French texts (Eliza Haywood). Watt notes that novels are no longer set at court but in the world of the middle or even the lower classes. They no longer take place in Catholic countries overseas (Italy, Spain, France) but in Britain, and here particularly in London. This reflects a shift to a more profound concern with real life. Financial, economic and social matters assume more importance...
eBook - ePub- Steven Earnshaw(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...Aspects of science fiction and fantasy may be ‘realistic’, for example, the psychological portrayals of characters may be realistic, but the genres are by definition not Realist (or realist). A novel could be premised on the idea that there is no meaning in the world, that the world is full of chaos and that our brains operate in irrational and chaotic ways. The novel itself might reproduce this at the level of structure and content and lay claim to being ‘realistic’ because it is faithfully copying the world as its author sees it. In fact, these were precisely the arguments put forward by those novelists now classified as part of the modernist movement (for example, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce) who became dissatisfied with Realism and argued that Realism provided unfaithful copies of reality. The modernists argued that they were more ‘realistic’ than the Realists at (predominantly) psychological levels. However, this is not Realism that the novelists are arguing for – this is mimesis, for Realism is underpinned by ideas of reason, consensus and explicability...
eBook - ePubFantasy and Mimesis (Routledge Revivals)
Responses to Reality in Western Literature
- Kathryn Hume(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...And if realism were not succeeding in this aim, it could hardly give readers the sense of controlling experience and knowing reality which had sustained this literary form, even though the sense of meaning it gave was admittedly limited and local. In the first half of the twentieth century, writers and readers alike had to face the implicit void of meaninglessness. Literature and criticism, language, philosophy, and science were revealed to be tautological, imprisoned within the artificial unrealities of their own conventions. Or, as Scholes puts it: Once we knew that fiction was about life and criticism was about fiction – and everything was simple. Now we know that fiction is about other fiction, is criticism in fact, or metafiction. And we know that criticism is about the impossibility of anything being about life, really, or even about fiction, or, finally, about anything. 11 Realism led step by step to this nothingness. At first, the great realistic novels evoked wonder, made readers feel that the fictive explanations of experience were correct. In such novels, one met people and problems that one half knew, and learned to see them whole. Realistic literature gave its readers a sense of power and insight, an outlet for feelings, and a reinforcement for social mores. This genuine richness and strength has proved ephemeral, largely because of its fundamental dependence on novelty and on validatable truth. Scientific gathering of evidence has a much vaster field of data to draw on so it has not suffered quite the enervation suffered by realistic literature. With all these problems, we can see why realistic literature would fail to give much sense of meaning to sophisticated readers. No one form has replaced it with a generally accepted way of asserting value. In the next section, however, we can look at at least four of the kinds of literature that are wrestling with the problem of meaning...
...I REALISM VERSUS EXPERIMENTALISM? 1 REALISM AND MODERNISM THE PRACTICE OF LITERARY REALISM Realism, I have suggested, is a notoriously tricky term to define. Even when limited to the realm of literary writing it has an aesthetic and a cognitive dimension neither of which can be wholly separated one from the other. Aesthetically, realism refers to certain modes and conventions of verbal and visual representation that can occur at any historical time. Yet realism is associated particularly with the secular and rational forms of knowledge that constitute the tradition of the Enlightenment, stemming from the growth of scientific understanding in the eighteenth century. Underpinning Enlightenment thought is an optimistic belief that human beings can adequately reproduce, by means of verbal and visual representations, both the objective world that is exterior to them and their own subjective responses to that exteriority. Such representations, verbal and visual, are assumed to be mutually recognisable by fellow human beings and form the basis of knowledge about the physical and social worlds. The values of accuracy, adequacy and truth are fundamental to this empirical view of knowledge and its representational form: realism. It follows from this that literary modes of writing that can be recognised as realist are those that, broadly speaking, present themselves as corresponding to the world as it is, using language predominantly as a means of communication rather than verbal display, and offering rational, secular explanations for all the happenings of the world so represented. Two central theses drive the argument I shall develop throughout this book: firstly, questions of knowledge and relative truth are inseparable from an understanding of realism as a representational form and secondly, our ability to communicate reasonably accurately with each other about the world and ourselves is what makes human community possible...
eBook - ePub- Frederic Neyrat(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The paradox is that the more realist literature and naturalist novels try to depict reality, the more reality reveals an excess that cannot be ontologically grasped; the more poetry strives to identify an object, the more the object rebels and claims its multiple, enigmatic relationship with the world. What I call a materialism of the excess is an attempt to understand the literary operations thanks to which novelists and poets reveal the existential profusion of the real, that is to say the fact that reality is always more than itself. The healthy paradox of literary realism As we saw, Harman rejects “representational realism” because “no reality can be immediately translated into representations of any sort.” 1 The problem that I would like to address in this section is that literary realism never consisted in believing that reality can be immediately translated into representations. Literary realism has always assumed that, to be realistic, representations must affect reality. That is the paradox I want now to explore. First, let us analyze Henry James’s important essay entitled “The Art of Fiction,” always quoted by those who want to explain what realism is. In this essay, James argues that “the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of the novel – the merit on which all its other merits…depend.” 2 Thanks to this “solidity of specification,” the writer can produce “the illusion of life.” In his comment on James’ claim, Philip J. Barrish – a specialist of literary realism – explains that concrete specifics, “truth of detail,” help create a novel’s air of reality…A realist writer’s capacity for close observation is thus of cardinal importance. James urges that a would-be writer, as she moves through life, should “try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost” 3 The last part of this quotation are James’ words...
eBook - ePub- J. P. Stern(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...8 Description and evaluation § 89 Realism combines with other modes to form integrated wholes—this much is obvious; and such combinations are not entirely haphazard. As soon as we look at writings which are partly but not ‘completely realistic’, we become aware of a curious shot-silk effect: the element of realism assumes a variable function. This complex effect may best be seen in works which are glaringly unrealistic yet at the same time actively challenge a set of realistic expectations. A picture by Hieronymus Bosch or Salvador Dali, a story by Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka leave us with a strange impression we call ‘grotesque’. 1 We are aware of an effect of purposeful incongruity. In Bosch it is the relatively simple case of the hideous and obscene or freakish elements combining with the idyllic, in Dali ‘scientifically’ exact odds and ends are meticulously assembled into ‘surrealist’ structures. Poe and Kafka anchor a complexly motivated narrative in several areas of experience, only to undermine it by imposing an arbitrary or untoward motivation in one limited area. In all such works realistic details are used for the purpose of building up a ‘fantasy’ or a ‘nightmare world’, the process of matching elements of the work of art with ordinary visual or emotional or social experience is subordinated to the making of something far removed from such experience. Swift’s or Rabelais’s satire or Picasso’s Guernica proceed in the opposite direction...
eBook - ePubReading Between the Lines
A Christian Guide to Literature
- Gene Edward Veith Jr.(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Crossway(Publisher)
...In doing so, he pushed realism itself closer to fantasy. The best modern realistic novelists draw on both the outer and the inner realities. William Faulkner captured the people and places of the backwoods South in vivid detail, but he also plunged into the minds of the characters, reflecting the complexity of their thoughts and emo tions in the very style of his prose. Faulkner’s realism anatomized the social structure of the South while at the same time affirming the com plexity and the dignity of his characters. Faulkner is profoundly demo cratic in the respect he shows for ordinary people. His “white trash” share-croppers, black farm hands, and seedy aristocrats lack refinement, but he never belittles them. Instead, he reveals that ordi nary life contains material enough for the highest art. The same can be said for Hemingway and Steinbeck, the other great modern American realists. Hemingway’s style, nearly opposite to Faulkner’s, is spare, terse, and cut to the bone. Disdaining flowery descriptions and commentary by the narrator, Hemingway’s mastery of dialogue and point of view create the effect of immersing the reader in the world of the characters. Steinbeck was more interested in the social problems of the country, but he never neglected the individual, whom he set against the backdrop of a natural world evocatively described. Steinbeck often turned to the Bible to amplify his themes (consider his titles East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath), and, like Faulkner, operated with a strong moral sensibility. From a Christian point of view, realism can be a way of coming to grips with the world and the human condition. Christianity is not primarily subjective, but objective. That is, it is not simply a matter of mystical feelings experienced in the private sanctum of the self...
