The Rise Of Realism

REALISM: From Victorianism To Virtual Reality Introduction Realism: "To represent reality as it really is" (Abrams' Glossary Of Literary Terms) This project describes shifting attitudes to the depiction of "the real world" in literature. It takes the 1830s as its starting point and charts the development of several critical disciplines. The influence of the dominant media form of each age (newspapers, photos, film, the internet) is examined. Finally, the project investigates theorists who feel that a "real world" cannot be depicted through language. External links can be found in the bottom right hand corner of each page.

Victorian Realism The Rise Of Realism An unprecedented emphasis was placed on art representing "the real world" in Europe and America during the Nineteenth Century. For Catherine Belsey, who describes this as expressive-realism, it was a fusion of the Aristotelian concept of art as mimesis (held through the Renaissance and Eighteenth Century) and Romantic conviction that poetry expressed the perceptions and emotions of a somehow remarkable individual (1980, 7-8). Realism regards art that articulates fantasy objects of mental processes as idealistic and therefore inadequate. John Ruskin derided art that failed his key criterion of "truth" (see "Pathetic Fallacy" in Abrams 1991). The rise of realism and the novel are intertwined. The length of the Victorian novel allowed for a level of detail that was particularly conducive to realism, so realism became its dominant form. Changes in literacy, the availability of books and conditions in which to read them (see "Books and their readers in Correa ed, 2000), not to mention the rise of the newspaper, provided a platform for art that was as interested in social commentary as escapism. Realist novels like Mary Barton can even be regarded as an early form of sociology. [links: Victorian web http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/victov.html Mary Barton on Project Gutenberg http://promo.net/cgipromo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=2153&full=yes&ftpsite=ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/guten berg/ Gaskell Web http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Gaskell.html Any Ruskin stuff http://www.brantwood.org.uk/JohnRuskin.htm

Key features of realist texts Ian Watt defined some key features of realist texts, which form the basis of this extended list: 1) A move away from Classical plots to the development of new ones Plots are based around contemporary characters, situations and social issues, reflecting the Wordsworthian idea that stories surround us in our daily lives. In the Preface to Mary Barton Gaskell asks "how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town in which I resided?" In the Preface to Bleak House Dickens vows to dwell "upon the romantic side of familiar things". The plot of Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes is based around the new railway system, which also influenced Dickens and Eliot in Dombey & Son and Middlemarch respectively. 2) Narratation According To Linear Chronology Victorian realist novels often present the development of one character, often the eponym, from childhood to death. 3) Emphasises an authenticity of individual experience Characters rarely belong to wide-social networks. They are often outsiders – orphans or governesses sent away from home. 4) The individual perceives reality through his/her own sensors So a single character with whom the reader aligns his/her sympathies is essential. These characters are often eponyms, most famously in Adam Bede, Jane Eyre, Mary Barton and Madam Bovary. A letter evaluating works offered for publication to the firm Bentley in 1868 demonstrates how widespread this trend was, in titles such as Nelly Brooke, George Grey and Guy Lovell Carrington (Correa ed 2000, 209). The strongest portrait of individual sensory experience can probably be attributed to the first person narratives of the Brontës (see Appendix One). However, their appropriation of several generic forms – gothic, fairy tale, romance – places them outside realism. Realist texts, instead, often convey individual experience by shifting the third person narrative briefly into a character's free indirect thought

5) Particularity rather than generality Particularly detailed descriptions are used to heighten the sense of social reality, foregrounding the reader's spatial awareness. Margaret Harkness, a lost contemporary of Hardy's whose novels are now out of print, dealt with the "fallen women" of her society under the pseudonym John Hall. Her novel about poverty in London, City Girl, was narrated in sordid detail. These descriptions are primarily visual, strongly influenced by pre-Raphalite painting. Indeed, the realist narrator often compares him/herself to a painter. See Appendix 2: "The Harbour Bridge" by Thomas Hardy. In realist texts the truth is always uncovered by looking closely enough. Every detail is examined. 6) Third person omniscient narration. The narrator rarely steps forward as a character in the novel. S/He is an anonymous figure. The world is easily knowable. The author is confident that s/he knows what characters mean. 7) Real historical fact. References to real historical time in real, verifiable geographic locations are abundant in realist novels. 8) Use of language. Realist narratives are not self-reflective but transparent. They deny or obscure their own textuality and their existence as a commercial artifice. Language is generally regarded as objective and unproblematic 9) Closure. Plots are based around several problems or crises that are set in motion across the narrative (these are generally based around contemporary social issues). The closing section of the text sees all of these resolved one way or another, to the reader's satisfaction. [Link: notes

on

Ian

Watt's

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Novel:

http://www.eiu.edu/~multilit/English104W-15/riseofthenovel%5Bianwatt%5D.htm

Realism in American literature 1830-90 http://www.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl311/realism.htm Adam Bede http://promo.net/cgipromo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=507&full=yes&ftpsite=ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenb erg/ Jane Eyre http://promo.net/cgipromo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=1260&full=yes&ftpsite=ftp://ibi blio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/ Mary Barton Madam Bovary http://promo.net/cgipromo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=2413&full=yes&ftpsite=ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/guten berg/

French Realism Realism was originally a French tradition, appropriated by England and Germany. Its main proponents were Balzac, Hugo and Emile Zola. Their differs from the above criteria in the following respects 1) The Portrayal Of "Low Life" The use of a seedy, poor, less than noble mileu was a reaction to the idealism of the nobility. 2) Omitting Nothing Unlike British realism, which was often sensitive to the bourgeoisie sensibilities of its audience, the French realists felt that life should be documented with nothing omitted. In Madame Bovary Flaubert not only reports detailed sexual encounters, but

is unafraid of detailing physical suffering: "She soon began vomiting blood. Her lips became drawn. Her limbs were convulsed, her whole body covered with brown spots, and her pulse slipped beneath the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp-string nearly breaking". Hardy was influenced by this mode, and came under similar criticism for portraying violence, illicit sexuality and prostitutes. 3) Objectivity The novel should not be moralistic. This was a key shift towards the objective, positive view that a writer's task is to portray life how it is without commenting upon it.

[Link: Madame Bovary http://promo.net/cgipromo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=2413&full=yes&ftpsite=ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/guten berg/ Balzac: The Country Doctor http://promo.net/cgipromo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=1350&full=yes&ftpsite=ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/guten berg/

Critical Theory on Victorian Realism Increasingly critics have come to stress the "unreality" of Victorian realist novels.

Macabe's "Classic Realism" The structuralist Colin MacCabe radically shifted critical perception of Victorian realist works by defining Classic Realism using the following criteria: 1) Distinction between Object Language and Metalanguage Macabe feels that literary criticism must be able to identify what a text represents independently from the form representation. He therefore distinguishes between a

metalanguage which talks about an object, and transforms it into content by naming the object language, the actual plot events. For Macabe "it is from the position of the meta-language that correspondence between word and world can be established" (1979, 4). 2) Realist texts exhibit a variety of discourses A realist text is made up of many discourses, whose influence is related to their "prior organisation within the text" (4). The sections in inverted commas (or "perverted commas" as James Joyce was later to condemn them), the dialogue of characters, may offer different and subversive ways of viewing the world, but are negated as real alternatives by the unspoken prose that surrounds and controls them. There is a clear hierarchy of discourse with the omniscient third-person narrator at the top. Metalanguage speaks over the character and plot to tell the reader what to think. 3) The narrator turns language into a metalanguage "The relation of dominance allows the metalanguage to understand how the object discourses obscurely figure truths which find clear expression in the meta-language" (5). A metalanguage regards its object discourses as material but itself as transparent. The metalanguage must deny its own textuality, it must pretend that it is outside writing. 4) Closure Like the use of inverted commas, the technique of closure allows the narrator to tie any unconventional or uncoventional elements back inside conventional ideology, by reasserting the status quo. Realism as a form promotes a safe, conventional and conservative view of outside reality. If you use techniques like third person omniscient narration and closure, your writing is essentially conservative. It makes us accept the world as it, makes us accept the arbitrary as historical. The notion of classic realism is important, as Belsey notes (1980 51) not only in identifying Victorian realist texts but as a general mode of literature that denies its own textuality and ignores the way in which literary realism is in fact an effect or illusion. Therefore, she defines realist texts as, "all those fictional forms which create

the illusion while we read that what is narrated is "really" and intelligibly happening: The Hobbit and The Rainbow, The War of the Worlds and Middlemarch. Speaking animals, elves, or Martians are no impediment to intelligibility and credibility if they conform to patterns of speech and behaviour consistent with a "recognisable" system. Even in fantasy events, however improbable in themselves, are related to each other in familiar ways. The plausibility of the individual signifieds is far less important to the reading process than the familiarity of the connections between the signifiers. It is the set of relationships between characters or events, or between characters and events, which makes fantasy plausible". (1980 52). Magic realist texts, such as Tony Morrison's Beloved are the perfect example of realism presenting the extraordinary as part of everyday life, in the existence of a dead daughter who eventually becomes a live family member through her mother's will.

Lodge's Response David Lodge responded to MacCabe's theory in "Middlemarch and the idea of the classic realist text" using the following points: Macabe has a naïve understanding of realism Few realist texts are as formulaic or transparent in terms of language hierarchy as Macabe claims. Many realist texts do contain metafictional elements Mary Barton, for example, opens with the narrator commenting that "you would not wonder, if you could see, or if I properly describe, the charm of one particular style". Realist writers have a much more sophisticated understanding of language and its nuances than Macabe suggests. The realist novel is not marked by a clear distinction between object and metalanguage It actually shuttles between these discourses and often de-establishes meaning. Realist texts often make the reader work as interpreter. They are full of conflicting language games. Classic realism is conservative at the level of form but not content.

He presents this argument with rather more conviction in a language game of his own, portraying Macabe's direction of thought in a character in his novel Nice Work: <do as appendix?> links: Colin MacCabe@the university of Exeter: http://www.ex.ac.uk/english/staff/staffinfo/maccabe.htm David Harris essay on realism http://www.arasite.org/guestsnw3.html Areté Interview with David Lodge http://www.aretemagazine.com/2001/issuefive/lodge.html Brocke University Notes On Realism

Modernists The visual movement peaked between 1840 and 1860. Even in Hardy's time the idea that looking hard enough could elucidate all (objective) truth had diminished. Interest in masks, roles and duplicity increased. The works of Henry James and Oscar Wilde express a general mistrust of the visual. In Lady Windemere's Fan the fan, initially a love gift, gradually becomes a symbol of corrupt sexual invitation. The play's surface wit and frivolity hide a scathing critique of contemporary marriage convention. After 1890, as Victorianism shifted to modernism, the realism debate crucially shifted to the idea that all knowledge is subjective. The "real" of the Nineteenth Century novel was not "real" at all. Like the experience of Dadaists on the continent, the horrific events of the First World War shook writer's conviction that traditional modes of representation, especially classic realism, could convey the

dissonance and emotional disarray of the post-war world. The best way to view Modernism is in post-expressionist painting . It regarded itself as capturing the actual experience of everyday life in a newly urban, consumerist world of shock, speed, movement, and transport far better than its predecessors had. This was achieved through innovations of form and style. In The Wasteland T.S. Eliot debased the idea of objective reality and meaning by presenting deliberately fragmented components of verse that could only be connected by a subjective meaning derived from the reader. There was also a crucial change in philosophical beliefs. Psychology and psychoanalysis were born. The individual psyche was fragmented. The old idea of subjects and characters in art was increasingly torn apart, at a time when the individual seemed to have a rapidly decreasing sense of identity in the masses anyway. Conversely, however, the shift from the visual to something that couldn't be seen led to strongly indivualised novels written as streams of consciousness. See as a stream of consciousness in which the narrator replicates the mental processes of a child. [Links Lady Windemere's Fan etext: http://promo.net/cgipromo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=790&full=yes&ftpsite=ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenb erg/ Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a young man etext http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/29/62/fram Article on Ulysses and the Wasteland http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/Library/special/exhibits/clastext/clspg158.htm

Literature Responds To Film In the Nineteenth Century the development of the photographic image and the newspaper strongly influenced the detailed style of classic realism. In the Twentieth Century attitudes towards the depiction of realism in literature were strongly influenced by the rise of film, which depicts objective visual images of "reality" to an

extent that text never could. James Monaco's chronological "spectrum of the arts" demonstrates film's importance: 1) Performance Arts. Originally all art had to be in "real time" performances (singing, storytelling etc). 2) Representative Media. Then there was the pre-history development of writing and pictogram forms of communication that could preserve tiny details exactly. These depended on established codes and conventions of language (both in lanaguage and pictures) to convey meaning to the observer. This is how realist novels worked. 3) Recorded Media (film, photo, sound) represents as significant a shift as that between performance arts and representative media. Recorded forms require a less complex application of codes than the representational arts, and also diminish the element of choice (representational art is more interested in how something is said than what is said). Representational media does still have codes and conventions – it is not reality. However, until recently (with the acceleration in the power of "special effects") recording arts have progressed steadily towards greater verisimilitude: sound film was more realistic than silent film, colour was more realistic than black and white. Film does not completely eliminate the intervention of a third party between the subject and observer, but it does significantly reduce the distortion inevitably introduced by the presence of the artist. (Monaco ??????????????) Film is more suited to realism than text as its driving tension lies in a conflict between the story and the objective nature of the image. Literary fiction has responded by expanded attention to the "subtle, complex ironies of narration". Like painting, prose narrative has in the Twentieth Century turned away from mimesis and towards selfconsciousness. Hence not only streams of consciousness, but the rise of metafiction .

Surrealism: Accelerating Abstraction

As psychology, sociology and other social sciences developed at the start of the Twentieth Century, art as a means of social commentary (the cornerstone of Victorian realist novels) came to seem increasingly invalid. Art instead became interested in aesthetics. For James Monaco: "Abstraction, pure form, became the touchstone of the work of art in the Twentieth Century".

Dadaism In the 1920s Dadaism parodied the move to aestheticism as part of its attempt to destroy the false values of bourgeoisie society, especially its use of rationality and therefore realism. The movement was strongly influenced by Freud's idea that art did not represent reality, but was a projection of the author's repressed sexual desires. For Dadaist all literature, and realism in particular, was a lie. They regarded realism in literature not as a reflection but as a creation. It was entirely untrustworthy. For Dadaists the disparity between language and truth had been highlighted by the propaganda of the First World War (Bradbury, 293). Truth lay in what the text did not say, and could only be expressed through free association, through art that was entirely spontaneous. Tristan Tzara developed an "incoherent, savage language which set aside logic and syntax". See Appendix 5.

[links: Loadsa Dada poems:

Tristan Tzara

http://www.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/tzara.html

A very cool Dada page

Proclamation without Pretension - Tristan Tzara

http://www.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/proclamation.html

http://www.bergen.org/AAST/Projects/Dadaism/poems.html

Avante Guarde & Modernism

http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/fre320/avantgarde.htm

Surrealism Surrealism is closely related to Dadaism and, in the eyes of some, its successor. Abrams defines it as: "a revolt against all restraints on free creativity, including logical reason, social and artistic conventions and norms, and all control over the artistic process by forethought and intention". For surrealists the world is infused with elements of our imagination, in art "the fantastic belies its fantasy by being obstinately real" (Bradbury 307). Like Modernist focus on streams of consciousness, surrealism felt that art derived from the "deep mind" rather than an objective reality. However, the surrealists connected the unconscious to language, anticipating the same kind of revolution in understanding realism that their contemporary Saussure would inspire in literary theorists and semiologists. André Breton and Philippe Soupault discovered, by following the psychoanalytic technique of automatic writing that "they could release a language that was by no means absurd or arbitrary but which glittered with an unlikely display of brilliant poetic images . . . In the speech of the unconscious, words 'lost their wrinkles', ceased to play the part of intellectual policemen and gave way to

new and active thoughts. This meant that unlimited credit could now be extended to language; a new reason for writing had been found . . . Automatism revealed that the flux of the inner mind was linguistic in character. If, at one level, language was an alien social institution as corrupt as society itself, at a deeper level it was a natural phenomenon expressive of the entire being". (Bradbury 1991, 300). Andre Breton page: http://www.kalin.lm.com/breton.html

Formalists and structuralists Formalists Roughly concurrent with the rise of surrealism in Paris, Russian literary criticism moved along to a different route to reach the same conclusion that literature related only to language rather than an external, objective "reality". For formalists, literature is a specialised mode of language. It is self-reflective as its function is to offer the reader a certain mode of experience through its "formal" features or linguistic signs. For Victor Shklovsky, literature's prime purpose is to foreground its own textuality in order to estrange or defamiliarize. It disrupts the modes of ordinary verbal discourse in order to present a fresh sensation to one normally evoked. Formalists stress the use of specialized literary devices - – suspense, closure, humour, delivering events so as to briefly deceive – to produce a fresh experience for the reader. The extent to which a text is "realist" depends on its accordance with literary convention and codes which the reader has learned to interpret or naturalise (to ascribe a text to a particular genre) in a way that gives the text the illusion of reflecting everyday experience. Roland Barthes later termed this "The Reality Effect". Structuralist criticism to some extent continues the Formalist tradition, but extend it by claiming that literature does not represent an objective reality because there is no objective reality to represent outside language. To understand this idea it is vital to examine the main precurssor not only of structuralism but of semiotics and many other fields of language study today. Links: An introduction to Russian formalism

http://www.shef.ac.uk/k-zbinden/russian.htm

Ferdinand de Saussure The striking feature of the remaining twentieth century theorists in this project, and their contemporaries Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida is that their work all derives from Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1915). Saussure caused an enormous shift in attitudes towards realism in literature, by challenging conventional ideas about the relationship between language and the world. Catherine Belsey explains Saussure's most important idea: "what seems obvious and natural is not necessarily so, but that on the contrary the "obvious" and "natural" are not given but produced in a specific society by the way in which that society talks and thinks about itself and its experience" (1980, 3). Saussure came to this conclusion by deconstructing the sign . He viewed language as "a system of differences with no fixed terms". Language precedes the existence of independent entities, making the world intelligible by differentiating between concepts. So consider the name of this website, "Llwybr Cyhoeddus". This translates from Welsh as "public footpath". It is represented on my homepage, ironically enough, with an image of a sign. The words on this sign seem to be a label that describes a small part of an objective world, a world that exists beyond the words "public footpath". The sign claims to be pointing at this objective extra-textual object, this "public footpath". The term is actually, however, ideologically loaded and particularly indicative of the way in which the world we experience is constructed by language. The stretch of ground it accompanies is only a "path" because someone has seen fit to call it that. Moreover, the word public is a means of differentiating from private, it enforces the idea of property by suggesting that we can walk there whereas we cannot walk on land that "belongs" to somebody else. So language does not point to an objective reality, it points to itself. The implications for "realist" literature are immense, as Belsey points out: "From this post-Saussurean perspective it is clear that the theory of literature as expressive realim is no longer tenable. The claim that a literary form reflects the

world is simply tautological. If by "the world" we understand the world we experience, the world differentiated by language, then the claim that realism reflects the world means that realism reflects the world constructed in language . . . Thus, what is intelligible as realism is the conventional and therefore familiar, "recognisable" articulation and distribution of concepts. It is intelligible as "realistic" precisely because it reproduces what we already seem to know . . . Far from expressing a unique perception of the world, authors produce meaning out of the available system of differences, and texts are intelligible in so far as they participate in it" (1980, 46-47). However, since language is not a determinate system, authors can break or play with conventional signification, through the use of metaphor and other devices. Texts often strain their language to point outside its ideology, and much deconstructive criticism is actually interested in what a text does not say, in searching for its "political unconscious". LINK: Summary of Course in General Linguistics http://www.public.iastate.edu/~dkain/crit/saustext.html Saussure http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/saussure.html

Catherine Belsey "Realism always stands somewhere between academicism and kitsch" (Lyotard, the Postmodern Condition) Belsey extends Saussurean linguistics in serveral ways, mainly in her focus on visual signifiers as well as the language ones used in literary texts. For her realist literature is no different from other "texts" such as film or advertisements because they all construct their signifieds out of juxtapositions of signifiers "which are intelligible not as direct reflections of an unmediated reality but because we are familiar with the

signifying systems from which they are drawn, linguistic, literary, semiotic" (1980, 49-50). Characterisation is thus constructed from a series of 'semes' (signifieds of connotation). Characters are built on what Barthes defines as a "code of reference". That is, an allusion to a shared body of knowledge. Characters are assembled from what we already know. This is the basis of Belsey's final criticism of realism: "To this extent [the realist text] is a predominantly conservative form. The experience of reading a text is ultimately reassuring, however harrowing the events of the story, because the world evoked in the fiction, its pattern of cause and effect, of social relationships and moral values, largely confirm the patterns of the world we seem to know" (1980, 51). This interpretation is strongly related to Macabe's ideas about Classic Realist texts, and responses to it can be found in the criticism on Victorian Realism It is important to note that these responses to realism are, however, minority academic ones. In 1980 Belsey felt that the prevailing critical climate was still constrained by the ideology of expressive realism: "the assumptions of expressive realism are currently perpetuated in the observations and the practices of writers, reviewers and English departments . . . Literature is still widely taken to be a reflection of life. In Iris Murdoch's view "bad art is a lie about the world", and what is by contrast seen as good is in some important evident sense seen as ipso facto true and as expressive of reality". The novel, above all, is praised for its "authenticity" in describing the world of social relationships or conveying the inner experience (often seen as "universal") of the individual in quest of identity" (13). University of Drury notes on Belsey http://www.drury.edu/ess/postmodernism/cbelsey.html

Roland Barthes Barthes not only applied Saussure's model to literature but "to decoding, by reference to its underlying signifying system, many aspects of popular culture" (Abrams, 302) in Mythologies (1967). Barthes distinguished between "readerly" texts such as the realist novel which attempts to "close" meaning through specific interpretations, and "writterly" text that aims at the ideal of "a galaxy of signifiers", and so encourage the reader to produce his/her own meanings according to various codes. In The

Pleasure of the Text (1973) Barthes' idealises, in contrast to the traditional pleasures of the realist text with its external reality, the jouissance (orgasmic bliss) evoked by a text that "incites a hedonistic abandon to the uncontrolled play of its signifiers" (Abrams, 302).

Postmodern Theorists: Language Constructs Reality

Lacan Lacan takes the Saussurean idea that the world is constructed through language one step further. He turns it inward, combines it with Freud's concept of the psyche, and concludes that we construct ourselves through language. Lacan disgards what Freud felt was the darkest, most repressed element of the unconscious – the sexual – and replaces it with language, with the sliding signifiers of Saussure's deconstructed sign (see appendix). Consequently, we can only express the unconscious through nonsense. This entirely obliterates the idea that reality can be presented through language. As Tom Davis puts it: " if words can't capture the world , what about literature? Because that is literature's main claim for our attention, that it delivers to us the world seen anew, that it is the prime agent for us of the actuality of the world". Anything beyond language itself, anything signified, is an ilusion. For Lacan the world of realist literature describes only the world of images, l'imaginaire and not the real world, la réelle, which is unknowable and unfathomably desirable. www.lacan.com Lacan links: http://www.mii.kurume-u.ac.jp/~leuers/Lacan.htm

Baudrillard For Baudrillard, also, the simulation is more important than the real. He sees us as living in a culture of the simulacrum, a copy without an original. The illusion is dominated by the mass media. Disneyland is an example of the hyperreal – an idealised simulated world of pleasure. Disneyland presents itself as a fantasy, in order to make the real world seem more real, where in fact reality is closer to Disneyland than one might think. This theory makes the illusionary real world seem more real. Baudrillard feels that we do not really live in the Blade Runner-esque world of accelerated technology that is constantly presented to us in the media. Appearance and reality has collapsed into one another. We can no longer tell where one stops and another ends. This idea is tied to capitalist ideology in William Gibson's cyberpunk future, in which he envisages "sign and signifier twisting towards the sky in the unending ritual of commerce, of desire" (All Tomorrow's Parties, 6). A Baudrillard simulacrum http://www.psu.edu/dept/scifi/278/27810A.html Procession of simulacra: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/Baudrillard_outline.htm l

Metafiction The term "realist" is increasingly used to distinguish between forms that efface their own textuality against those which embrace it, by use of metafictional ("writing about writing") techniques. It is not new – Shakespeare plays often draw attention to "the poor player that struts his hours upon the stage", but has gained new relevance for the postmodern rejection of realism. The technique questions the relationship between fiction and reality, both in and outside the text. It draws attention to the existence of the text as an artefact. The author will often insert himself in the text. In Martin Amis' Money the first person narrator encounters Amis himself and pursuades

him to write a screenplay for him, which transpires to be part of the diegesis of the novel. Theories of metafiction http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/metafiction.htm

Realism & The Internet: Hyperreality? Virtual Reality Rapid advances in computer technology have also complicated our understanding of realism: "The world we live in is no longer the only world that exists. What we consider the real world is merely a starting point: "World 0". With virtual technologies, a limitless series of "real worlds" can be created that do not exist in isolation but can be combined with one another, and with World 0, to create applications that stir our dreams and have concrete practical value" (Akikazu Takeuchi, 1994 The Virtual Reality Casebook) Virtual reality is a three dimensional simulated environment generated by a computer and existing in real time. This environment may simulate the real, replicating its physics etc. Alternatively, however, the environment can be entirely imaginary. The aim is to create a world that the user can be immersed in and capable of interaction with to same extent that he/she reacts to the "real" one. Immersion is currently achieved most often through head-mounted displays (HMDs). The idea derives, to some extent, from William Gibson's Neuromancer in which characters interact across virtual networks by plugging themselves into machines. Virtual Reality is still at the very earliest stages of development (and presently rather out of vogue compared to its early nineties heyday). Its implications for art are unclear so, though it has been the basis of several projects. Nicole Stenger, an artist, regards virtualisty as "a literary medium with rhythmical qualities" (Eugene, Anderson 1994, 4) and created a virtual reality project entitled Angels that built an abstract environment immersed in music. "hot virtual reality sites" http://www.itl.nist.gov/iaui/ovrt/hotvr.html

Hypertext Just as the photograph, film and the newspaper all had a profound effect on literary realism, the internet is currently exerting a new influence. Its main innovation, as far as literature is concerned, is the creation of hypertext. Hypertext is "a method of

storing data through a computer program that allows a user to create and link fields of information at will and to retrieve the data nonsequentially". It is the way in which we navigate the web – following links. It was designed by Tim Berners Lee and placed on the internet in 1991, though the actual idea owes much to Vannevar Bush's Telex system, and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu. Hypertexts remove chronological linearity from a narrative, a central tenet of the realist text that successive generarations of writers have tried to subvert. Text is divided into nodes, chunks of information (web pages on the internet) that the reader navigates across a web. In a hypertext the reader does not start a text and read it to the end, but takes however many routes, from however many different points, as the author has provided for them. Hypertext allows for new innovations in art, such as the linking of images, text and video (once called multimedia, now more fashionably referred to as hypermedia). A pre-evolved form may be the computer game. However, Hypertext fiction is still in its infancy, the most rewarding example so far being Afternoon by Michael Joyce . There remain large problems with the format that mean its most substantial effect on literary realism is still some years off.

The Information/Digital Revolution Crucially, the digital age passes Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus down to the masses. Not just with the internet but in desktop publishing or digital video. It is now cheaper and easier to set up, produce and distribute a newspaper, radio station or film than ever before, due to the user friendly and increasingly economical nature of digital technologies. This destabilises traditional authority. Any individual who can afford digital technology can now propagate ideology to a mass audience. Mass ideology is no longer exclusively under state control (governments, schools, "the media" etc). Individual voices can be heard as they really are, without the metanarrative that accompanies any use of "Vox Populi" segments, documentary or "reality TV" in the mainstream media. As it becomes increasingly difficult to legitimate each piece of ideology that we are fed against all the others fragmentation - a staple of postmodernism - occurs. Reality becomes fragmented. "Digital technologies such as morphing and sampling destroy our faith in the honesty of images and sound. We can no longer trust our eyes and ears (James Monaco)". .

The photographic image, on of the main tenets of Victorian realism, is no longer to be trusted. Even a cheap PC can de-objectify the image: And finally there is Dr James Monaco, in the hypertext presentation in my reading dossier. He is not real, we made him up. The man in the photograph is probably called James Monaco because that is the name we typed into Google's image search when we invented him. But he doesn't work for the University of Bulwark and doesn't write books about the bite size nature of MTV society. Or, at least, we'd be very surprised if he does. Realism confirms Lacan's conviction about literature: it is all a beautiful trick.

Bibliography Abrams, M.H. A Glossary Of Literary Terms: Seventh Edition USA: Hardcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999 Belsey, Catherine 1980 Critical Practice Routledge: London & New York Macabe, Colin James Joyce & The Revolution Of The Word (First two chapters) PR6019.09 Miller, J Hilis Middlemarch ?????? Monaco, James 2000 How To Read A Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia (third edition) Oxford Univ. Press: New York Takeuchi, Akikazu 1994 The Virtual Reality Casebook Van Nostrand Reinhold, USA

Watt, Ian The Rise Of Realism (First two chapters)

Appendix 1. An excerpt from Vilette by Charlotte Brontë "The next day was the first of March, and when I awoke, rose, and opened my curtain, I saw the risen sun struggling through the fog. Above my head I saw the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw a solemn, orbed mass, dark-blue and dim – THE DOME. While I looked my inner self moved; my spirit shook its alwaysfettering wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who had never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life" (Charlotte Brontë Vilette VI) [links: Mitsuharu Matsuoka Vilette etext http://www.lang.nagoyau.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Bronte-Villette.html] Appendix 2 (Hardy's Harbour Bridge) Appendix 3: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt. O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song. O, the green wothe botheth.

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell. His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. He danced: Tralala lala, Tralala tralaladdy, Tralala lala, Tralala lala.

Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante. Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper. The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen's father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said: -- O, Stephen will apologize. Dante said: -- O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.-Pull out his eyes, Apologize, Apologize, Pull out his eyes.

Apologize, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologize. The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery. Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said.

Rody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a stink. Rody Kickham had greaves in his number and a hamper in the refectory. Nasty Roche had big hands. He called the Friday pudding dog- in-the-blanket. And one day be had asked: -- What is your name? Stephen had answered: Stephen Dedalus. Appendix 4: The Approximate Man (extracted) by Tristan Tzara (translated from French by the Google search engine) < http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.chez.com/barkokhb a/tzara.htm&prev=/search%3Fq%3D%2522Tristan%2BTzara%2522%26start%3D10 %26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN> heavy Sunday lid on the boiling of blood weekly magazine weight squatted on its muscles fallen inside oneself found the bells sound without reason and us too sound bells without reason and us too we will be delighted with the noise by the chains that we will make sound in us with the bells which is this language which whips us we start in the light our nerves are whips between the hands of time and the doubt comes with only one colourless wing being screwed compressing itself being crushed in us as the ruffled paper of packing demolishes gift of another age to the slips of fish of bitterness the bells sound without reason and us too the eyes of the fruits look at us attentively and all our actions are controlled it of did not hide there nothing the water of the river washed its bed so much it carries the soft son of the glances which trailed with the feet of the walls in the bars licked of the lives enticed the weak dependent one of temptations dried up of the extases dug at the bottom of the old alternatives and untied the sources of the captive tears sources been used for the daily newspapers smotherings the glances which take with desiccated hands the produced light of the day or ombrageuse appearance who give the concerned richness of the smile screwed like a flower with the buttonhole of the morning those which require the rest or pleasure touches of electric vibrations starts adventures fire the certainty or slavery the glances which crawled along the discrete storms used paving stones of the cities and expié many lownesses in alms

follow themselves tight around the water ribbons and run towards the seas while carrying on their passage human refuse and their mirages the water of the river washed its bed so much that even the light slips on the smooth wave and fall at the bottom with the heavy glare from the stones the bells sound without reason and us too the concern which we carry with us who are our interior clothing that we spend every morning that the night demolishes with hands of dream decorated useless metal rebuses purified in the bath of the circular landscapes in the cities prepared with carnage with the sacrifice close to the seas to the balayements of prospects on the mountains with worry severities in the villages with the painful nonchalances the heavy hand on the head the bells sound without reason and us too we leave with the departures arrive with the arrivals let us leave with the arrivals arrive when the others leave without reason a little dry a little hard severe bread food more bread which accompanies the tasty song on the range of the language the colors deposit their weight and think and think or shout and remain and nourish themselves light fruits like smoke plane who thinks of heat that the word weaves around its core the dream which one calls us the bells sound without reason and us too we walk to escape swarming from the roads with a bottle of landscape a disease only one only one disease which we cultivate death I know that I carry the melody in me and am not afraid of it I carry death and if I die it is death who will carry me in his unperceivable arms ends and light like the odor of thin grass ends and light as the departure without cause without bitterness without debts without regret without the bells sound without reason and us too why seek the end of the chain which connects to us with the chain sound bells without reason and us too we will make sound in us broken glasses silver moneys frays to the counterfeit moneies remains of the festivals burst in laughing and storm with the doors of which could open the pits tombs of air mills crushing the Arctic bones

these festivals which carry us the heads to the sky and spit on our muscles the night of molten lead I speak about who speak which speak I am alone I am not that a small noise I have several noise in me a ruffled noise frozen with the crossroads thrown on the wet pavement with the feet of the men in a hurry running with their deaths around dead which extends its arms on the dial of the hour only alive to the sun the obscure breath of the night thickens and along the veins sing the marine flutes transposed on the octaves of the layers of various existences the lives are repeated ad infinitum until the atomic thinness and in top so high that we cannot see with these lives at sides which we do not see thepurple one of so much of parallel ways those which we could have taken those by which we could not have come in the world or in to have already left for a long time so a long time that one would have forgotten and the time and the ground which would have sucked us the flesh limpid salts and molten metals at the bottom of the wells I think of heat that the word weaves around its core the dream which one calls us

Appendix 5: Deconstructing the sign (Tom Davis)