Realism and Its Discontents
Description
Realism has traditionally, albeit variously, been conceived through explicit attention to detail, the representation of individual experience, or the attempt to depict ‘objective’ reality. Yet, since the Enlightenment, realisms have struggled to cohere into any single framework, negotiating the desire for faithful representation with a simultaneous desire to imbue the ordinary with transcendent meaning. How might realism be reformulated when looked at from the perspective of ‘the visionary,’ ‘spirituality,’ ‘(re)enchantment,’ and the ‘supernatural’? How might extant theories of realism change through an attention to the more-than – even impossibly – real?
This seminar invites explorations into how literary and cultural forms grapple with an evolving and often overlooked relationship between realism and that which attempts to exceed it. Such excesses are apparent from the first stirrings of English literary realism, from Daniel Defoe’s ghost stories to George Eliot’s conviction that there should be “men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things…and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them.” The desire to heighten the real – toward the uncanny, the transcendent, the epiphanic – attunes us to Mark Fisher’s observation that what is at first “presented as necessary and inevitable” is no more than “a mere contingency.” Bound up with desires for the spiritual, transcendent, and enchantment in the everyday, realism has struggled with its own professed epistemological motivations, traditionally conceived as objectivity and rationality. This seminar proposes that “realism” is a useful categorical distinction insofar as it provides a necessary background against which the more-than-real can become legible.
Realism, it’s clear, has its discontents. How do the aesthetic parameters of realism permit or preclude representations of the unreal? How does the presence of the spiritual or visionary inform expectations of genre? Is it possible to take spirituality seriously in the context of realism? How does attention to spirituality and faith inform historically contingent definitions of “the real”?
We invite paper proposals that engage with the aforementioned questions. Possible topics include:
- The representation of mystical experiences in otherwise “realist” narratives
- The role of belief in shaping character and plot
- The aesthetics of the unseen
- The sacred and the profane in a pre- or post-secular world
- Indigenous spiritual practices and orientations
- Recent turns in Western society toward Traditionalist Catholicism, and other forms of faith and religion
- Realisms and the occult, astrology, numerology, magic, and witchcraft
- Psychedelia and altered states of awareness
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Daniel Hack is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of two books: The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (2005) and Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Fiction (2017). His most recent articles are "Reading for the Foreshadowing" (Representations, 2024) and "Why Always That Dorothea? Realism and the Rise of Meaning," forthcoming in a special issue of Novel on "Belief in Fiction," which he co-edited. He is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.
Speaker Bio
Roberto Viviani is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies at McGill University. His research investigates the intersection of Critical Theory and Aesthetics. His dissertation analyzes Pasolini's 1960s "lyrical realism" as a pursuit of aesthetic truth through the negation of social contradictions, exploring its resonance with Marcuse's model of the aesthetic dimension as a site of revolutionary resistance. He is also a cofounder of the annual Rethinking Gramsci International Conference.
Speaker Bio
I am a second year graduate student in the University of Michigan English Language and Literature program with interests in the avant-garde and radical political legacies of Romanticism.
Speaker Bio
I am an assistant professor of English at Tufts University and current ACLS fellow specializing in early modern literature and drama. My current book project, Migration and Mimesis in the English Renaissance: From More to Milton, traces a literary history of migration in the early modern world. My research interest includes: post-Reformation public culture, early modern poetics, migration and empire, conversion, citizenship, and the phenomenology of theater.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sonia Werner is a Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU's Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement.
Speaker Bio
PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Warsaw and Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher at University of California, Berkeley (2025/2026). He is interested in the intersection of film and critical theory. Participant of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University (2023). He has conducted research on the Eastern European influences in postwar American film avant-garde at the University of Toronto and at the Institue for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.
Speaker Bio
Matthew Wickman is University Professor of English at Brigham Young University, Founding and Past Director of the BYU Humanities Center, editor of the academic journal Literature and Belief, and host of the ecumenical Faith and Imagination podcast. Author of two scholarly monographs, 50 articles and book chapters, and the spiritual memoir Life to the Whole Being, he is presently completing a book titled Christian Poetry and Spiritual Style: Toward a Poetics of Faith.
Speaker Bio
Ahmed Elbenni is a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His research into the twentieth-century movement known as al-adab al-islami sits at the intersection of Islamic, literary, and postsecular studies. Other interests adjacent to his academic research include Western and Arabic science fiction; film theory; the history of history; and cyberculture and digital spirituality.
Ahmed works in English, Arabic, French, and Turkish.