Synthesis e-journal
Volume 3 (2010)
Call for papers
Experiments in/of Realism
Anna Despotopoulou and Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou (Issue eds.)
If in the nineteenth century Realism began as a movement initiating a progressive and drastic shift away from Romanticism, aiming to discover radical ways of linking the imaginative with the real, in the twentieth century, conversely, Realism was vilified, deemed unashamedly conservative and passé; its ideology was viewed as flawed and its experiments were deliberately forgotten or undervalued. The more reality was conceived as an ideological artifact, the more realism was reduced to a mere oxymoron, a term that defies itself, a conceptual impasse. In the years of high postmodernism, Realism has been unfairly used, in the words of Bruce Robbins, as a “scapegoat term that a given author, text, period, or genre can be shown to rise sophisticatedly and self-consciously above.” And yet Realism strikes back: its self-reflexive moments have been recently reread as ambitious studies of the act of representation, and its linear plots, supposedly straightforward characters, and omniscient narrators destabilized and rescued from facile and scornful labeling, while the tension between literality and fictionality, which Realism allegedly sought to conceal, has been brought to the forefront. More surprisingly even, new poststructuralist approaches have gone as far as unearthing and highlighting the “proto-postmodern” elements of nineteenth-century realistic texts. Rather than seen as the unfortunate moment in the history of narrative, sandwiched between Romanticism and Modernism, Realism becomes the focus of attention, and its efforts, achievements, and conscious limitations are reexamined on theoretic, thematic, and stylistic levels.
In line with current attempts to complicate and expand our understanding of Realism, in terms of its ideology and cultural and formal pursuits, the third issue of Synthesis will participate in the debate aimed at exploring the multiformity of the term and reformulating our thinking as regards its endeavours. Our purpose is to examine Realism as an inconclusive, open-ended term, involved in a dialectic relationship with the “-isms” that precede it and those that follow it. In what ways does realism fight against its reduction to a literary technique that indulges in a naïvely “objective” reproduction of material reality? And by what means does it resist an uncritical endorsement of socio-cultural hegemonic practices? Can Realism be re-viewed as the avant-garde gesture that it was initially perceived as? And in this respect, is it, perhaps, time to rethink the chronological and formal boundaries of Realism, which until now conveniently served to include or exclude works from its canon? How is the Realist agenda appropriated and used to ends that operate against mimesis? Can the study of Realism, which is at work across disciplines and in all types of narratives, offer new possibilities of approaching all kinds of texts? And what, in that case, would the limitations of realism be?
We invite contributions which engage critically with Realist texts and participate in current theoretical debates which aim at re-evaluating Realism. Papers may address topics such as:
· The illusionistic nature of Realistic representation
· Formal experimentations of Realism
· The reactionary/progressive politics of Realism
· Gender and/or class construction in Realism
· Science, technology, and Realism
· Art, the visual, and the invisible in Realism
· Ethics and morality in Realist texts
· Transition, flux, alienation in Realism
· Space and mobility in Realist texts
· Reconfigurations of the Real in Realism
· Negotiating Realism through contemporary film
· Contemporary Realisms in late twentieth-century fiction
Detailed proposals (800-1000 words) for (6-7000 word) articles as well as any inquiries regarding this issue should be sent by email to both Issue Editors: Anna Despotopoulou (adespoto@enl.uoa.gr) and Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou (katkit@enl.auth.gr). Please send a short bio together with your proposal.
Deadlines
20 July 2009 submission of abstracts
20 September 2009 notification of acceptance
30 March 2010 submission of articles